Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/414

410 relations "such as," "greater than," "to the right of," "to the left of," are transitive. That is, they follow James's axiom of skipped intermediaries. Now all those serial relations that can be expressed in these transitive dyadic relations can also be expressed in terms of the formally triadic relation "between." Thus, let $$A, B, C, D$$ be four objects in a row. I can say, "$$B$$ is to the right of $$A$$, $$C$$ is to the right of $$B$$." I can conclude that $$C$$ is to the right of $$A$$. And then I can define the relations of order in question. Now it is very easy to see that if $$B$$ is to the right of $$A$$ and $$C$$ is to the right of $$B$$, $$C$$ must be to the right of $$A$$ so long as one interprets the relations of right and left as we ordinarily do. But suppose I give you the premises, "$$B$$ is between $$A$$ and $$C$$, $$C$$ is between $$A$$ and $$D$$," and ask you what follows. The conclusion is decidedly hard for most minds to work out. In other words, the triadic relations have a psychological difficulty which we do not feel in the case of the transitive dyadic relations, although we can express equivalent facts in both terms. The difference in question is hardly due to the fact that a set of three objects is more complicated to grasp than a set of two. For a little exercise in attempting to reason in terms of "between," as the geometers often do, will show that the psychological difficulty is out of all proportion to the numerical difference between two and three. The grounds for the difference in difficulty are presumably statable only in psycho-physical terms. But the matter is one for psychological research, and should be undertaken.

Over against these problems of the psychology of deduction which are possibly capable of a more or less direct experimental research, there are vast numbers of problems of deduction which can be attacked more indirectly, some of them by following the records of formation of new habits, some of them by means of more or less exact study of social processes. There exists, for instance, an indefinite range of possibilities for the study of the psychology of the arithmetical processes by a device which, so far as I know, has still been very little used, although I have repeatedly recommended it to students of educational psychology. We hear a good deal of effort to make out the details of the process whereby a child gets control of arithmetical computations. Now it is perfectly easy for any one to put himself near to the beginning of practical arithmetic and into a place where he has to learn very many of bis habits as a computer over again, under conditions that will admit of a pretty careful experimental scrutiny of the way in which the new habits get formed, and which will enable us to make precise records of the growth of the new habits. The device in question consists simply in using, instead of our decadic notation and numeration, a dyadic, triadic, or other such system. Dyadic arithmetic is the simplest of all. In this one uses two digits instead of the digits from to 0 to 9, inclusive. That is, one uses only and unity; 1 standing alone will mean unity. If one