SUO: Re: CG: RE: Re: Ontology
Dear Jesse,
Thank you for sending the full quotation from Russell.
I commented on Jay's shorter quotation from the same
source, but I had thought that Russell was criticizing
Peirce's paper of 1870, which was the first development
of relations (or predicates) with two or more arguments.
But now I see that R. did indeed cite Peirce's publication
of 1885, which presented the full development of first
and second-order logic in a notation that is one-to-one
equivalent to what Russell adopted from Peano.
There are only three ways of interpreting Russell's
criticism of Peirce:
1. He read Peirce's earlier papers and not the 1885
paper, but copied the citation from Schroeder.
2. He skimmed the 1885 paper, but dismissed it in
the same cursory way as he treated all the other
works he commented on in his _History of Western
Philosophy_.
3. He recognized that Peirce's version of logic was
identical to the one he was using and deliberately
misrepresented it in order to make his own work
seem original.
In other words, Russell was either careless or lying.
Since Peirce's paper of 1885 is not available on the
WWW, I'm now scanning selections from it in order to
demonstrate that in his 1903 book, Russell had not
advanced beyond Peirce's publication of 1885. I'll
send the results to these e-mail lists this weekend.
John Sowa