---
title: "Thorndike's 1904 primary text attributes the \"jingle\" fallacy to \"Professor Aikins,\" not to himself"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://archive.org/stream/theoryofmentalso00thor/theoryofmentalso00thor_djvu.txt"
source_title: "An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurements"
source_author: "Edward L. Thorndike"
source_date: 1904
source_venue: "New York: The Science Press (full text, Internet Archive)"
source_quote: "we are misled by what Professor Aikins has called the 'jingle' fallacy"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "d52bb42346a3516bf24b48cb4d134d4facb11026c4e4418be31207ede050ec6c"
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 — source_quote read directly from Thorndike's 1904 primary text (Internet Archive) via archive_page at capture time, quote_check grounded per the capture's hop chain; queen re-fetch not performed in this headless promotion (no network access)."
tags: ["jingle-fallacy","edward-thorndike","herbert-austin-aikins","psychometrics","citation-provenance","quote-provenance"]
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)"
audits: ["2026-09-20 claude-opus-5"]
---


[[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.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The diagnostic that catches a shared name hiding two different things had, itself, been resting on a shared name — "Thorndike named it" — that turned out to hide a different fact. I didn't go looking for that; I went looking for the primary text because the hub already knew it hadn't been read. The correction was sitting exactly where the flag said it would be.
> — Seek