SUO: Peirce the Logician
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Tom,
You might also look into Putnam's "Peirce the Logician",
reprinted in 'Realism with a Human Face', Harvard, 1990,
originally published in 'Historia Mathematica', vol. 9,
pp. 290-301, 1982, where he sets many details of the
historical record straight.
Jon Awbrey
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John F. Sowa wrote:
>
> Tom,
>
> There are many complex reasons why the history of logic turned
> out the way it did, and it really isn't a conspiracy. It is
> more the result of large numbers of historical accidents,
> trends, fads, personal grudges, and just plain oversights.
>
> 1. Peirce was really in the center of the scientific
> world during the 1870s and 1880s when he was actively
> corresponding with and visiting Schroeder, De Morgan, and
> others. At that time, he was teaching at Johns Hopkins,
> where he had some very good students, and he was working
> at the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, which paid him to
> travel around the world to measure gravity and perform
> other experiements.
>
> 2. Besides his fame in logic, he was simultaneously
> famous in physics and mathematics. He was the first
> US scientist to be invited to lecture at international
> congresses in Europe, he invented instruments of his
> own design for measuring gravity with greater precision
> than had ever been done before, and he was not only
> the first person to propose that the standard for
> length be based on a wavelength of light, he actually
> built the apparatus to use light waves to measure the
> length of his pendulum arms. In mathematics, he was
> a colleague of Cayley and Sylvester (from whom he got
> many of his ideas about graphs), and he edited his
> father's pioneering book on linear algebra, to which
> he added a number of new theorems of his own.
>
> 3. But some serious reversals in his fortuntes occurred,
> partly caused by the death of his father, partly caused
> by his divorce and remarriage, and partly caused by
> incredible villany on the part of Simon Newcomb, a
> former student of his father's, who had been jealous
> of Peirce's greater fame as a scientist. As a result,
> Peirce lost his job at the USC&GS and at Johns Hopkins
> and was blackballed at every university where he applied
> for a job (primarily because Simon Newcomb, his former
> superior at the USC&GS wrote a highly negative review
> to everyone who might hire him). He had to support
> himself with many part-time jobs, including his role
> as associate editor of the Century Dictionary, for which
> he wrote, revised, or edited over 16,000 definitions.
>
> 4. As late as 1902, he tried to get support to write a
> book on his logic from the new Carnegie Foundation,
> which was giving money to support science projects.
> He had letters of recommendation both from a senator
> from New York and from President Teddy Roosevelt.
> But Simon Newcomb, the head of the committee that
> was distributing the funds, rejected his application
> on the grounds that logic was not science.
>
> This is a brief summary of the much greater detail that
> can be found in the biography by Joseph Brent.
>
> Meanwhile, the old logicians who had known Peirce were
> dying off, including his strongest backer, Ernst Schroeder.
> Peirce had no money to travel, no academic affiliation,
> and no new students to pursue his research further.
> Whitehead cited Peirce's papers on the algebra of logic
> in his 1898 book on Universal Algebra, but Russell was
> trying to make a name for himself, and he had no reason
> to advertise the work of his predecessors (especially
> if they had invented the same things earlier -- as
> Donatus said, "Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt").
>
> In the late 1920s, Quine went to Harvard to study with
> Whitehead, and after he got his PhD, he won a fellowship
> to go to Europe, where he spent some time with the
> Vienna Circle and became a close friend of Carnap,
> from whom he learned that Frege had invented everything
> there was to know about logic. Then for the next 70
> years, Quine was Frege's loudest cheerleader at the
> most prestigious university in the US.
>
> Another reason why Quine might have been cool
> on Peirce is that in his early days at Harvard,
> he was quarreling with C. I. Lewis, who was
> a very strong advocate of Peirce's work.
> The editing of Peirce's Collected Papers was
> initiated by Lewis and done by two of Whitehead's
> graduate students, Hartshorne and Weiss (neither
> of whom was strong in logic -- and a better title
> for that work would be "Collected Excerpts").
>
> Meanwhile in the UK, Dummet was churning out book
> after book about Frege, while ignoring everything that
> occured on the other side of the pond. Most other
> logicians are not historians, and most historians
> know nothing about logic. When logicians go back
> into history, the oldest book they look at is
> the Principia Mathematica, in which they see
> Russell's note about Peano and Frege.
>
> > 1) I believe that Kneale and Kneale have published what
> > is acknowledged as the standard history of logic. Have
> > they got the story right?
>
> They mention Peirce as somebody who invented FOL
> shortly after Frege, but neither the Kneales nor
> Bochenski (who says much more about the early history
> than the Kneales) says that it was Peirce's notation
> that everyone adopted rather than Frege's. They
> all say that the notation came from Peano, but
> they don't mention (or at least don't emphasize)
> that Peano got it from Peirce and Schroeder. In
> any case, van Heijenoort's book is the major source
> for most logicians, and it skips from Frege directly
> to Peano with nothing in between.
>
> > 2) There is a good history of the work on logic done by Russell
> > and Quine in particular. It's by Hao Wang, an important logician
> > in his own right. The book is "Beyond Analytic Philosophy"
> > (MIT Press, 1988). His only mention of Peirce is in a brief
> > section "Pragmatism and C. I. Lewis". So the cover-up (or
> > oversight? or a little of both?) has been pretty extensive,
> > and has fooled a serious logician writing a history of that period.
>
> Wang was a close friend of Goedel's, who came on the
> scene after Russell and Carnap had already begun to
> dominate the logical scene, and Wang would have had no
> reason to go digging in the earlier work. As I said,
> there was no organized cover-up. People were just
> promoting themselves and their buddies.
>
> The last logician of that generation who was seriously
> interested in Peirce was Frank Ramsey, who recommended
> Peirce to Wittgenstein. For more on that encounter,
> see the paper by Jaime Nubiola:
>
> http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/nubiola/scholar.htm
>
> I always wondered what might have happened to the history
> of logic and philosophy if Ramsey had not died so young.
>
> > 3) Could it be more oversight than cover-up, an oversight
> > based perhaps on what I yesterday called the "hermeneutic"
> > character of Peirce's writings, and the "high cost of entry"
> > to hermeneutic systems?
>
> As I said, Peirce was very much in the mainstream during
> the 1870s and 1880s, but in his later years, he had no
> job, no money, no students, and no one with whom he
> could discuss his ideas. He continued writing many
> pages of manuscripts, mostly unpublished, which are
> highly idiosyncratic. Most Peircean scholars regard
> his later work as the most revolutionary and the most
> profound. Unfortunately, the Collected Papers, which
> were not edited by logicians, do not bring out the
> connections between Peirce's logic and the rest of his
> philosophy, which Peirce, Haack, and I believe are
> his most important contributions to modern (i.e., 21st
> century philosophy, logic, and artificial intelligence).
>
> In any case, Peirce's background in mathematics, physics.
> logic, and lexicography gave him a breadth and depth
> that is rare, if not unique, in the history of philosophy.
>
> And I even forgot to mention that Peirce boasted of having
> the largest collection of medieval manuscripts on logic
> in the Boston area -- even more than Harvard library.
> That background led him to put more emphasis on language
> than Frege, Schroeder, Peano, Russell, Hilbert, or Goedel.
> That is another reason why Peirce's combination of logic
> and semeiotic is so much more valuable than the work by
> logicians whose only applications are to mathematics.
> (And it's also another reason why they ignore him.)
>
> John
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