undefined | Better HN

0 pointsyesenadam4y ago0 comments

> then Frege's work became equally known through the work of Bertrand Russel

I'm no expert, but you missed the part where Peirce was written out of the history of logic entirely for most of the 20th C[0], I guess due to the centrality of Frege/Russell in the Anglo/analytic tradition.

The article doesn't seem to me to claim that "one person fully deserves the credit". "What is the point of that"? I guess to be able to give readers new to Peirce, in a couple of paragraphs, an idea of the breadth and importance of his work. I'm not sure how the article "ultimately demeans the value of its subject", if you mean Peirce. It's not a technical journal article, but a "learn how awesome Peirce was!" article, and begrudging Peirce such articles seems a little, well, more goblyny than queennely.

Thanks for the interesting article!

[0] in English, at least, I mean.

0 comments

3 comments · 1 top-level

YeGoblynQueenne4y ago· 2 in thread

Well, I'm equal parts goblyn and queenne so you must be wrong :P

I don't know if it's right to say that Peirce was "written out" of the history of logic, no less "entirely". Personally, as a student of logic, I get my knowledge from sources that are neither Frege, nor Peirce, nor recognisably derived from either one's work. A lot of water has gone under the bridge and modern mathematical logic is something that neither of the two would recognise as their own.

On the other hand, I note that the way I was taught to think about quantifiers (by my thesis advisor, during my PhD) was decidedly Peirce-ian: informally, that ∀ is the big-and and ∃ is the big-or of all variable instantiations to entities in the domain of discourse. So I don't think anything was really written out.

>> Thanks for the interesting article!

You're welcome. For once, an article on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that I can read without having studied philosophy. Usually I get bogged down in unexplained jargon very quickly.

yesenadamOP4y ago

Sorry, I seem to have failed to communicate what I meant. I meant that in accounts of the history of logic that I saw as a student, say books published in English 1940s-1990s, Peirce was not mentioned. Then when I learnt his importance, that became a very noticeable and annoying omission, which thankfully seems to have started to be corrected in recent decades.

I don't see how where you get your logic, or the state of modern logic, or whether the way you were taught to think was Peircian, at all bears on whether Peirce was unfairly omitted from the history of logic.

YeGoblynQueenne4y ago

My apologies if my comments are confusing! I haven't studied the history of logic and the textbooks I've read don't have much information about it. I mentioned that I was taught a Peirce-ian concept of quantifiers to say I think that Peirce's work has been influential. If it was influential, then it was not ignored, deliberately or otherwise.

I don't know to what extent Peirce is left out of accounts of the history of the development of modern mathematical logic. Perhaps you're right about it, but I'm a bit skeptical because it seems to me from the little I've read that both Peirce and Frege produced similar and overlapping work around the same time as each other and independently of each other, so neither deliberately tried to omit references to each other's work, they just ignored each other's work more or less. Peirce's work sure seems like it had a strong following early on. Frege's branch of logic seems to have eventually become established not for nationalistic reasons but because it was simply considered "better" (whatever that may mean). I think Peirce's English-language work would be more favourably received by Anglo researchers thatn Frege's which was in German, anyway.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse