Re: Frege against the Booleans

JW = Jim Willgoose

JW: I followed up on two paper suggestions by Irving (Sluga and Van Heijenoort) in
     the context of the language or calculus topic.  With Sluga, I detect the idea
     that the Begriffsshrift is a universal language because it is meaningful in
     a way that the Boolean logic is not.  Sluga sees his paper as an "extension
     and adjustment" of Van Heijenoort's paper on logic as language or calculus.
     He places great emphasis on the "priority principle."  He quotes from Frege,
     "I begin with judgments and their contents and not with concepts ... The
     formation of concepts I let proceed from judgments. (Posthumous writings)
     Sluga says, "This principle of priority, in fact, constitutes the true
     center of his critique of Boolean logic.  That logic is a mere calculus
     for him because of its inattention to that principle, while his own logic
     approximates a characteristic language because of its reliance on it."
     (Sluga, Frege against the Booleans) The Frege quote above is from around
     1879 and the material focus is on 1884 or earlier; especially "Boole's
     calculating logic and the Begriffsshrift." (a response to Schroder's
     criticism).  There is a lot more to this article, including linking
     the priority principle to the better known "context principle."
     (words have meaning only in sentences) What I am doing is reading
     these two papers concurrently with Mitchell and Ladd-Franklin
     from Studies in Logic. (1883)

JW: ps. I like the way you diagram a thread on your site.

Jim,

Sorry, I was away on several excursions and missed that part of the context.

My main concern, here and elsewhere, resides with the potential contribution of
Peirce to our understanding of inquiry.  If I were starting a new project today,
instead of trying to dig my way out of unfinished business, it would get a title
like "The Unrealized Potential of Peirce's Thought" or maybe "The Unmet Challenge
of Peirce's Work".  My feeling is that only a small fraction of Peirce's potential
contribution to our understanding has yet been realized and that something critical
has been lost in the years between Peirce and Russell.  Consequently, my concern is
less with Boole and Frege than with the clues their work provides to what was found
and what was lost.

It has long been my experience that we cannot grasp the full import of Peirce's work
from the shadows that are cast on the analytic, atomistic, logistic, reductive plain.
I prefer looking at the work of what came after from Peirce's conceptual perspective,
instead of the other way around.  I think that affords a much clearer view of things.

Regards,

Jon

-- 

academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey
my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/
inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
mwb: http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey
oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey
facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JonnyCache