SUO: RE: Peirce the Logician
Thanks. The Putnam volume is easy to find. (I thought I already had it, but
no, I have, instead, Putnam's "The Many Faces of Realism". There's some pun
involving "about face" here, but let's face it, I'm not nearly as good with
puns as you are, Jon, so I'll leave it for you.)
-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawbrey@att.net]
Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2003 9:35 PM
To: John F. Sowa
Cc: Tom Johnston; SUO; cg@cs.uah.edu; Nicola Guarino
Subject: 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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