Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/411

Rh side of the square are incommensurable. That is, he discovered that certain premises imply certain conclusions.

The process by which he discovered this we happen, though somewhat indirectly, to know. The instance is a remarkable one of the fecundity of the deductive process. The conclusion when the Greek reached it was a novelty. It seemed to him so novel and uncanny a conclusion that the Pythagorean school is said by a later tradition to have long regarded the whole matter as a mystery which must not be mentioned to the vulgar. It was reported that the man who revealed this mystery came to a bad end and received special penalties in the underworld, so closely in those days was exact science linked with tabu and with superstition. Yet no one who once goes through the little process of reasoning by which the ancient geometer established his result can remain without interest in the psychology of such a process.

You see throughout how my account of the whole matter is of course colored by my logical interests, and yet I freely admit that the psychological problems at issue ought to be considered without any undue reference to anybody's philosophical prejudices or concerns. I admit my own bias in the matter, merely because I am thereby enabled to call attention to what the live process of deduction is, and to point out that the recent psychology of reasoning has profoundly neglected to take account of some of the most elementary facts with regard to the nature of this process.

Charles Peirce long ago called attention to the general nature of the psychological processes which are in question in deduction. They are processes of the nature of ideal experiments. The instance of the one-sided strip of paper readily shows how many intermediate steps there may be between such ideal experiments and physical experiments with a strip of paper. On the other hand, as soon as you begin to reason, and to predict what will be true about a given strip of paper if certain hypotheses are met, with regard to its structure, you get an insight into the whole situation which you can not possibly get by cutting the strip of paper without adding the deductive process. And in general, wherever deduction is worth while, the testing of hypotheses after deductions have carefully been made whereby we predict determinate results of such hypotheses, has a wholly different value and interest from that which results from the testing of hypotheses without previous deduction.

The psychology of deduction may then well be characterized as the psychology of the Gedanken-experiment. The peculiarity of the experimental processes in question is that whether we use symbols, or diagrams, or mental images, our reasoning depends upon the fact that the