Anna H. Taylor and M. F. Washburn

“ Under this head we may consider the cases where unpleasant- ness arose because of a quite vague and indefinite sense of something wrong with the argument. The observer cannot or at least does not state that anything is wrong with a particular part of the reasoning; she does not 'place' the wrongness; it is only vaguely felt. "Some- thing is wrong with the 'therefore,' " said two observers in the case of syllogism (i) . Two persons complained that (5) was 'unconvincing' and therefore unpleasant. Four gave 'incompleteness' without fur- ther specification as the source of unpleasantness in (i) . ”

“ Three observers reported the falsity of the conclusion, in (5) , as the only source of unpleasantness, and five gave it as one source. What mental processes are involved in recognizing that a statement is false? Our data throw light on this problem in a few cases only. The conclusion of (2) , that day-laborers are virtuous, aroused in those observers who analyzed their consciousness of its falsity a sense of the incongruity of the subject and predicate; several reported that they had a mental picture of a gang of workmen, dirty, quarrelsome, and disorderly. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The thought of two sub-classes as not being identical with each other would not be disagreeable unless the argument de- manded their equality. Is it not probable that the unpleasantness in this case arises ultimately from the same source as it did in (c) ;that is, from the confusion and" division of attention that result when in- stead of passing smoothly from one term to the aext, attention is 'led aside' to consider the omitted factors? ”