PROBLEMS EMPHASIZED BY PR A GMA TISM 40 1 



has been brought under this major premise as a particular case of the 

 principle. Professor Pillsbury consequently points out how compara- 

 tively insignificant both from the logical and from the psychological 

 point of view the syllogism is as an expression of the nature of the 

 concrete process of reasoning. To bring cases under major premises is 

 to do little to confirm our belief except in so far as one thus empha- 

 sizes in a somewhat formal way the tendency of every new or question- 

 able fact to find its place by being brought into conformity with the 

 habits, or better with the principles of action, which have been formu- 

 lated on the basis of previous experience. Deductive proof appears 

 therefore to be, as Professor Pillsbury says, not so different from induc- 

 tion as is usually supposed, and to be in any case of comparatively minor 

 importance. The business of proof, according to Professor Pillsbury, 

 is to produce belief. Belief in general is not produced by formulating 

 major premises. It is produced by a more complex process whose 

 general nature he sets forth. 



Other familiar discussions of the reasoning process, such as one finds 

 in the text-books of recent pragmatists, agree with Professor Pillsbury 

 in assuming that it is of the essence of deduction or of deductive proof 

 to proceed from the general to the particular, and that the significance 

 of deductive proof lies in the fact that one hereby formulates, often 

 somewhat uselessly, the general process by which an adjustment to 

 the environment in cases of initial doubt or difficulty is attained. Apart 

 from these statements more characteristic of pragmatists, a wide-spread 

 tradition, which unfortunately is supported by the older logical text- 

 books themselves, maintains that it is of the essence of deductive 

 reasoning to bring nothing out of the premises except what was already 

 in them, so that the essence of the deduction is "analysis." Prom 

 this point of view it is supposed that when you engage in deduction 

 you solemnly draw out of the bag the cat which you have already 

 hidden in it. You declare, for instance, that all the A'& that are B are 

 indeed B, and solemnly demonstrate that all the white mice must be 

 both white and mice. It is unquestionable that many of the logicians of 

 the past as well as the psychologists of recent times have conspired to 

 give this impression of the deductive process. But whatever the psy- 

 chology of deduction may be, any fair examination of the work of the 

 exact deductive operations of science, and especially any examination of 

 the work of mathematics, shows that deduction as it exists in real life is 

 simply not this fiction of the older logical text-books. And yet to the 

 psychological analysis of this fiction, with the natural result that such 

 a process is not of very great importance, Professor Pillsbury, as I 

 understand him, devotes himself in his discussion of the place of the 

 syllogism in life. 



But anybody who undertakes to deal with the psychology of reason- 



