SUO: Re: Ontology
Jay,
I apologize for any slurs I may have cast on your mother's
beloved teacher. And please realize that I also bought
the _World of Mathematics_ when I was in high school, and
that is where I first learned about Russell, Whitehead,
and symbolic logic. In my freshman year at MIT, I took
a course on symbolic logic, in which I was dutifully
taught that it all came from Frege, Peano, Russell,
and Whitehead. In that same year, I read William James'
book on pragmatism, in which he mentioned his friend
Charles Sanders Peirce -- but nobody mentioned any
connection between Peirce and modern logic.
Then for many years I used symbolic logic in what they
told me was "Peano-Russell" notation. I took a lot more
courses on the subject, but nobody ever mentioned Peirce.
In 1968, I bought the _Sourcebook on Mathematical Logic_
by van Heijenoort, which jumped straight from Frege
to Peano, with no mention of Peirce (except in Peano's
footnote about Peirce as the inventor of the notation).
In my first publication on conceptual graphs in 1976,
I was trying to combine the AI work on semantic networks
with a solid logic foundation, but I was not completely
happy with the combination. But in 1978, Martin Gardner
wrote about Peirce's existential graphs in his column
in the Scientific American. I followed the references,
and it was a total revelation. Peirce had done it all
in a very elegant form, and nobody else in AI (or in
any of my logic courses) had noticed.
As Russell himself said, he did not learn about symbolic
logic until he went to the conference in Paris in 1899.
That was 20 years after Frege and Peirce had invented
the subject and quite a few years after Schroeder had
published his 3-volume textbook (1890 to 1895), which
used Peirce's notation throughout.
Since Russell read and spoke German fluently, there
is no way that he could have missed Schroeder's book,
which had become the standard textbook on the subject.
But he did not refer to either Peirce or Schroeder as
the inventors of the notation he used. As you pointed
out, his only reference to Peirce was a disparaging
mention of P's 1870 work on relations with more than
one argument (which DeMorgan hailed as the "greatest
advance in logic since Boole").
Then Russell published his _Principles of Mathematics_
in 1903 -- just four years after he first learned the
subject from Peano. In his published review of that
book, Peirce wrote "a compendium of well-known results",
but in a letter to Lady Welby, he called it "superficial
to the point of nauseating me." What else would you
expect Peirce to say? R. had just learned the subject
and tossed off a book immediately after learning about it.
No matter how brilliant R. might be, the book was certainly
superficial by the standards of Frege, Peirce, Schroeder,
Hilbert, and others who had been working on it for years.
JH> I don't believe that Putnam, Quine or Hintikka ever
> wrote that Russell was simple-minded, or that they said
> that his work was nonsense or a travesty or unthoughtful,
> or showed no spark of originality, or any other of those
> loaded remarks you're fond of making, or even that he
> never referred to Peirce, which is simply factually
> egregious, as we've seen.
Please let me try to put those words back into the
context in which I wrote them.
Putnam, Quine, and Hintikka were doing the same thing
that I am doing now -- making brief historical remarks
to set the record straight.
The term "simpleminded" was Whitehead's, whose words I
quoted, in which W. referred to himself as "muddleheaded"
and R. as "simpleminded". Those are indeed disparaging
terms, but W. used them to characterize both himself and
R. in the same slightly disparaging, but humorous way.
I observed that those terms, when taken in that sense,
are a good way of describing the difference between
the two. In doing so, I did not say that R. was not
"thoughtful" in an absolute sense, but that he was
more likely than W. to resort to witty remarks than
detailed, thoughtful analyses.
I did apply the words "nonsense" and "travesty" to
R's _History of Western Philosophy_ because it is a
highly distorted presentation that is (a) historically
inaccurate (see, for example, R's misrepresentation
of the history of logic), (b) unsympathetic to most of
the philosophers he describes, and (c) heavily dependent
on secondary sources rather than the original material.
And of course Russell referred to Peirce, but only
to disparage him instead of giving him credit.
I did not say that R. "showed no spark of originality",
but that Whitehead believed that his more "muddleheaded"
students were more likely to be the creative ones.
There is certainly nothing new in R's _Principles of
Mathematics_, which a good textbook, but not original
research.
I also said that two of Russell's most famous
discoveries had been done better by others:
1. R's 1905 work on definite descriptions had been
anticipated by Ockham in a form that is more
complete and thorough, although written in Latin
instead of symbolic logic.
2. R's discovery of the contradiction in Frege's work
had been noticed by Zermelo, who did not publish
the contradiction in a separate paper. Instead,
he published his axioms for set theory that avoided
the contradiction.
Russell deserves credit for discovering these points
independently, but he was not a groundbreaking pioneer.
I might also mention that the so-called "DeMorgan's Laws"
for relating the Boolean operators AND and OR, were also
stated in Latin by Ockham.
All of these points are factual observations, which are
documented in the literature. This is not a hatchet
job on Russell, but a necessary correction of historical
oversights.
John