MINOR STUDIES FROM THE PSYCHOLOGICAL
LABORATORY OF VASSAR COLLEGE
XII. The Sources of the Affective Reaction to
Fallacies
By Anna H. Taylor and M. F. Washburn
About a hundred young women students, mostly college Juniors, were asked to introspect the impression produced upon them by a set of logical fallacies. In the original plan six of these faulty arguments were used, the design being to have two specimens of each of the three types of formal fallacy: illicit major, illicit minor, and undistributed middle; and to construct one of each pair with a true conclusion, the other with a false conclusion. In practice, the syllogism used to represent the fallacy of illicit minor with a true conclusion proved unsatisfactory, being so obviously wrong as not to produce the impression of an argument at all, and it was therefore discarded. The observers were asked in the first instance to record whether the arguments were agreeable or disagreeable, and then to report any further considerations that occurred to them. The great majority of them had had no training in formal logic. Nineteen had pursued a course in argumentation, and seven had studied logic in preparatory schools. Fifty-four, however, had had a course in introductory philosophy, in which the syllogism had been briefly explained.
The following were the faulty syllogisms used:
- (Undistributed Middle: true conclusion.) "All trees are vegetables; all oaks are vegetables, therefore all oaks are trees."
- (Same: false conclusion.) "Virtuous people always make profitable use of their time; day laborers make profitable use of their time, therefore day laborers are virtuous."
- (Illicit Minor: false conclusion.) "Only criminals should be put under restraint; for all criminals are dangerous to society, and all persons who are dangerous to society should be restrained."
- (Illicit Major: true conclusion.) "Church property is nt taxed; for it is not private property, and all private property is taxed."
- (Same: false conclusion.) "Mathematical study improves the reasoning powers; but as the study of logic is not mathematical study, we may infer that it does not improve the reasoning powers."
The papers that were handed in proved to contain material of much interest, but material with which it has been by no means easy to deal. As any one who has undertaken a similar task knows, analyzing and classifying a large mass of introspective results involves the danger of falsifying them. In the desire to bring order out of chaos, statements are brought together under the same heading that represent really different mental processes; and in general much of the value of the introspections is lost by the cutting and drying process to which they are subjected. A great amount of the most careful study has been devoted to the reports of our observers in the
