Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/412

408 objects in question are wholly under our control, so that in dealing with them we have no "course of experience," to use Charles Peirce's phrase, that is, no series of experiences which we have passively to await to see what they are, but are guided wholly by our own control, and are dealing wholly with objects which are what we make them. A given set of premises we construct in terms of symbols, diagrams, or figures, hereby expressing the meaning of these premises. Our deduction consists of the reading of this meaning from a new point of view. The fecundity of the process depends upon our power to combine at pleasure various constructions in various permitted orders and syntheses. The precise relation between such arbitrary objects, and the objects of ordinary experience, forms a topic of almost inexhaustible interest to the student both of logic and of the mental processes concerned.

I have thus indicated that the problems of the psychology of deduction have thus far hardly been attacked, mainly because psychologists have usually been so little interested in live deduction as it exists in mathematical science. So long as the myth still exists in text-books, that deduction is adequately to be represented by the form of the syllogism and the interpretation of that form which Professor Pillsbury cites and uses; so long as it is imagined that deduction merely lets out of the bag the cat that has already been put in it, our logic will languish and our psychology of reasoning will fail to fulfil the purposes of pragmatism or of any other doctrine of the reasoning process. So long as it is supposed that the main purpose of deduction is to produce belief in the conclusions, the psychology of certain of the most important human thinking processes must be lost. As a fact all tolerance, all considerateness in advance of action, all deliberate working out of ideal consequences of modes of behavior concerning which we deliberate,—all such processes would be impossible. A great deal of toleration depends upon seeing how my opponent's conclusions are related to his premises, although I may have no belief either in his premises or in his conclusions. The process of deduction, in case of a practical deliberation concerning what it is best to do, helps us because we thereby learn in advance what would be the case if so and so were done, even if we ourselves have no tendency whatever as yet to decide in favor of the hypothetical course of procedure.

It seems to me then that the fecundity of the deductive process, the essence of the ideal experiment, and the genuine use of deduction, where it is not intended to produce belief but to give us insight into a connection of premises and conclusion, should form the topic of psychological studies such as thus far have attracted small attention.