Re: Peirce Preservation ("Studies in Logic" and Its Vicissitudes) At: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/8116
IA = Irving Anellis (also, "Intelligence Augmentation") IA: Jon Awbrey wrote: "I would tend to sort Frege more in a class with Boole, De Morgan, Peirce, and Schröder, since I have the sense when I read them that they are all talking like mathematicians, not like people who are alien to mathematics." IA: I would thoroughly concur. IA: Although Peirce had, perforce, deliberately identified himself as a "logician" in _Who's Who_, and part 2 of his 1885 AJM paper, after being accepted by Sylvester, was refused publication by Simon Newcomb (who succeeded Sylvester as AJM editor) because Peirce insisted that the paper was "logic" rather than "mathematics", each of these people worked in mathematics as mathematicians (Boole, De Morgan Peirce, Schröder primarily in algebra, but also contributing to differential and integral calculus and function theory; Frege primarily in function theory, but also working in algebra; and all to some extent in geometry as well). Oh, I didn't mean to suggest that logicians and mathematicians are mutually exclusive categories. I don't see any necessary contradiction between being a logician and being a mathematician, but logicists distinguish themselves as striving to reduce mathematics to logic — and even that need not be extreme in its aims, depending on what an individual inquirer means by "logic" — but when someone sets out to reduce logic itself to a style of purely syntactic analysis, then I find myself needing to draw a line. Thanks a million for the summary below, as it will help me catch up after many distractions of travel and daily events. Regards, Jon IA: My points were -- to put them as simplistically and succinctly as possible -- that: IA: (a) _Studies in Logic_ did not get laid aside because of the diffusion of its contents (Epicurean logic; probability, along with algebraic logic) but because IA: (i) philosophers either mathophobic or innumerate were unprepared or unable to tackle the algebraic logic; while IA: (ii) the mathematician who were capable of handling it did not ignore _Studies..._ in the "pre-Principia" day (witness Dodgson's being inspired to devise falsifiability trees by Ladd-Franklin's treatment of the antilogism and Marquand's contribution on logic machines; witness the praise for _Studies..._ by Venn, Schröder, and even Bertrand Russell's recommendation to Couturat that he read _Studies..._); IA: (b) once the "Fregean revolution" began taking effect, in the "post-Principia" era, not only _Studies in Logic_ slid off the radar even for those capable of handling the mathematics, but so did most of the work in algebraic logic from Boole and De Morgan through Peirce and Schröder to even the "pre-Principia" Whitehead, in favor of logistic, that is in favor of the function-theoretic approach rather than the older algebraic approach to logic, and THAT was why, in 1941, Tarski expressed surprise and chagrin that the work of Peirce and Schröder hadn't been followed through and that, in 1941, algebraic logic languished in the same state in which it had existed forty-five years earlier. Incidentally, Gilbert Ryle attributed the interest of philosophers in logistic preeminently to the advertisements in favor of it by Bertrand Russell, convincing philosophers that the "new" mathematical logic could help them resolve or eliminate philosophical puzzles regarding language and epistemology (at the same time, we might add, that Carnap was arguing for the use of he logical analysis of language in eliminating metaphysics). IA: (I do not believe that in my previous posts I said anything to the contrary or said anything that could be construed to the contrary.) -- academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/ mwb: http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey word press blog 1: http://jonawbrey.wordpress.com/ word press blog 2: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU