Thought-Culture; Or, Practical Mental TrainingAtkinson, William Walker
Science
Thought-Culture; Or, Practical Mental Training
Atkinson, William Walker
Thought and thinking
The two Rules of Conversion, stated in simple form, are as follows:
I. Do not change the quality of a judgment. The quality of the converse
must remain the same as that of the convertend.
II. Do not distribute an undistributed term. No term must be distributed
in the converse which is not distributed in the convertend.
The reason of these rules is that it would be contrary to truth and
logic to give to a converted judgment a higher degree of quality and
quantity than is found in the original judgment. To do so would be to
attempt to make "twice 2" more than "2 plus 2."
There are three methods or kinds of Conversion, as follows: (1) Simple
Conversion; (2) Limited Conversion; and (3) Conversion by
Contraposition.
_In Simple Conversion_, there is no change in either quality or
quantity. For instance, by Simple Conversion we may convert a
proposition by changing the places of its subject and predicate,
respectively. But as Jevons says: "It does not follow that the new one
will always be true if the old one was true. Sometimes this is the
case, and sometimes it is not. If I say, 'some churches are
wooden-buildings,' I may turn it around and get 'some wooden-buildings
are churches;' the meaning is exactly the same as before. This kind of
change is called Simple Conversion, because we need do nothing but
simply change the subjects and predicates in order to get a new
proposition. We see that the Particular Affirmative proposition can be
simply converted. Such is the case also with the Universal Negative
proposition. 'No large flowers are green things' may be converted simply
into 'no green things are large flowers.'"
_In Limited Conversion_, the quantity is changed from Universal to
Particular. Of this, Jevons continues: "But it is a more troublesome
matter, however, to convert a Universal Affirmative proposition. The
statement that 'all jelly fish are animals,' is true; but, if we convert
it, getting 'all animals are jelly fish,' the result is absurd. This is
because the predicate of a universal proposition is really particular.
We do not mean that jelly fish are 'all' the animals which exist, but
only 'some' of the animals. The proposition ought really to be 'all
jelly fish are _some_ animals,' and if we converted this simply, we
should get, 'some animals are all jelly fish.' But we almost always
leave out the little adjectives _some_ and _all_ when they would occur
in the predicate, so that the proposition, when converted, becomes
'_some_ animals are jelly fish.' This kind of change is called Limited
Conversion, and we see that a Universal Affirmative proposition, when so
converted, gives a Particular Affirmative one."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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