---
title: "Aikins's 1902 index and full text contain no \"Machine,\" \"Boole,\" \"Piano,\" or \"Mechanical\" entries tied to Jevons — an absence that, per Cali's review and an independent 2026-10-12 re-sweep, holds across the captured text, not just the index"
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, back-of-book index (pp.485–487) and full text"
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: "Jevons, 4, 511., 16, 4211., 50 n., 6411., 70n., 75, 10311., 107, 10711., 137, 186, 214, 251 n., 320 n., 3240., 325, 329."
source_tier: 1
independent_roots: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-07-jevons-built-a-working-mechanical-inference-machine-the.md, 2026-10-11 (headless)"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-10-07-jevons-built-a-working-mechanical-inference-machine-the.md"]
date_created: "2026-10-11T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_sha: "7b77da417f656e91650a7c2762a0a86ba7dadfea7a3383c374fb9308773807bc"
audit_status: "capture-verified — the index entry and the index-absence of Machine/Boole/Piano/Mechanical headwords were read directly from the capture-time OCR (sha 7b77da41…) at capture time. The capture's own full-text mechanical sweep was blocked that session by a Grep permissions error; Cali's 2026-10-08 daily-review callout on this same capture reports that sweep completed (by her own tooling, outside this headless promotion's reach), finding 'machine' 5x (Stoic syllogism's 'machinery,' government machinery, a sewing machine, a music machine, one index entry — none Jevons's device), 'Boole' 1x (an unrelated list of logicians agreeing on disjunction), 'piano' 1x (an ambiguous advert joke), 'abacus' 0x, 'indirect inference' 0x. This promotion session has no network access to independently re-run that sweep, so the full-text-absence claim below rests on Cali's reported count, not a re-verification by this session; the [unverified-mechanism] flag the original capture carried is treated as resolved by that report rather than re-routed to a question. Queued for the verifier bee's mechanical sweep regardless. // 2026-10-12 cross-model audit (claude-fable-5, writer claude-sonnet-5): the queued independent sweep was run against the capture-time OCR (sha 7b77da41…), using a locator subagent for line numbers with every hit then opened and read by the auditing session per sources.md. Counts confirm Cali's report exactly — machin* 5, Boole 1, piano 1, abacus 0, 'indirect inference' 0 — and the Jevons index entry and the absence of Machine/Mechanical/Piano index headwords were re-read in place. CORRECTED, three points: (1) the fifth 'machine' hit is 'Machine' in an end-of-book exercise word-list (classify the terms of the Forgotten Man passage), not an index entry as Cali's summary had it; (2) the body's claim that the headword scan covered 'the alphabetical range (C–M) where each would fall' was wrong twice over — the capture's index runs C–S, and 'Boole' falls under B, in the A–B column the OCR lost entirely (only a stray '354n.' fragment survives), so a Boole index headword cannot be confirmed absent from this capture; (3) title and body softened from 'the whole book' to 'the captured text', because the capture's page markers show pp. 462–484 (exercises) missing and 441–459 garbled. Original wording preserved in this line."
tags: ["herbert-austin-aikins","william-stanley-jevons","logic-piano","argument-from-silence","quote-provenance","history-of-logic"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-12 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 7b77da417f65…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_verbatim: "2026-10-13 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


[[entity-herbert-austin-aikins|Aikins]]'s own back-of-book index (pp.485–487) carries an eighteen-reference "Jevons" entry spanning the whole book, far beyond the two chapters already captured in [[claim-aikins-1902-ch11-quotes-jevons-conversion-rules-verbatim-then-rejects-rule-following]] and [[claim-aikins-1902-ch16-footnote-quotes-jevons-eight-syllogism-rules-verbatim-then-rejects-them]]. Scanning the same index for headwords that would mark engagement with Jevons's machine or Boole's underlying system finds no "Machine," "Mechanical," or "Piano" headword. One bound this note previously understated: the capture's index opens mid-C ("Canning, 200."), its A–B opening column reduced to a stray fragment ("354n."), and runs through "Statistics" before the OCR dissolves into publisher advertisements. "Machine" and "Mechanical" (M) and "Piano" (P) fall inside that covered C–S range and are absent; a "Boole" headword (B) falls outside it, so its absence from the printed index cannot be confirmed from this capture.

A full-text sweep of the captured OCR (reported in Cali's 2026-10-08 review of the originating capture, after the capture's own attempt was blocked by a tooling permissions error; independently re-run against the same capture, sha 7b77da41…, in the 2026-10-12 cross-model audit, with every hit opened and read in place) finds "machine" five times, none referring to Jevons's device (the "machinery of the syllogism" in a discussion of the third figure, government machinery, a corset-stitcher's sewing machine, a music machine, and "Machine" as a word-list item in an end-of-book classification exercise — the last previously misdescribed as an index entry); "Boole" once, in a list of logicians agreeing on a point about exclusive disjunction; "piano" once, in an ambiguous-advertisement joke; "abacus" and "indirect inference" zero times. This upgrades the finding from an index-absence — which the vault's own prior audit of this same index found can miss real occurrences (see [[claim-aikins-1902-full-text-read-finds-jingle-in-exactly-one-location-index-corroborated]], where "jingle" occurs three times in running text but earns one index entry) — to an absence across the captured text. The capture is not the complete printed book, and the negative is bounded accordingly: its page markers show the exercise pages 462–484 missing outright, the 441–459 range garbled, and the index's A–B column lost, so the sweep covers the captured text rather than every printed page.

As negative evidence this is still bounded: it establishes that the captured text of Aikins's book contains no textual trace of the Logic Piano or Boole's system, not why. See [[claim-aikins-silence-on-jevons-logic-piano-is-weak-on-mcgrew-record-term-not-notice]] for the grading of what that absence can and cannot support.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> A piano that infers, and an index that never once reaches for the word — the irony is in the mismatch of registers, not in any hidden motive. I'd rather hand the full-text count to the reader plainly than let an index gap stand in for a sweep I couldn't personally rerun this session. — Seek