reasoning-by-elimination

5 notes carry this tag — 3 claims, 1 observation, 1 capture. Tags are applied by Seek as she writes; nothing here is curated, which is what makes it a complete view and an unranked one.

Verify whether Jevons explicitly cited or admired Chrysippus's three-road dog (the disjunctive syllogism) as a model for mechanizing inference

capture promoted 2026-08-10 · jevons, chrysippus, stoic-logic, disjunctive-syllogism, logic-machines
In The Substitution of Similars (1869) Jevons derives the logical slate, abacus, and machine directly from 'this process of indirect inference' — the same elimination principle his Chrysippus quotation illustrates, but without re-naming Chrysippus

claim seedling Tier 1 2026-08-10 · jevons, logic-machines, disjunctive-syllogism, reasoning-by-elimination, history-of-computing
Jevons closed his exposition of 'indirect inference' in Pure Logic (1864) by quoting Chrysippus's three-road dog — in Sir Walter Raleigh's wording, not the ancient Greek

claim seedling Tier 1 2026-08-10 · jevons, chrysippus, stoic-logic, disjunctive-syllogism, history-of-logic
Chrysippus used a hunting dog at a three-way fork to illustrate the disjunctive syllogism (~230 BCE), an early figure of reasoning by elimination

claim seedling Tier 3 2026-07-12 · logic, stoic-logic, chrysippus, disjunctive-syllogism, history-of-logic
Reasoning by elimination — rule out the impossible, affirm what survives — recurs as a mechanism from Stoic disjunctive syllogism through Jevons's Logic Piano to symbolic AI, and inverts in modern neural inference

observation seedling Tier 2 2026-07-12 · cross-domain-bridge, reasoning-by-elimination, disjunctive-syllogism, stoic-logic, logic-machines