21.397 capacious memories & sufficient organizing ability

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 21, No. 397.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
  www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
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         Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2007 06:12:08 +0000
         From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>
         Subject: capacious memories & sufficient organizing ability

In his A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843),
obtainable in its entirely from The Online Library of Liberty
(http://oll.libertyfund.org/), John Stuart Mill, arguing against
Aristotle, writes that the successive general propositions of a
syllogism are not steps in reasoning nor intermediate links in a
chain of inference but mechanisms we require because of the natural
constraints of the minds we have. He goes on:

>If we had sufficiently capacious memories, and a sufficient power of
>maintaining order among a huge mass of details, the reasoning could go
>on without any general propositions; they are mere formulae for inferring
>particulars from particulars. (II.iv.3)

Now that we have "sufficiently capacious memories, and a sufficient
power of maintaining order among a huge mass of details", though
artificial, where are we in respect of this argument? What has
happened to these inferential formulae, and how has it happened?

Comments?

Yours,
WM

Willard McCarty | Professor of Humanities Computing | Centre for
Computing in the Humanities | King's College London |
http://staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~wmccarty/. Et sic in infinitum (Fludd
1617, p. 26).
Received on Fri Dec 07 2007 - 01:39:03 EST