In the experiment with the columns for addition
only six subjects, A, B, C, D, F, and K took part. Of these the two
who had made the distinction into psychological and logical certainty
with the visual experiments (subjects A and F) again made the same
distinction. Subject F, however, who had had occasion to do a good deal
of important work with statistics, found practically no element of
logical certainty in connection with his addition, though it seemed to
him that what confidence he felt in his result should be distinguished
from the psychological certainty he had had as to the character of
the visual fields. Subject B felt no certainty in her results except
as she could so hold the process together as to have what seemed to
her a simultaneous experience. When she had to judge of the results
of a set of successive experiences that could not be so unified, she
characterized her state of consciousness not as holding a feeling
of certainty or of uncertainty, but as simply lacking any feeling
of certainty. The other three subjects found no difference between
the feelings of certainty and uncertainty associated with visual
experiences and those associated with the process of addition. As a
whole, it seems then that we must answer our first problem by saying
that the case seems to be different with different individuals. With
some the highest grade of certainty associated with a sense-experience
is sharply distinct from the other grades, and with some again there
appear at least the two general classes of psychological and logical
certainty. On the other hand, there seem to be people for whom the
feeling of certainty has no such sharp distinctions of kind within it.
The results as to the second problem may be more briefly and more
distinctly given. No subject found any evidence that the number of the
grades of certainty which he could distinguish would be limited by
anything except his keenness in introspection, although in the simple
tests given for the experiment, four was the greatest number of grades
distinguished at any one time. Two of the subjects (B and F), who set
the highest grade of certainty apart from the judgments made with
lesser confidence, said that there might be degrees within that higher
grade as well as among the "uncertainties." There was no evidence that
logical certainty differed from psychological in respect of the grades
to be found within it, and some evidence that they were alike in that
respect, although logical certainty was less carefully examined. It
would seem, then, that our second problem is to be answered thus: There
are degrees present in some if not in all kinds of certainty, and there
is no evidence that the number of these degrees is limited.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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