Bibliography

A Logical Critique of Essential Articles of Religious Faith

An argument […] is nearly equivalent to “premiss” or “copulate premiss,” i.e. a body of premisses having a single intention, and is a known or pretended fact which is intended to serve as a Sign of the reality of another fact, its Conclusion.

A negative doubt is the mere absence of a state of Belief, that is to say, of a habit of determinate expectation under definite circumstances. More generally, a Belief is self-controlled Habit.

[“Logical Critic”] discusses the justification of each of the essentially different kinds of reasoning…

Genuine doubt is a state of mind so distressing that many persons cannot support it long. If I may be allowed to use the word “Habit” to denote any state of mind by virtue of which a person would, under definite circumstances, — mostly, if not invariably, consisting in his experiencing conscious experience of some kind, — either think, or act, or feel in a definite way, […] then doubt may be defined as the state of mind in which one is stimulated to incompossible intellectuals assents. This is positive doubt, — an irritation not finding its immediate appeasement and therefore resulting (since it is a mental irritation) in conflicting inchoative judgments accompanied with pain. A negative doubt is the mere absence of a state of Belief, that is to say, of a habit of determinate expectation under definite circumstances.

If I may be allowed to use the word “Habit” to denote any state of mind by virtue of which a person would, under definite circumstances, — mostly, if not invariably, consisting in his experiencing conscious experience of some kind, — either think, or act, or feel in a definite way, […] then doubt may be defined as the state of mind in which one is stimulated to incompossible intellectual assents.

The word Reasoning may be used as the name either of a mental action or of a mental occupation. In the latter sense, it is that occupation of the mind in which one casts about for arguments, considers them, and draws a conclusion from them. In the former sense, it is a synonym of inference, or the passage from an argument to a conclusion.

By Philosophy, I mean that branch of heuretic science (the science of discovery,) which, in the first place, seeks categorical truth, and does not, like mathematics, content itself with demonstrating the truth of its discoveries conditionally upon the absolute acceptance of the exact truth of postulates, conditions, or antecedents, for which that science does not in the least assume responsibility. Yet Philosophy, as I understand it, although it is a heuretic science of categorical truth, […] does not profess either by wider or by more refined observations to open to us any new experience whatever. On the contrary, all that it is to teach us, it is to teach by new reasonings based [on] the common experience of all mankind, or at any rate upon what nobody in the world has any doubt about, or can possibly bring himself to doubt of it.

Now, what precisely do we mean when we assert that any thing is “real”; in other words, what is the character which we mean, or intend to cause the person whom we address to believe, is true of that thing. What we all mean is that there are predicates that are true of that thing, and would be true of it, no matter what [a] determinate person or determinate collection of persons might think or imagine to be false of that thing, in any mode of thinking whatsoever. Of course, whether the thing be real or not, there will be other predicates whose being true of it consists in their being thought to be so; for that is involved in the meaning of some predicates, as when we say that a man is “popular.” But if there be so much as a single predicate whose truth of the thing in question is quite independent of its being thought to be so, there will be many such, and that thing will have the important character we call reality.

The word Reasoning may be used as the name either of a mental action or of a mental occupation. In the latter sense, it is that occupation of the mind in which one casts about for arguments, considers them, and draws a conclusion from them. In the former sense, it is a synonym of inference, or the passage from an argument to a conclusion.