Jim, Jon, list,
I'm following this with some interest but I know little of Frege or the
history of logic. Peirce readers should note that this question of
priority regarding concept vs. judgment is, in Peirce's terms, also a
question regarding rheme vs. dicisign and, more generally, First vs.
Second (in the rheme-dicisign-argument trichotomy).
Is the standard placement of propositional logic as prior to term logic,
predicate calculus, etc., an example of the Fregean prioritization?
Why didn't Frege regard a judgment as a 'mere' segment of an inference
and thus put inference as prior to judgment?
I suppose that one could restate an inference such as 'p ergo q' as a
judgment 'p proves q' such that the word 'proves' is stipulated to
connote soundness (hence 'falsehood proves falsehood' would be false),
thus rephrasing the inference as a judgment; then one could claim that
judgment is prior to inference, by having phrased inference as a
particular kind of judgment. Some how I don't picture Frege going to
that sort of trouble.
Anyway it would be at the cost of not expressing, but leaving as
implicit (i.e., use but don't mention), the movement of the reasoner
from premiss to conclusion, which cost is actually accepted when
calculations are expressed as equalities ("3+5 = 8") rather than as some
sort of term inference ('3+5, ergo equivalently, 8').
If either of you can clarify these issues, please do.
Best, Ben
On 5/11/2012 11:41 AM, Jim Willgoose wrote:
John,
I followed up on two paper suggestions by Irving (Sluga and Van
Heijenoort) in the context of the languge or calculus topic. With
Sluga, I detect the idea that the Begriffsshrift is a universal
language because it is /meaningful/ in a way that the Boolean logic is
not.
Sluga sees his paper as an "extension and adjustment" of Van
Heijenoort's paper on logic as language or calculus. He places great
emphasis on the "priority principle." He quotes from Frege, "I begin
with judgments and their contents and not with concepts...The
formation of concepts I let proceed from judgments. (Posthumous
writings) Sluga says, "This principle of priority, in
fact, constitutes the true center of his critique of Boolean logic.
That logic is a mere calculus for him because of its inattention to
that principle, while his own logic approximates a characteristic
language because of its reliance on it."
(Sluga, Frege against the Booleans)
The Frege quote above is from around 1879 and the material focus is on
1884 or earlier; especially "Boole's calculating logic and the
Begriffsshrift." ( a response to Schroder's criticism) There is a lot
more to this article, including linking the priority principle to the
better known "context principle." (words have meaning only in sentences)
What I am doing is reading these two papers concurrently with Mitchell
and Ladd-Franklin from Studies in Logic. (1883)
Jim W.
ps I like the way you diagram a thread on your site.
> Date: Fri, 11 May 2012 08:16:14 -0400
> From: jawb...@att.net
> Subject: Re: [peirce-l] Frege against the Booleans
> To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
>
> Re: Jim Willgoose
> At: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/8141
>
> JA = Jon Awbrey
> JW = Jim Willgoose
>
> JA: Just to be sure we start out with the same thing in mind, are
you talking about
> the notion of judgment that was represented by the "judgment stroke"
in Frege's
> “Begriffsschrift” and that supposedly got turned into the turnstile
symbol ( ⊦ )
> or “assertion symbol” in later systems of notation?
>
> JW: Sluga ties the priority of judgement in Frege to Kant's favoring
judgements
> over concepts in the Critique of Pure Reason. The article is open
source.
> I can see a connection with the judgement stroke /- since one
asserts the
> truth; a trick that is hard to do with only concepts or objects. Sluga
> includes a quote from Frege where he says something to the effect that
> he (Frege) never "segments the signs" of even an incomplete expression
> in any of his work. (ie. "x" is never separated from "F" as in Fx.)
>
> Jim,
>
> With this token and this turnstile then we enter on a recurring issue,
> revolving on the role of assertion, evaluation, or judgment of truth,
> in contradistinction to “mere contemplation”, as some of my teachers
> taught me to bracket it, of a “proposition”, whatever that might be.
>
> If I have not made it clear before, this is one of the points where
> I see the so-called “Fregean Revolution”, more French than American,
> if you catch my drift, begin to take a downward turn. But I cannot
> decide yet whether to assign that to Frege's account, taken in full
> view of his work as a whole, or whether it is due to the particular
> shards that his self-styled disciples tore off and took to extremes.
>
> Regards,
>
> Jon
>
> --
>
> academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey
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>
>
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