SECTIONAL TRANSACTIONS.— J. 611 



background. A full statement of the fundamental relationship of Fechner's Law 

 must therefore be that if A/B= B/C, then the step-experiences from A, B and B, C will 

 be equal if both are observed under the same conditions of spatio-temporal background. 



Dr. Ll. Wynn Jones. — Individual Differences in Mental Inertia. 



Mr. 6. G. Campion. — Meaning and Error. 



In the problem of meaning and error, epistemology, logic, psychology and etym- 

 ology all find an inevitable point of contact. 

 The conclusions reached in this paper are : 



(1) That the mental symbols of which our knowledge is composed must in any 

 system of genetic psychology be regarded as subject to a growth process in the several 

 and successive ontogenetic phases of the individual mind. 



(2) That these living and growing mental symbols are severally denoted by 

 relatively stable and static word symbols which the logicians call ' terms.' 



(3) That the living and growing mental 83'mbol3 (which have variously been 

 called ideas, concepts, presentations, representations, images, &c.) are the ' meanings ' 

 which the slowly interacting and cumulative influence of etymology, logic, usage and 

 tradition have attached to the terms which severally denote them. 



(4) That the organic growth with structural differentiation which takes place in 

 these mental symbols is the psychological aspect of what in logic is termed ' analysis.' 



(5) That these growing symbols are ineradicably subjective and permeated with 

 error, this error becoming greater as the sj^mbols tend to vary from the cultivated 

 and accepted usage of the terms employed to denote them. 



(6) That such erroneous mental symbols may be gradually linked into groups 

 and become finally rationalised into obsessions. 



(7) That to regard knowledge as an integrated aggregation of such living and 

 growing subjective symbols goes far to provide us with a psychological theory of 

 knowledge wide enough to embrace the whole universe of human error, human illusion 

 and human self-deception. 



(8) That this view of knowledge can be shown to be congruous with observed 

 phenomena of the neural basis of our minds, the cerebro-spinal nervous system. - 



Mr. J. T. Bradley. — A Psychological Theory of Error. 



For epistemologists error probably presents an insoluble problem ; and logicians 

 are mainly interested in classifying errors of reasoning. It remains for psychologists 

 to examine the mental processes from which errors emerge. Spearman and Freud, 

 particularly, have indicated valuable lines of approach to this problem. 



Errors are due to inadequate insight and mental bias. They are items that 

 persist by virtue of retentivity and they intrude where items generated by noetic 

 processes should have place. The superior intensity which favours the intrusion is 

 due to habit, which makes a relatively slight demand upon mental energy, or objective 

 conditions {e.g. vividness, recency, position). Narrowness of mental span, limitations 

 of ' g,' speed of apprehension, fatigue, distraction, absence of relevant knowledge and 

 insuflScient conation account for the low intensity of the displaced item. The dis- 

 placement may be partial or entire. Between the intruder and the ousted item a 

 relation of likeness exists {e.g. likeness of meaning, form, position or unity). 



Experiments have been performed by the writer of this paper to see what errors 

 were made when sentences, specially constructed and presented under various condi- 

 tions, were reproduced, immediately and after various intervals of time. The results 

 so obtained led to a further experiment, in which specially selected words were woven 

 according to a definite pattern into paragraphs that varied in their degree of unity. 

 Immediate and deferred reproduction of the special words was sought by the comple- 

 tion method. 



The errors produced by these experiments indicated that convergence from speoifio 

 to general connotation, and repetition were their most potent causes. Degree of 



> Campion, G. G. — To appear in Brit. Journ. Philosoph. Studies. Cf. ' Elements 

 in Thought and Emotion,' ' The Organic Growth of the Concept as one of the Factors 

 in Intelligence,' Brit. Journ. Psychol., July 1928, ' The Neural Sub-strata of Reflective 

 Thought,' Brit. Jourru Med. Psychol., vol. v, pt. 2, 1925. 



RR2 



