ONT WIANTAMMKIAAMTHMKAN?

[Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>]

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| Please remember that we are not now concerned with
| the physics and chemistry, the anatomy and physiology,
| of man.  They are my daily business.  They do not contribute
| to the logic of our problem.  Despite Ramon Lull's combinatorial
| analysis of logic and all of his followers, including Leibnitz with
| his universal characteristic and his persistent effort to build logical
| computing machines, from the death of William of Ockham logic decayed.
| There were, of course, teachers of logic.  The forms of the syllogism
| and the logic of classes were taught, and we shall use some of their
| devices, but there was a general recognition of their inadequacy to
| the problems in hand.  Russell says it was Jevons -- and Feibleman,
| that it was DeMorgan -- who said, "The logic of Aristotle is inadequate,
| for it does not show that if a horse is an animal then the head of the horse
| is the head of an animal."  To which Russell replies, "Fortunate Aristotle,
| for if a horse were a clam or a hydra it would not be so."  The difficulty
| is that they had no knowledge of the logic of relations, and almost none
| of the logic of propositions.  These logics really began in the latter
| part of the last century with Charles Peirce as their great pioneer.
| As with most pioneers, many of the trails he blazed were not followed
| for a score of years.  For example, he discovered the amphecks -- that
| is, "not both ... and ..." and "neither ... nor ...", which Sheffer
| rediscovered and are called by his name for them, "stroke functions".
| It was Peirce who broke the ice with his logic of relatives, from
| which springs the pitiful beginnings of our logic of relations of
| two and more than two arguments.  So completely had the traditional
| Aristotelian logic been lost that Peirce remarks that when he wrote
| the 'Century Dictionary' he was so confused concerning abduction, or
| apagoge, and induction that he wrote nonsense.  Thus Aristotelian logic,
| like the skeleton of Tom Paine, was lost to us from the world that it
| had engendered.  Peirce had to go back to Duns Scotus to start again
| the realistic logic of science.  Pragmatism took hold, despite its
| misinterpretation by William James.  The world was ripe for it.
| Frege, Peano, Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, followed by a
| host of lesser lights, but sparked by many a strange character
| like Schroeder, Sheffer, Gödel, and company, gave us a working
| logic of propositions.  By the time I had sunk my teeth into
| these questions, the Polish school was well on its way to glory.
| In 1923 I gave up the attempt to write a logic of transitive verbs
| and began to see what I could do with the logic of propositions.
| My object, as a psychologist, was to invent a kind of least psychic
| event, or "psychon", that would have the following properties:  First,
| it was to be so simple an event that it either happened or else it did
| not happen.  Second, it was to happen only if its bound cause had happened --
| shades of Duns Scotus! -- that is, it was to imply its temporal antecedent.
| Third, it was to propose this to subsequent psychons.  Fourth, these were
| to be compounded to produce the equivalents of more complicated propositions
| concerning their antecedents.  (McCulloch, WIANTAMMKIAAMTHMKAN?, EOM, pages 7-8).
|
| Warren S. McCulloch,
| "What Is a Number that a Man May Know It,
|  and a Man, that He May Know a Number",
| The Ninth Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture,
| 'General Semantics Bulletin', Numbers 26 & 27,
| Institute of General Semantics, Lakeville, CT, 1961.
| In 'Embodiments of Mind', MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1965.

It is a passage that comes to mind as my mind comes to this pass of wondering:
What would this web be if we were to wit what were wisest for winning with it?
I am drawn ever toward the same old, ever new answer, that it ought to be the
dot between the I's that multiplies one Intelligence by another, instead of a
dash between each pair that marks the cancellation, and the very diminishment
of each and every one by the other.

Jon Awbrey

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