Exner[154] cites the excellent example in which a mother becomes frightened while her child cries, not because the cry as such sounds so terrible as because of its combination with the consciousness that it comes from her own child and that something might have happened to it. It is asserted, and I think rightly, that verbal associations have a considerable share in such cases. As Stricker[155] expresses it, the form of any conceptual complex whatever, brings out its appropriate word. If we see the _thing_ watch, we get the _word_ watch. If we see a man with a definite symptom of consumption the word tuberculosis occurs at once. The last example is rather more significant because when the whole complex appears mistakes are more remote than when merely one or another “safe” symptom permits the appearance of the word in question. What is safe to one mind need not be so to another, and the notion as to the certainty of any symptom changes with time and place and person. Mistakes are especially possible when people are so certain of their “safe” symptoms that they do not examine how they inferred from them. This inference, however, is directly related to the appearance of the word. Return to the example mentioned above, and suppose that A has discovered a “safe” symptom of consumption in B and the word tuberculosis occurs to him. But the occurrence does not leave him with the word merely, there is a direct inference “B has tuberculosis.” We never begin anything with the word alone, we attach it immediately to some fact and in the present case it has become, as usual, a judgment. The thought-movement of him who has heard this judgment, however, turns backward and he supposes that the judge has had a long series of sense-perceptions from which he has derived his inference. And in fact he has had only one perception, the reliability of which is often questionable.
Then there is the additional difficulty that in every inference there are leaps made by each inferer according to his character and training. And the maker does not consider whether the other fellow can make similar leaps or whether his route is different. E. g., when an English philosopher says, “We really ought not to expect that the manufacture of woolens shall be perfected by a nation which knows no astronomy,”--we are likely to say that the sentence is silly; another might say that it is paradoxical and a third that it is quite correct, for what is missing is merely the proposition that the grade of culture made possible by astronomy is such as to require textile proficiency also. “In conversation the simplest case of skipping is where the conclusion is drawn directly from the minor premise. But many other inferences are omitted, as in the case of real thinking. In giving information there is review of the thinking of other people; women and untrained people do not do this, and hence the disconnectedness of their conversation.”[156] In this fact is the danger in examining witnesses, inasmuch as we involuntarily interpolate the missing details in the skipping inferences, but do it according to our own knowledge of the facts. Hence, a test of the correctness of the other man’s inference becomes either quite impossible or is developed coarsely. In the careful observation of leaping inferences made by witnesses--and not merely by women and the uneducated--it will be seen that the inference one might oneself make might either have been different or have proceeded in a different way. If, then, all the premises are tested a different result from that of the witness is obtained. It is well known how identical premises permit of different conclusions by different people.
