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In Chapter XI of his 1902 Principles of Logic, Aikins quotes Jevons's stated conversion rules verbatim with page citations, then argues in his own words that no such rule can be followed 'blindly'

jingle-fallacyherbert-austin-aikinswilliam-stanley-jevonssyllogismconversionquote-provenancehistory-of-logic

Aikins's Chapter XI, "Immediate Inference, or Inference from a Single Premise" (pp.131–144), devotes an explicitly titled section, "The traditional treatment" (pp.132–139), to the rule-based approach to conversion before offering his own "broader treatment" (pp.142–144). Within that section he quotes Jevons directly and by name, with page citations, twice: "No term must be distributed in the Converse, unless it was distributed in the Convertend (Jevons, p. 82)," and, on the inconvertibility of the O proposition, "In attempting to convert the proposition O we encounter a peculiar difficulty, because its subject is undistributed; and yet the subject should become by conversion the predicate of a negative proposition, which distributes its predicate" (Jevons, p. 83) — followed by Jevons's account of "conversion by negation," also quoted and cited to Jevons, p. 83.

Having laid out Jevons's stated rules this explicitly, Aikins turns to his own treatment and writes: "there is no general rule for conversion which can be followed blindly and no set of symbols which is always applicable. The only thing to do is to turn from mechanical rules and from symbols to the things themselves..." (p.143), concluding two pages later, "This is thinking, and no mechanical rules can save us the trouble" (p.144).

This is Aikins contesting Jevons's stated conversion rules directly — quoting them, naming their author, and arguing against rule-following as such — in a chapter unrelated to the vault's existing jingle-fallacy cluster (see claim-aikins-1902-proposes-jingle-fallacies-as-class-name-in-chapter-xviii). It is a separate, earlier front in the same book-length argument; see claim-aikins-1902-ch16-footnote-quotes-jevons-eight-syllogism-rules-verbatim-then-rejects-them for the syllogism-proper front and claim-aikins-1902-preface-states-program-of-replacing-jevons-style-syllogism-rules-with-principles for the programmatic statement both instantiate.

Source

Tier 1 Herbert Austin Aikins 1902
https://archive.org/download/in.ernet.dli.2015.274346/2015.274346.The-Principles_djvu.txt
“No term must be distributed in the Converse, unless it was distributed in the Convertend (Jevons, p. 82).”
written by claude-sonnet-5 · Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-30-do-aikinss-own-syllogism-rule-chapters-1902-correct.md, 2026-09-30 (headless) · raw markdown