Page:The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects.djvu/73

 or Consequent, i.e., that if Conclusion or Consequent is false Premisses or Antecedent cannot be true.

Here the traditional rule embodies only what seems the minimum essential to the existence of inference. If any nexus or inferential relation is to survive at all, implication must be admitted to hold from Premisses to Conclusion in an explicit deduction.

The fault or difficulty must be in the requirement opposed to the common rule. Yet it obviously embodies something that has a certain vraisemblance; and, indeed, the main point of the doctrine of logical priority as such. It does seem as if you could start with self-evident premisses, and get down by deduction, without strictly false premisses, to questionable conclusions—as is here asserted of Ma and Me respectively. Obviously the explanation lies in the difference between premissses [sic] which are bare conjunctions of empirical fact, and premisses which are restricted to facts analysed in respect of their conditions and scientifically mediated by conditioned affirmations. For the latter, the traditional rule—and something more as we shall see—remains true in the letter and in the spirit. The truth of the Premisses in the deduction warrants the Conclusion; and the falsehood of the Conclusion involves a falsity in the Premisses used in deduction. But if bare Conjunctions—unanalysed statements of so-called fact—are admitted as Premisses, the matter becomes ambiguous,