SUO: The Gulf of Ignorance
Bill Tepfenhart and I received an offline
note from somebody who felt that we were
being too harsh in our criticisms of the
field of computer science.
I replied that we were so critical because
we knew it so well that the lapses were
painful to us. But I also responded that
I had personal reasons for being so harsh
on some of the logicians themselves.
And I want to emphasize that I am not
criticizing people who haven't studied
logic. It's not their fault. It's the
fault of the people who should have been
their teachers.
Following is the explanation of my personal
discovery, which makes me so angry at some
of the people who should have taught me.
John Sowa
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... I was directing my harshest criticism
at Bertrand Russell, who was one of the
smartest guys in the world and who was
one of the leaders in the field of logic.
And one of the other targets of my criticism,
Quine, was another of the most brilliant
philosophers of the 20th century.
But he was so brilliant that he dominated the
field of logic at Harvard for about 40 years,
during which the philosophy department at Harvard
was sitting on Peirce's collected manuscripts
-- and doing absolutely nothing with them.
In 1968, I was a graduate student at Harvard
in comp. sci., and I took some courses in
logic in the philosophy department. But
during that time, I never heard anyone at
Harvard mention a single word about Peirce.
In fact, I was talking with another grad
student in philosophy, who was doing a
dissertation on Frege with Quine as his
thesis adviser. But nobody, absolutely
nobody was doing a dissertation on Peirce,
even though they had all the resources there.
I didn't learn about Peirce's existential
graphs until 1978 -- ten years later.
And I learned about them by reading an
article in the mathematical games section
of the Scientific American by Martin Gardner.
That article happened to mention the book
on Peirce's EGs by Don Roberts. I asked
the IBM librarian to order it, and it was
a revelation. But I never heard about it
at all when I was at Harvard -- and that
should have been the fountainhead of
knowledge about the subject.
Even worse, when I was at Harvard, I bought
the _Sourcebook on Mathematical Logic_,
which reprinted key articles in the history
of logic from Frege to Goedel. But there
was not a single article in it by Peirce.
The book was published by Harvard University
Press, and the author, who was from the
Netherlands, thanked Quine for helping him
select the key articles to include.
The fact that you had never studied much about
logic is excusable. But what is inexcusable is
that somebody like me, who had been studying logic
since 1958 (when I was a freshman at MIT) and who
had taken some courses in logic at Harvard, had
never heard about Peirce's contributions to logic
and his existential graphs until 1978, when I read
Martin Gardner's article.
That is what I meant about the gulf of ignorance
that was being spread by people who should have
been the source of enlightenment.
John