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The American Aristotle

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Re: The American Aristotle

#31

Post by RNCTX »

sonotathrowaway wrote: post #25
RNCTX wrote: post #14

I don't claim any higher knowledge of Pierce than what came up in passing as a humanities grad, but having some knowledge of the others mentioned, some points: > When people discuss the connections between language and cognition such as the possible existence of language in nonhuman species, communication in nature, language acquisition, thinking and human language more generally, cognitive scientists and evolutionar…

> I don't think it a coincidence that the rise of linguistics coincides with a decline in cognition that we can all observe today as reaching a sort of critical mass, in which the mention of a thing is gauged to be a judgment of a thing, particularly in social media contexts. I don’t think this is true at all, or supported by any examination of history.

The idea that everything can be turned into a science, when that is clearly not the case, has created a few generations of people who think that they can programmatically examine the meaning of human discourse, which is also not the case.

As for the history in question, it's only going back to ~1993, isn't it? And really on pervasive since the early 2000s.

Re: The American Aristotle

#32

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

yesenadam wrote: post #30
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> (...) the development of mathematical logic (before and arguably better eventually than Gottlob Frege) (...) Frege and Peirce worked out similar aspects of mathematical logic in around the same years. Peirce's work was better known for a while through the work of Ernst Schröder, but then Frege's work became equally known through the work of Bertrand Russel. It's difficult to say which of the two influenced their c…

> 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…

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.

Re: The American Aristotle

#33

Post by yesenadam »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #32
yesenadam wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 neith…

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.

Re: The American Aristotle

#34

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

yesenadam wrote: post #33
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 neith…

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 o…

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.

Re: The American Aristotle

#36

Post by glenstein »

slibhb wrote: post #29
glenstein wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't consider Peirce's racism relevant Relevant to what? The subject, so far as I can tell, is Pierce's intellectual legacy. Is discussion of his views on race allowed or not allowed? I honestly don't know. But what I do know is that whenever people try to calvinball into existence a special rule that we're not allowed, in a comment section of all places, those rules tend to grate me the wrong way.

I didn't say it's not allowed, I said I don't consider it relevant. Are you "calvinballing into existence" a rule that says I am not allowed to consider certain things irrelevant?

That's an unresponsive and frivolous distinction; the point is the same regardless of which magic word you insist is operative.
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