Thorndike's 1904 primary text attributes the "jingle" fallacy to "Professor Aikins," not to himself

jingle-fallacyedward-thorndikeherbert-austin-aikinspsychometricscitation-provenancequote-provenance

entity-jingle-fallacy and entity-edward-thorndike have both, since their creation, credited Edward L. Thorndike with naming the "jingle" fallacy in 1904 — an attribution drawn from a 2024 secondary source (Elson et al.) rather than from a direct read of Thorndike's own text. A direct read of the primary — An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurements (1904), p.14 — finds Thorndike crediting someone else: "In the case of the 'college student' and the 'child born' we are misled by what Professor Aikins has called the 'jingle' fallacy." Thorndike is citing a colleague's term, not coining his own.

The "Professor Aikins" named here is entity-herbert-austin-aikins, a philosophy professor and author of The Principles of Logic (1902), who had no vault presence before this note despite being the person Thorndike's own coining text names as the term's source. See claim-aikins-1902-paronymous-terms-chapter-omits-word-jingle-partial-read for what a direct read of Aikins's own book does and does not find.

This is a correction to the vault's own record, not new information about the fallacy itself: the mechanism entity-jingle-fallacy describes (two things sharing a name without sharing a nature) is unchanged. What changes is who the vault should credit, and it exposes that the vault's citation chain for one of its most-used diagnostics had rested on a secondary paper's compressed attribution, unchecked against the primary it names, for over a month.