JW = Jim Willgoose JW: I followed up on two paper suggestions by Irving (Sluga and Van Heijenoort) in the context of the language 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)
JW: ps. I like the way you diagram a thread on your site. Jim, Sorry, I was away on several excursions and missed that part of the context. My main concern, here and elsewhere, resides with the potential contribution of Peirce to our understanding of inquiry. If I were starting a new project today, instead of trying to dig my way out of unfinished business, it would get a title like "The Unrealized Potential of Peirce's Thought" or maybe "The Unmet Challenge of Peirce's Work". My feeling is that only a small fraction of Peirce's potential contribution to our understanding has yet been realized and that something critical has been lost in the years between Peirce and Russell. Consequently, my concern is less with Boole and Frege than with the clues their work provides to what was found and what was lost. It has long been my experience that we cannot grasp the full import of Peirce's work from the shadows that are cast on the analytic, atomistic, logistic, reductive plain. I prefer looking at the work of what came after from Peirce's conceptual perspective, instead of the other way around. I think that affords a much clearer view of things. Regards, Jon -- academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/ inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/ mwb: http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JonnyCache --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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