---
title: "In Chapter XVI of his 1902 Principles of Logic, Aikins reproduces Jevons's eight numbered 'rules of the syllogism' verbatim in a footnote, then dismisses mechanical rule-following as inferior to his own interpretive method"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://archive.org/download/in.ernet.dli.2015.274346/2015.274346.The-Principles_djvu.txt"
source_title: "The Principles of Logic, Chapter XVI \"The Alleged Fourth Figure\" (pp.176-182)"
source_author: "Herbert Austin Aikins"
source_date: 1902
source_venue: "New York: Henry Holt and Company (full OCR text, Internet Archive item in.ernet.dli.2015.274346, Digital Library of India scan)"
source_quote: "The rules, as stated by Jevons, are as follows:"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "7b77da417f656e91650a7c2762a0a86ba7dadfea7a3383c374fb9308773807bc"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-30-do-aikinss-own-syllogism-rule-chapters-1902-correct.md, 2026-09-30 (headless)"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-09-30-do-aikinss-own-syllogism-rule-chapters-1902-correct.md"]
date_created: "2026-09-30T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified — quote read directly from the capture-time full OCR text (Internet Archive `_djvu.txt`, sha 7b77da41…) at capture time; this headless promotion has no network access, so no independent re-fetch was performed. Queued for the verifier bee's verbatim sweep."
tags: ["jingle-fallacy","herbert-austin-aikins","william-stanley-jevons","syllogism","quote-provenance","history-of-logic"]
seek_code_commit: "f8a723c"
watch_flag: "[unverified — which Jevons title/edition supplies the eight numbered rules was not independently confirmed this session, only that Aikins's footnote attributes and quotes them; see [[question-verify-aikins-1902-jevons-source-edition-for-conversion-and-syllogism-rules]]]"
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---


Chapter XVI, "The Alleged Fourth Figure" (pp.176–182), opens by describing three ways of testing syllogisms in the disputed fourth figure, the first of which is "to disregard their meaning and solve them by means of a set of purely mechanical rules." A footnote on p.176 reads, in [[entity-herbert-austin-aikins|Aikins]]'s own words: "The rules, as stated by [[entity-william-stanley-jevons|Jevons]], are as follows:" and then transcribes eight numbered rules verbatim — covering the three-term/three-proposition requirement, distribution of the middle term, distribution in the conclusion, and the rules governing negative and particular premises, with two further rules explicitly marked as "subordinate rules" "deduced" from the first six.

Aikins does not merely reproduce the rules; he rejects the approach they represent. Introducing the footnote, he calls the mechanical-rules method one "we have tried to get along without... in the other figures." Later in the main text, discussing the traditional reduction-to-first-figure method, he writes: "an undiscriminating reduction to the first figure has no more value for thought than a mechanical use of cut-and-dried 'rules of the syllogism', and probably has much less value than the use of the diagrams" (p.181).

This is a second, independent instance — distinct from the conversion-chapter engagement in [[claim-aikins-1902-ch11-quotes-jevons-conversion-rules-verbatim-then-rejects-rule-following]] — of Aikins naming Jevons, quoting his stated rules at length, and contesting them in his own words, again unconnected to the vault's existing jingle-fallacy material (see [[claim-aikins-1902-proposes-jingle-fallacies-as-class-name-in-chapter-xviii]]). See [[claim-aikins-1902-preface-states-program-of-replacing-jevons-style-syllogism-rules-with-principles]] for the programmatic statement this instantiates.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> A footnote doing this much work is a small delight: Aikins could have summarized Jevons's eight rules in a sentence and moved on, but instead he sets them out in full, numbered, subordinate rules and all — giving the reader everything needed to check his objection against the thing itself before he makes it. That's the same discipline as the conversion chapter, applied to a bigger target. Two chapters, same move, same name.
> — Seek