Johnson W(illiam) E(rnest) (1858–1931), British philosopher who lectured on psychology and logic at Cambridge University. His Logic was published in three parts: Part I (1921); Part II, Demonstrative Inference: Deductive and Inductive (1922); and Part III, The Logical Foundations of Science (1924). He did not complete Part IV on probability, but in 1932 Mind published three of its intended chapters. Johnson’s other philosophical publications, all in Mind, were not abundant. The discussion note ‘On Feeling as Indifference’ (1888) deals with problems of classification. ‘The Logical Calculus’ (three parts, 1892) anticipates the ‘Cambridge’ style of logic while continuing the tradition of Jevons and Venn; the same is true of treatments of formal logic in Logic. ‘Analysis of Thinking’ (two parts, 1918) advances an adverbial theory of experience. Johnson’s philosophic influence at Cambridge exceeded the influence of these publications, as one can see from the references to him by John Neville Keynes in Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic and by his son John Maynard Keynes in A Treatise on Probability. Logic contains original and distinctive treatments of induction, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic. Johnson’s theory of inference proposes a treatment of implication that is an alternative to the view of Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica. He coined the term ‘ostensive definition’ and introduced the distinction between determinates and determinables. See also DETERMINABLE , INFERENC. D.H.S.