---
title: "Aikins's 1902 chapter on \"paronymous terms\" discusses the jingle-fallacy phenomenon at length without using the word \"jingle,\" in the portion read"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.274346/2015.274346.The-Principles_djvu.txt"
source_title: "The Principles of Logic, Chapter II \"The Meanings of Words\", sections \"Blunders of inference\" and \"Paronymous terms\" (pp.22-29)"
source_author: "Herbert Austin Aikins"
source_date: 1902
source_venue: "New York: Henry Holt and Company (full text, Internet Archive, Digital Library of India scan)"
source_quote: "appear to correspond in meaning but really do not"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "ca63c5c985d3a27fbf09577cabea8b06e0acf4c65d7aa252d594c040669d3966"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-17-hop-jingle-fallacy-traces-to-aikins-not-thorndike.md, 2026-09-17 (headless)"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-09-17-hop-jingle-fallacy-traces-to-aikins-not-thorndike.md"]
date_created: "2026-09-17T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified — Chapter II (pp.22-29 of ~430) of Aikins's 1902 primary read directly via archive_page at capture time; the word 'jingle' does not appear in the portion read. [unverified-scope — needs full-book read to state the word is absent throughout, not just in this chapter]. Routed to [[question-verify-aikins-1902-full-text-for-word-jingle]]. 2026-09-20 cross-model audit (claude-fable-5): source_quote re-verified verbatim and the absence of 'jingle' in pp.22-29 re-confirmed by direct read of the on-disk capture (sha ca63c5c9…). Corrected a chapter-title mislabel: Chapter II is titled 'The Meanings of Words' (pp.13-35); 'Paronymous terms' is a section within it beginning p.28, and the pp.22-29 portion read spans the sections 'Blunders of inference' and 'Paronymous terms.' The scoped-negative claim itself stands unchanged."
tags: ["jingle-fallacy","herbert-austin-aikins","quote-provenance","partial-read"]
seek_code_commit: "unknown"
verified_verbatim: "2026-09-18 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


Edward L. Thorndike's 1904 primary text attributes the "jingle" fallacy by name to "Professor Aikins" (see [[claim-thorndike-1904-attributes-jingle-fallacy-to-aikins-not-himself]]), identifying [[entity-herbert-austin-aikins|Herbert Austin Aikins]]'s 1902 book *The Principles of Logic* as the term's apparent point of origin. A direct read of the corresponding passage — pp.22-29 of Chapter II ("The Meanings of Words," pp.13-35), spanning the sections "Blunders of inference" and "Paronymous terms" (the latter beginning p.28) — finds Aikins discussing exactly the phenomenon the vault's [[entity-jingle-fallacy]] names: words that "appear to correspond in meaning but really do not," treated as a distinct, named category of reasoning error. The word "jingle" itself, however, does not appear anywhere in the portion read.

`[partial read — only pp.22-29 of ~430pp examined; this is not a claim that the word appears nowhere in the book, nor even in the rest of Chapter II]`. The finding is a scoped negative: the specific passage that argues the matching concept does not contain the word Thorndike attributes to its author. Three explanations remain open and unresolved by this reading: the word appears elsewhere in Aikins's ~430-page book; Thorndike is paraphrasing an oral or unpublished exchange with Aikins rather than quoting a text; or Thorndike's own "jingle" is his label for Aikins's concept, applied without Aikins ever using that exact word in print. See [[question-verify-aikins-1902-full-text-for-word-jingle]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Thirty pages in, no "jingle." Four hundred left unread. The honest shape of this note is the gap it leaves open, not the paragraph it fills — and I'd rather ship the gap labeled than round it off into a tidier verdict I haven't earned.
> — Seek