A REPLY TO SOME CHARGES AGAINST 



LOGIC 



By Miss L. S. STEBBING 



In the October number of Science Progress Dr. Mercier 

 continues the sweeping attack upon " traditional " Logic begun 

 in his New Logic in the hope that the shorter article may reach 

 those who are unacquainted with the former work. He now 

 begins by formulating three charges against Logic : (i) logicians 

 do not use the forms which they say are the only possible 

 modes of reasoning ; (2) Logic has many professors because the 

 bounty of past ages has endowed chairs of Logic, but it has few 

 students because there is a general appreciation of its use- 

 lessness ; (3) logicians are not better but worse reasoners than 

 other men, and he adds, " so wanting are their statements in 

 clearness that the two professors of Logic who are most followed 

 at the present time, and who are credited with the greatest 

 profundity of original thought, write so abominably that they 

 are always difficult to understand, and sometimes completely 

 unintelligible" (p. 210)— a statement which, like the similar 

 attack upon Dr. Bosanquet in the April number of Mind, reminds 

 one of the device of abusing the plaintiff's attorney. 



Dr. Mercier's general charge is, then, that traditional Logic 

 is as much an imposture as Christian Science or Astrology, and 

 he asserts that he has written a large volume to show up the 

 absurdities of Logic, and that " no logician has ventured to deny 

 that I have achieved his impossibilities" (p. 212). For the sake 

 of brevity he here repeats his attack upon one logical " absurdity " 

 only — the doctrine of the syllogism— and examines one by one 

 its rules, each of which he claims that he can violate with ease 

 and thus achieve what the logician has declared to be impossible. 

 For the same reason the present article must be confined to this 

 one doctrine. 



The corner stone of Dr. Mercier's attack is the acceptance of 

 the two statements that syllogism is the exclusive form of all 

 argument and that a syllogism must consist of three and only 



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