modern logic
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modern logic, in the history of Western philosophy, the concepts, principles, and systems of logical argumentation that were studied and developed from approximately the 16th century through the end of the 19th century.
The term “modern logic” conventionally refers to developments in the field of logic from the start of the European Renaissance to the turn of the 20th century. This is not to suggest that there was a smooth development of a unified conception of reasoning during the modern period. Modern logic exhibited an extreme diversity, and its chaotic development reflected all too clearly the political and intellectual turmoil with which it was surrounded. These upheavals included the Renaissance itself, the diminished influence of the Roman Catholic Church and the lesser intellectual role of the Latin language, the Reformation and subsequent religious wars, the Scientific Revolution and the growth of modern mathematics, and the rise and fall of empires and nation-states.
The 16th century
Renaissance writers sometimes denounced all of medieval logic. The humanism of the Renaissance is often seen as promoting the study of the classic works of ancient Greece and Rome, but the logic of Aristotle (384–322 bce) was frequently regarded as being so hopelessly bound together with the “sterile” logical systems of the Middle Ages as to constitute an exception to this spirit of rebirth. Some intellectual figures, such as Martin Luther (1483–1546), were repelled by any hint of Aristotelianism. Others, such as the great humanist essayist Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), occasionally praised Aristotle but never lauded his logical theory; like many writers in the Renaissance, Erasmus found in Aristotle’s theory of the syllogism only “subtlety and arid ingenuity.” The German Lutheran humanist Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) had a more balanced appreciation of Aristotle’s logic. Melanchthon’s Compendaria dialectices ratio (“Brief Outline of Dialects”) of 1520, built upon his Institutiones Rhetoricae of the previous year, became a popular Lutheran text. There he described his purpose as presenting “a true, pure and uncomplicated logic, just as we have received it from Aristotle and some of his judicious commentators.” Elsewhere, influential writers such as François Rabelais (c. 1494–1553) and Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) had few kind words for logic as they knew it.
The French reformer and pamphleteer Petrus Ramus (1515–72) was also the author of extremely influential “Reform” logical texts. His Dialectique (Dialectics) of 1555 was the first major logical work in a modern language. In this work and in his Dialecticae libri duo (“Two Books of Dialectics”) of 1556 he combined attacks on medieval logic, an emphasis on the use of logic in actual arguments (“dialectics”), and a presentation of a highly simplified approach to categorical syllogisms, without an attempt to follow Aristotle (see Aristotle: Syllogistic). Elsewhere, he proposed that reasoning should be taught by using the Elements, a treatise on geometry by the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid (flourished c. 300 bce), rather than by the study of the syllogism. He devoted special attention to valid syllogisms with singular premises, such as “Octavius is the heir of Caesar. I am Octavius. Therefore, I am the heir of Caesar.” Singular terms (such as proper names) had been treated by earlier logicians: Pseudo-Scotus (the author—or authors—of various works once falsely attributed to the Scottish philosopher John Duns Scotus [c. 1266–1308]), among others, had proposed assimilating them to universal propositions by understanding “Julius Caesar is mortal” as “All Julius Caesars are mortal.” Although Ramus’s proposals for singular terms were not widely accepted, his concern for explicitly addressing them and his refusal to use artificial techniques to convert them to standard forms prefigured more recent interests. Although it had its precursors in medieval semantic thought, Ramus’s division of thought into a hierarchy composed of concepts, judgments, arguments, and method was influential in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Medieval logic remained alive, especially in predominantly Roman Catholic universities and countries, such as Italy and Spain. Some of this work had considerable value, even though it was outside of the mainstream logical tradition, from which it diverged in the 16th century. If the Reform tradition of Melanchthon and Ramus represents one major tradition in modern logic, and the later medieval tradition another, then a third tradition is found in the followers of the Spanish (Catalan) soldier, priest, missionary, and mystic Ramón Llull (1232/33–1315/16). His Ars magna (1305–08; “The Great Art”) represents an attempt to symbolize concepts and derive propositions that form various combinations of possibilities. These notions, associated with lore of the Kabbala, later influenced the French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62) and the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and the rise of probability theory. Llull’s influence can be seen more directly in the work of his fellow Spaniard Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), who used a V-shaped symbol to indicate the inclusion of one term in another (see ). Other work inspired by Llull includes the logic and notational system of the German logician Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638). The work of Vives and Alsted represents perhaps the first systematic effort at a logical symbolism.
With the 17th century came increasing interest in symbolizing logic. These symbolizations sometimes took graphic or pictorial forms but more often used letters in the manner of algebra to stand for propositions, concepts, classes, properties, and relations, as well as special symbols for logical notions. Inspired by the triumphs achieved in mathematics after it had turned to the systematic use of special symbols, logicians hoped to imitate this success. The systematic application of symbols and abbreviations and the conscious hope that through this application great progress could be made were a distinguishing characteristic of modern logic.
The modern era saw major changes not only in the external appearance of logical writings but also in the purposes of logic. Logic for Aristotle was a theory of ideal human reasoning and inference that also had clear pedagogical value. Early modern logicians stressed what they called “dialectics” (or “rhetoric”), because “logic” had come to mean an elaborate medieval theory of reasoning that was not always directed toward improving reasoning. A related goal was to extend the scope of human reasoning beyond textbook syllogistic theory and to acknowledge that there were important kinds of valid inference that could not be formulated in traditional Aristotelian syllogistic. But another part of the rejection of Aristotelian logic (broadly conceived to include medieval logic) is best explained by the changing and quite new goals that logic took on in the modern era. One such goal was the development of an ideal logical language that naturally expressed ideal thought and was more precise than natural languages. Another goal was to develop methods of thinking and discovery that would accelerate or improve human thought or would allow its replacement by mechanical devices. Whereas Aristotelian logic had seen itself as a tool for training “natural” abilities at reasoning, later logics proposed vastly improving meagre and wavering human tendencies and abilities. The linking of logic with mathematics was an especially characteristic theme in the modern era. Finally, in the modern era came an intense consciousness of the importance of logical form (forms of sentences, as well as forms or patterns of arguments). Although the medievals made many distinctions among patterns of sentences and arguments, the modern logical notion of “form” was perhaps first crystallized in the work of the Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–65) and the English mathematician and logician Augustus De Morgan (1806–71). The now standard discussions of validity, invalidity, and the self-conscious separation of “formal” from nonformal aspects of sentences and arguments all trace their roots to this work.
The 17th century
The Logica Hamburgensis (1638) of the German mathematician Joachim Jung (1587–1657) was one replacement for the “Protestant” logic of Melanchthon. Its chief virtue was the care with which late medieval theories and techniques were gathered and presented. Jung devoted considerable attention to valid arguments that do not fit into simpler, standard conceptions of the syllogism and immediate inference. Of special interest is his treatment of quantified relational arguments, then called “oblique” syllogisms because of the oblique (non-nominative) case that is used to express them in Latin. An example is: “The square of an even number is even; 6 is even; therefore, the square of 6 is even.” The technique of dealing with such inferences involved rewriting a premise so that the term in the oblique case (for example, “of an even number”) would occur in the subject position and thus be amenable to standard syllogistic manipulation. Such arguments had in fact been noticed by Aristotle and were also treated in late medieval logic.
An especially widely used text of the 17th century is usually termed simply the Port-Royal Logic after the seat of the anticlerical Jansenist movement outside Paris. It was written by the French theologians Antoine Arnauld (1612–94) and Pierre Nicole (1625–95), possibly with others, and was published in French in 1662 with the title La Logique ou l’art de penser (“Logic or the Art of Thinking”). It was promptly translated into Latin and English and underwent many reprintings in the late 17th and 18th centuries. It followed Ramus’s outline of concept, judgment, argument, and method; it also briefly mentioned oblique syllogisms. The Port-Royal Logic followed the general Reform program of simplifying syllogistic theory, reducing the number of traditional syllogistic figures from four, and minimizing distinctions thought to be useless (see ancient logic: Syllogisms). In addition, the work contained an important contribution to semantics in the form of the distinction between comprehension and extension. Although medieval semantic theory had used similar notions, the Port-Royal notions found their way into numerous 18th- and 19th-century discussions of the meanings and reference of terms; they appeared, for example, in A System of Logic (1843), an influential work by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill. The “comprehension” of a term consisted of all the essential attributes in it (those that cannot be removed without “destroying” the concept), and the extension consisted of all those objects to which the concept applies. Thus the comprehension of the term “triangle” might include the attributes of being a polygon, three-sided, three-angled, and so on. Its extension would include all kinds of triangles. The Port-Royal Logic also contained an influential discussion of definitions that was inspired by the work of Pascal. According to this discussion, some terms could not be defined (“primitive” terms), and definitions were divided between nominal and real ones. Real definitions were descriptive and stated the essential properties in a concept, while nominal definitions were creative and stipulated the conventions by which a linguistic term was to be used.
Discussions of “nominal” and “real” definitions go back at least to the general debates between medieval nominalists and realists (see also metaphysics: Universals and particulars); Pascal’s application of the distinction is interesting for the emphasis that it laid on mathematical definitions being nominal and on the usefulness of nominal definitions. Although the Port-Royal logic itself contained no symbolism, the philosophical foundation for using symbols by nominal definitions was nevertheless laid.
One intriguing 17th-century treatment of logic in terms of demonstrations, postulates, and definitions in a Euclidean fashion occurs in the otherwise quite traditional Logica Demonstrativa (1697; “Demonstrative Logic”) of the Italian Jesuit Gerolamo Saccheri (1667–1733). Saccheri is better known for his suggestion of the possibility of a non-Euclidean geometry in Euclides ab Omni Naevo Vindicatus (1733; “Euclid Cleared of Every Flaw”). Another incisive traditional logic was presented in the Logica fundamentis suis restituta (1662; “Logic Restored to its Fundamentals”), by the Dutch philosopher Arnold Geulincx (1624–69)
Leibniz
The logical work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz may be said to represent one of the greatest triumphs, as well as one of the greatest tragedies, in the history of logic. Leibniz created in the 1680s a symbolic logic (see ) that is remarkably similar to the system of the British mathematician George Boole (1815–64)—and Boole is widely regarded as the originator of mathematical or symbolic logic. But nothing other than vague generalities about Leibniz’s goals for logic was published until 1903—well after symbolic logic was in full blossom. Thus one could say that, great though Leibniz’s discoveries were, they were virtually without influence in the history of logic.
Leibniz’s logical research was not entirely symbolic, however, nor was he without influence in the history of (nonsymbolic) logic. Early in his life, Leibniz was strongly interested in the program of Llull, and he wrote the De arte combinatoria (1666); this work followed the general Llullian goal of discovering truths by combining concepts into judgments in exhaustive ways and then methodically assessing their truth. Leibniz later developed a goal of devising what he called a “universally characteristic language” (lingua characteristica universalis) that would, first, notationally represent concepts by displaying the more basic concepts of which they were composed, and second, naturally represent (in the manner of graphs or pictures, “iconically”) the concept in a way that could be easily grasped by readers, no matter what their native tongue. Leibniz studied and was impressed by the method of the Egyptians and Chinese in using picturelike expressions for concepts. The goal of a universal language had already been suggested by the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650); it had also been discussed extensively by the English philologist George Dalgarno (c. 1626–87) and, for mathematical language and communication, by the French algebraist François Viète (1540–1603).
Another and distinct goal Leibniz proposed for logic was a “calculus of reason” (calculus ratiocinator). This would naturally first require a symbolism but would then involve explicit manipulations of the symbols according to established rules by which either new truths could be discovered or proposed conclusions could be checked to see if they could indeed be derived from the premises. Reasoning could then take place in the way large sums are done—that is, mechanically or algorithmically—and thus not be subject to individual mistakes and failures of ingenuity. Such derivations could be checked by others or performed by machines, a possibility that Leibniz seriously contemplated. Leibniz’s suggestion that machines could be constructed to draw valid inferences or to check the deductions of others was pursued in the 19th century by Charles Babbage (1791–1871), William Stanley Jevons (1835–82), and Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), among others.
The symbolic calculus that Leibniz devised seems to have been more of a calculus of reason than a “characteristic” language. It was motivated by his view that most concepts were “composite”: they were collections or conjunctions of other more basic concepts. Symbols (letters, lines, or circles) were then used to stand for concepts and their relationships. This resulted in what is called an “intensional” rather than an “extensional” logic—one whose terms stand for properties or concepts rather than for the things having these properties (see intension and extension). Leibniz’s basic notion of the truth of a judgment was that the concepts making up the predicate were “included in” the concept of the subject. What Leibniz symbolized as “A ∞ Β,” or what one might write as “A = B” was that all the concepts making up concept A also are contained in concept B, and vice versa.
Leibniz used two further notions to expand the basic logical calculus. In his notation, “A ⊕ B ∞ C” indicates that the concepts in A and those in B wholly constitute those in C. One might write this as “A + B = C” or “A ∪ B = C”—if one keeps in mind that A, B, and C stand for concepts or properties, not for individual things. Leibniz also used the juxtaposition of terms in the following way: “AB ∞ C,” which might be written as “A × B = C” or “A ∩ B = C,” signifies in his system that all the concepts in both A and B wholly constitute the concept C.
A universal affirmative judgment, such as “All A’s are B’s,” becomes in Leibniz’s notation “A ∞ AB.” This equation states that the concepts included in the concepts of both A and B are the same as those in A. The syllogism “All A’s are B’s; all B’s are C’s; therefore all A’s are C’s,” becomes the sequence of equations “A = AB; B =BC; therefore A =AC.” This conclusion can be derived from the premises by two simple algebraic substitutions and the associativity of logical multiplication.
As with many early symbolic logics, including many developed in the 19th century, Leibniz’s system had difficulties with particular and negative statements, and it included little discussion of propositional logic and no formal treatment of quantified relational statements. (Leibniz later became keenly aware of the importance of relations and relational inferences.)
Although Leibniz might seem to deserve to be credited with great originality in his symbolic logic—especially in his equational, algebraic logic—it turns out that such insights were relatively common to mathematicians of the 17th and 18th centuries who had a knowledge of traditional syllogistic logic. For example, in 1685 the Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli (1654–1705) published a pamphlet on the parallels of logic and algebra and gave some algebraic renderings of categorical statements. Later the symbolic work of Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–77), Gottfried Ploucquet (1716–90), Leonhard Euler (1707–83), and even Boole—all apparently uninfluenced by Leibniz’s or even Bernoulli’s work—seems to show the extent to which these ideas were apparent to the best mathematical minds of the day.
The 18th and 19th centuries
In the 18th century there were three major contributors to the development of formal logic: Ploucquet, Lambert, and Euler (see below), although none went far beyond Leibniz and none influenced subsequent developments in the way that Boole and the German mathematician and logician Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) later did. Leibniz’s major goals for logic, such as the development of a “characteristic” language; the parallels among arithmetic, algebra, and syllogistic; and his notion of the truth of a judgment as the concept of the predicate being “included in” the concept of the subject, were carried forward by the German mathematician and philosopher Christian Wolff (1679–1754) but without any significant development of a logic, symbolic or otherwise.
Gottfried Ploucquet
The work of Ploucquet was based on the ideas of Leibniz, although the symbolic calculus Ploucquet developed does not resemble that of Leibniz (see ). The basis of Ploucquet’s symbolic logic was the sign “>,” which he unfortunately used to indicate that two concepts are disjoint—i.e., having no basic concepts in common; in its propositional interpretation, it is equivalent to what became known in the 20th century as the “Sheffer stroke” function (also known to Peirce), meaning “neither…nor.” The universal negative proposition, “No A’s are B’s,” would become “A > B” (or, convertibly, “B > A”). The equality sign was used to denote conceptual identity, as in Leibniz. Capital letters were used for distributed terms, lowercase ones for undistributed terms. The intersection of concepts was represented by “+”; the multiplication sign (or juxtaposition) stood for the inclusive union of concepts; and a bar over a letter stood for complementation (in the manner of Leibniz). Thus “Ā” represented all non-A’s, while “ā” meant the same as “some non-A.” Rules of inference were the standard algebraic substitution of identicals along with more complicated implicit rules for manipulating the nonidentities using “>.” Ploucquet was interested in graphic representations of logical relations—using lines, for example. He was also one of the first symbolic logicians to have worried extensively about representing quantification—although his own contrast of distributed and undistributed terms is a clumsy and limited device. Not a mathematician, Ploucquet did not pursue the logical interpretation of inverse operations (e.g., division, square root, and so on) and of binomial expansions; the interpretation of these operations was to plague some algebras of logic and sidetrack substantive development—first in the work of Leibniz and Bernoulli, then in that of Lambert, Boole, and the German mathematician and algebraist Ernst Schröder (see below). Ploucquet published and promoted his views widely (his publications included an essay on Leibniz’s logic); he influenced his contemporary Lambert and had a still greater influence upon Georg Jonathan von Holland and Christian August Semler.
Johann Heinrich Lambert
The greatest 18th-century logician was undoubtedly Johann Heinrich Lambert. Lambert was the first to demonstrate the irrationality of π, and, when asked by King Frederick II (“the Great”) of Prussia in what field he was most capable, is said to have curtly answered “All.” His own highly articulated philosophy was a more thorough and creative reworking of rationalist ideas from Leibniz and Wolff. His symbolic and formal logic, developed especially in his Sechs Versuche einer Zeichenkunst in der Vernunftlehre (1777; “Six Attempts at a Symbolic Method in the Theory of Reason”), was an elegant and notationally efficient calculus, extensively duplicating, apparently unwittingly, sections of Leibniz’s calculus of a century earlier. Like the systems of Leibniz, Ploucquet, and most Germans, it was intensional, using terms to stand for concepts, not individual things. It also used an identity sign and the plus sign in the natural algebraic way that one sees in Leibniz and Boole.
Five features distinguish Lambert’s logic from other systems. First, Lambert was concerned to separate the simpler concepts constituting a more complex concept into the genus and differentia—the broader and narrowing concepts—typical of standard definitions: the symbols for the genus and differentia of a concept were operations on terms, extracting the genus or differentia of a concept. Second, Lambert carefully differentiated among letters for known, undetermined, and genuinely unknown concepts, using different letters from the Latin alphabet; the lack of such distinctions in algebra instruction has probably caused extensive confusion. Third, his disjunction or union operation, “ + ,” was taken in the exclusive sense—excluding the overlap of two concepts, in contrast to Ploucquet’s inclusive operation, for example. Fourth, Lambert accomplished the expression of quantification such as that in “Every A is B” by writing “a = mb” (see )—that is, the known concept a is identical to the concepts in both the known concept b and an indeterminate concept m; this device is similar enough to Boole’s later use of the letter “y” to suggest some possible influence. Finally, Lambert considered briefly the symbolic theorems that would not hold if the concepts were relations, such as “is the father of.” He also introduced a notation for expressing relational notions in terms of single-placed functions: in his system, “i = α : : c” indicates that the individual (concept) i is the result of applying a function α to the individual concept c. Although it is not known whether Frege had read Lambert, it is possible that Lambert’s analysis influenced Frege’s analysis of quantified relations, which depends on the notion of a function.
Other 18th-century logicians
Lambert also developed a method of pictorially displaying the overlap of the content of concepts with overlapping line segments. Leibniz had experimented with similar techniques. Two-dimensional techniques were popularized by Euler in his Lettres à une princesse d’Allemagne (1768–74; “Letters to a German Princess”). These techniques and the related Venn diagrams have been especially popular in logic education. In Euler’s method the interior areas of circles represented (intensionally) the more basic concepts making up a concept or property. To display “All A’s are B’s,” Euler drew a circle labeled “A” that was entirely contained within another circle, “B.” (See .) Such circles could be manipulated to discover the validity of syllogisms. Euler did not develop this method very far, and it did not constitute a significant logical advance. Leibniz himself had occasionally drawn such illustrations, and they apparently first entered the literature in the Universalia Euclidea (1661), by the German philosopher Johann C. Sturm (1635–1703) Euler’s methods were systematically developed by the French mathematician Joseph-Diez Gergonne (1771–1859), although Gergonne retreated from two-dimensional graphs to linear formulas that could be more easily printed and manipulated. For complicated reasons, almost all German formal logic came from the Protestant areas of the German-speaking world.
The German philosophers Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) made enormous contributions to philosophy, but their contributions to formal logic can only be described as minimal or even harmful. Kant refers to logic as a virtually completed artifice in his important Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787). He showed no interest in Leibniz’s goal of a natural, universal, and efficient logical language and no appreciation of symbolic or mathematical formulations. His own lectures on logic, published in 1800 as Immanuel Kants Logik: ein Handbuch zu Vorlesungen, and his earlier The Mistaken Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (1762) were minor contributions to the history of logic. Hegel refers early in his massive Science of Logic (1812–16) to the centuries of work in logic since Aristotle as a mere preoccupation with “technical manipulations.” He took issue with the claim that one could separate the “logical form” of a judgment from its substance—and thus with the very possibility of logic based on a theory of logical form. When the study of logic blossomed again on German-speaking soil, contributors came from mathematics and the natural sciences.
In the English-speaking world, logic had always been more easily and continuously tolerated, even if it did not so early reach the heights of mathematical sophistication that it had in the German- and French-speaking worlds. Logic textbooks in English appeared in considerable numbers in the 17th and 18th centuries: some were translations, while others were handy, simplified handbooks with some interesting and developed positions, such as Institutio Logicae (1687), by John Wallis (1616–1703), and works by Henry Aldrich (1648–1710), Isaac Watts (1674–1748), and the founder of Methodism, John Wesley (1703–91). Out of this tradition arose the Elements of Logic (1826), by Richard Whately (1787–1863) and, in the same tradition, Mill’s enormously popular A System of Logic. Although now largely relegated to a footnote, Whately’s nonsymbolic textbook reformulated many concepts in such a thoughtful and clear way that it is generally (and first by De Morgan) credited with single-handedly bringing about the “rebirth” of English-language logic.
Boole and De Morgan
The two most important contributors to British logic in the first half of the 19th century were undoubtedly George Boole and Augustus De Morgan. Their work took place against a more general background of logical work in English by figures such as Whately, George Bentham (1800–84), Hamilton, and others. Although Boole cannot be credited with the very first symbolic logic, he was the first major formulator of a symbolic extensional logic that is familiar today as a logic or algebra of classes. (Von Holland, a correspondent of Lambert, had experimented with an extensional theory, and in 1839 the English writer Thomas Solly [1816–75] presented an extensional logic in A Syllabus of Logic, though not an algebraic one.)
Boole published two major works, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic in 1847 and An Investigation of the Laws of Thought in 1854. It was the first of these two works that had the deeper impact on his contemporaries and on the history of logic. The Mathematical Analysis of Logic arose as the result of two broad streams of influence. The first was the English logic-textbook tradition. The second was the rapid growth in the early 19th century of sophisticated discussions of algebra and anticipations of nonstandard algebras. The British mathematicians D.F. Gregory (1813–44) and George Peacock (1791–1858) were major figures in this theoretical appreciation of algebra. Such conceptions gradually evolved into “nonstandard” abstract algebras such as quaternions, vectors, linear algebra, and Boolean algebra itself.
Boole used capital letters to stand for the extensions of terms; they are referred to (in 1854) as classes of “things” but should not be understood as modern sets. The universal class or term—which he called simply “the Universe”—was represented by the numeral “1,” and the null class by “0.” The juxtaposition of terms (for example, “AB”) created a term referring to the intersection of two classes or terms. The addition sign signified the non-overlapping union; that is, “A + B” referred to the entities in A or in B; in cases where the extensions of terms A and B overlapped, the expression was held to be “undefined.” For designating a proper subclass of a class, Boole used the notation “v,” writing for example “vA” to indicate some of the A’s. Finally, he used subtraction to indicate the removing of terms from classes. For example, “1 − x” would indicate what one would obtain by removing the elements of x from the universal class—that is, obtaining the complement of x (relative to the universe, 1).
Basic equations included: 1A = A, 0A = 0, A + 0 = 0, A + 1 = 1 (but only where A = 0), A + B = B + A, AB = BA, AA = A (but not A + A = A), (AB)C = A(BC), and the distribution laws, A(B + C) = AB + AC and A + (BC) = (A + B)(A + C). Boole offered a relatively systematic, but not rigorously axiomatic, presentation. For a universal affirmative statement such as “All A’s are B’s,” Boole used three alternative notations (see ): AB = B (somewhat in the manner of Leibniz), A(1 − B) = 0, or A = vB (the class of A’s is equal to some proper subclass of the B’s). The first and second interpretations allowed one to derive syllogisms by algebraic substitution: the latter required manipulation of subclass (“v”) symbols.
In contrast to earlier symbolisms, Boole’s was extensively developed, with a thorough exploration of a large number of equations (including binomial-like expansions) and techniques. The formal logic was separately applied to the interpretation of propositional logic, which became an interpretation of the class or term logic—with terms standing for occasions or times rather than for concrete individual things. Following the English textbook tradition, deductive logic is but one half of the subject matter of the book, with inductive logic and probability theory constituting the other half of both his 1847 and 1854 works.
Seen in historical perspective, Boole’s logic was a remarkably smooth bend of the new “algebraic” perspective and the English-logic textbook tradition. His 1847 work begins with a slogan that could have served as the motto of abstract algebra: “…the validity of the processes of analysis does not depend upon the interpretation of the symbols which are employed, but solely upon the laws of combination.”
Modifications to Boole’s system were swift in coming: in the 1860s Peirce and Jevons both proposed replacing Boole’s “ + ” with a simple inclusive union or summation: the expression “A + B” was to be interpreted as designating the class of things in A, in B, or in both. This results in accepting the equation “1 + 1 = 1,” which is certainly not true of the ordinary numerical algebra and at which Boole apparently balked.
Interestingly, one defect in Boole’s theory, its failure to detail relational inferences, was dealt with almost simultaneously with the publication of his first major work. In 1847 De Morgan published his Formal Logic; or, the Calculus of Inference, Necessary and Probable. Unlike Boole and most other logicians in the United Kingdom, De Morgan knew the medieval theory of logic and semantics and also knew the Continental, Leibnizian symbolic tradition of Lambert, Ploucquet, and Gergonne. The symbolic system that De Morgan introduced in his work and used in subsequent publications is, however, clumsy and does not show the appreciation of abstract algebras that Boole’s did. De Morgan did introduce the enormously influential notion of a possibly arbitrary and stipulated “universe of discourse” that was used by later Booleans. (Boole’s original universe referred simply to “all things.”) This view influenced 20th-century logical semantics. De Morgan contrasted uppercase and lowercase letters: a capital letter represented a class of individuals, while a lowercase letter represented its complement relative to the universe of discourse, a convention Boole might have expressed by writing “x = (1 − X)”; this stipulation results in the general principle: xX = 0. A period indicated a (propositional) negation, and the parentheses “(“ and ”)” indicated, respectively, distributed (if the parenthesis faces toward the nearby term) and undistributed terms. Thus De Morgan would write “All A’s are B’s” as “A) )B” and “Some A’s are B’s” as “A ( )B.” These distinctions parallel Boole’s account of distribution (quantification) in “A = vB” (where A is distributed but B is not) and “vA = B” (where both terms are distributed). Although his entire system was developed with wit, consistency, and brilliance, it is remarkable that De Morgan never saw the inferiority of his notation to almost all available symbolisms.
De Morgan’s other essays on logic were published in a series of papers from 1846 to 1862 (and an unpublished essay of 1868) entitled simply “On the Syllogism.” The first series of four papers found its way into the middle of the Formal Logic of 1847. The second series, published in 1850, is of considerable significance in the history of logic, for it marks the first extensive discussion of quantified relations since late medieval logic and Jung’s massive Logica hamburgensis of 1638. In fact, De Morgan made the point, later to be exhaustively repeated by Peirce and implicitly endorsed by Frege, that relational inferences are the core of mathematical inference and scientific reasoning of all sorts; relational inferences are thus not just one type of reasoning but rather are the most important type of deductive reasoning. Often attributed to De Morgan—not precisely correctly but in the right spirit—was the observation that all of Aristotelian logic was helpless to show the validity of the inference, “All horses are animals; therefore, every head of a horse is the head of an animal.” The title of this series of papers, De Morgan’s devotion to the history of logic, his reluctance to mathematize logic in any serious way, and even his clumsy notation—apparently designed to represent as well as possible the traditional theory of the syllogism—show De Morgan to be a deeply traditional logician.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce, the son of the Harvard mathematics professor and discoverer of linear algebra Benjamin Peirce, was the first significant American figure in logic. Peirce had read the work of Aristotle, Whately, Kant, and Boole as well as medieval works and was influenced by his father’s sophisticated conceptions of algebra and mathematics. Peirce’s first published contribution to logic was his improvement in 1867 of Boole’s system. Although Peirce never published a book on logic (he did edit a collection of papers by himself and his students, the Studies in Logic of 1883), he was the author of an important article in 1870, whose abbreviated title was “On the Notation of Relatives,” and of a series of articles in the 1880s on logic and mathematics; these were all published in American mathematics journals.
It is relatively easy to describe Peirce’s main approach to logic, at least in his earlier work: it was a refinement of Boole’s algebra of logic and, especially, the development of techniques for handling relations within that algebra. In a phrase, Peirce sought a blend of Boole (on the algebra of logic) and De Morgan (on quantified relational inferences). Described in this way, however, it is easy to underestimate the originality and creativity (even idiosyncrasy) of Peirce. Although committed to the broadly “algebraic” tradition of Boole and his father, Peirce quickly moved away from the equational style of Boole and from efforts to mimic numerical algebra. In particular, he argued that a transitive and asymmetric logical relation of inclusion, for which he used the symbol “⤙,” was more useful than equations; the importance of such a basic, transitive relation was first stressed by De Morgan, and much of Peirce’s work can be seen as an exploration of the formal, abstract properties of this distinctively logical relation. He used it to express class inclusion, the “if…then” connective of propositional logic, and even the relation between the premises and conclusion of an argument (“illation”). Furthermore, Peirce slowly abandoned the strictly substitutional character of algebraic terms and increasingly used notation that resembled modern quantifiers.
Quantifiers were briefly introduced in 1870 and were used extensively in the papers of the 1880s. They were borrowed by Schröder for his extremely influential treatise on the algebra of logic and were later adopted by the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932) from Schröder; thus in all probability they are the source of the notation for quantifiers now widely used. In his earlier works, Peirce might have written “A ⤙ B” to express the universal statement “All A’s are B’s” (see ); however, he often wrote this as “Πî Ai ⤙ Πî” Bî (the class of all the i’s that are A is included in the class of all the i’s that are B) or, still later and interpreted in the modern way, as “For all i’s, if i is A, then i is B.” Peirce and Schröder were never clear about whether they thought these quantifiers and variables were necessary for the expression of certain statements (as opposed to using strictly algebraic formulas), and Frege did not address this vital issue either; the Boolean algebra without quantifiers, even with extensions for relations that Peirce introduced, was demonstrated to be inadequate only in the mid-20th century by the Polish-born American logician Alfred Tarski (1901–83) and others.
Peirce developed this symbolism extensively for relations. His earlier work was based on versions of multiplication and addition for relations—called relative multiplication and addition—so that Boolean laws still held. Both Peirce’s conception of the purposes of logic and the details of his symbolism and logical rules were enormously complicated by highly developed and unusual philosophical views, by elaborate theories of mind and thought, and by his theory of mental and visual signs (semiotics). He argued that all reasoning was “diagrammatic” but that some diagrams were better (more iconic) than others if they more accurately represented the structure of our thoughts. His earlier works seems to be more in the tradition of developing a calculus of reason that would make reasoning quicker and better and permit one to validate others’ reasoning more accurately and efficiently. His later views, however, seem to be more in the direction of developing a “characteristic” language. In the late 1880s and 1890s Peirce developed a far more extensively iconic system of logical representation, his existential graphs. This work was, however, not published in his lifetime and was little recognized until the 1960s.
Peirce did not play a major role in the important debates at the end of the 19th century on the relationship of logic and mathematics and on set theory. In fact, in responding to an obviously quick reading of Bertrand Russell’s restatements of Frege’s position that mathematics could be derived from logic (see logicism), Peirce countered that logic was properly seen as a branch of mathematics, not vice versa. He had no influential students: the brilliant O.H. Mitchell (1851–89) died at an early age, and Christine Ladd-Franklin (1847–1930) never adapted to the newer symbolic tradition of Peano, Frege, and Russell. On the other hand, Peano and especially Schröder had read Peirce’s work carefully and adopted much of his notation and his doctrine of the importance of relations (although they were less fervent than De Morgan and Peirce). Peano and Schröder, using much of Peirce’s notation, had an enormous influence into the 20th century.
In Germany, the older formal and symbolic logical tradition was barely kept alive by figures such as Salomon Maimon (1754–1800), Semler, August Detlev Twesten (1789–1876), and Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch (1802–96). The German mathematician and philologist Hermann Günther Grassmann (1809–77) published in 1844 his Ausdehnungslehre (“The Theory of Extension”), in which he used a novel and difficult notation to explore quantities (“extensions”) of all sorts—logical extension and intension, numerical, spatial, temporal, and so on. Grassmann’s notion of extension is very similar to the use of the broad term “quantity” (and the phrase “logic of quantity”) that is seen in the works of Bentham and Hamilton from the same period in the United Kingdom; it is from this English-language tradition that the terms, still in use, of logical “quantification” and “quantifiers” derive. Grassmann’s work influenced Robert Grassmann (1815–1901)—specifically, his Die Begriffslehre oder Logik (1872; “The Theory of Concepts or Logic”)—Schröder, and Peano. The stage for a rebirth of German formal logic was further set by works of Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802–72), published in the 1860s and ’70s, on Aristotle’s and Leibniz’s logic and on the relationship of mathematics and philosophy. The much-read article “Die englische Logik der Gegenwart” (1876; “Contemporary English Logic”), by the Austrian philosopher Alois Riehl (1844–1924), introduced German speakers to the works of Boole, De Morgan, and Jevons.
Gottlob Frege
In 1879 Frege—whose mathematical specialty, like Boole’s, had actually been calculus—published perhaps the finest single book on symbolic logic in the 19th century, Begriffsschrift (“Conceptual Notation”). The title was taken from Trendelenburg’s translation of Leibniz’s notion of a characteristic language. Frege’s small volume is a rigorous presentation of what would now be called the first-order predicate logic. It contains a careful use of quantifiers and predicates (although predicates are described as functions, suggestive of the technique of Lambert). It shows no trace of the influence of Boole and little trace of the older German tradition of symbolic logic. One might surmise that Frege was familiar with Trendelenburg’s discussion of Leibniz, had probably encountered works by Drobisch and Hermann Grassmann, and possibly had a passing familiarity with the works of Boole and Lambert, but was otherwise ignorant of the history of logic. He later characterized his system as inspired by Leibniz’s goal of a characteristic language but not of a calculus of reason. Frege’s notation was unique and problematically two-dimensional; this alone caused it to be little read (see ).
Frege was well aware of the importance of functions in mathematics, and these form the basis of his notation for predicates; he never showed an awareness of the work of De Morgan and Peirce on relations or of older medieval treatments. The work was reviewed (by Schröder, among others) but never very positively, and the reviews always chided him for his failure to acknowledge the Boolean and older German symbolic tradition; reviews written by philosophers chided him for various sins against reigning idealist dogmas. Frege stubbornly ignored the critiques of his notation and persisted in publishing all his later works using it, including his little-read magnum opus, Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (1893–1903; The Basic Laws of Arithmetic).
His first writings after the Begriffsschrift were bitter attacks on Boolean methods (showing no awareness of the improvements by Peirce, Jevons, Schröder, and others) and a defense of his own system. His main complaint against Boole was the artificiality of mimicking notation better suited for numerical analysis rather than developing a notation for logical analysis alone. This work was followed by the Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884; The Foundations of Arithmetic) and then by a series of extremely important papers on precise mathematical and logical topics. After 1879 Frege carefully developed his position that all of mathematics could be derived from, or reduced to, basic “logical” laws—a position later to be known as logicism in the philosophy of mathematics. His view paralleled similar ideas about the reducibility of mathematics to set theory from roughly the same time—although Frege always stressed that his was an intensional logic of concepts, not of extensions and classes. His views are often marked by hostility to British extensional logic and to the general English-speaking tendencies toward nominalism and empiricism that he found in authors such as Mill. Frege’s work was much admired in the period 1900–10 by Russell, who promoted Frege’s logicist research program—first in the Introduction to Mathematical Logic (1903), and then with Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), in Principia Mathematica (1910–13)—but who used a Peirce-Schröder-Peano system of notation rather than Frege’s; Russell’s development of relations and functions was very similar to Schröder’s and Peirce’s. Nevertheless, Russell’s formulation of what is now called the “set-theoretic” paradoxes was taken by Frege himself, perhaps too readily, as a shattering blow to his goal of founding mathematics and science in an intensional, “conceptual” logic. Almost all progress in symbolic logic in the first half of the 20th century was accomplished using set theories and extensional logics and thus mainly relied upon work by Peirce, Schröder, Peano, and Georg Cantor (1845–1918). Frege’s care and rigour were, however, admired by many German logicians and mathematicians, including David Hilbert (1862–1943) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Although he did not formulate his theories in an axiomatic form, Frege’s derivations were so careful and painstaking that he is sometimes regarded as a founder of this axiomatic tradition in logic. Since the 1960s Frege’s works have been translated extensively into English and reprinted in German, and they have had an enormous impact on a new generation of mathematical and philosophical logicians.
Ernst Schröder
German symbolic logic (in a broad sense) was cultivated by two other major figures in the 19th century. The tradition of Hermann Grassmann was continued by the German mathematician and algebraist Ernst Schröder (1841–1902). His first work, Der Operations-kreis des Logikkalkuls (1877; “The Circle of Operations of the Logical Calculus”), was an equational algebraic logic influenced by Boole and Grassmann but presented in an especially clear, concise, and careful manner; it was, however, intensional in that letters stand for concepts, not classes or things. Although Jevons and Frege complained of what they saw as the “mysterious” relationship between numerical algebra and logic in Boole, Schröder announced with great clarity: “There is certainly a contrast of the objects of the two operations. They are totally different. In arithmetic, letters are numbers, but here, they are arbitrary concepts.” He also used the phrase “mathematical logic.” Schröder’s main work was his three-volume Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik (1890–1905; “Lectures on the Algebra of Logic”). This is an extensive and sometimes original presentation of all that was known about the algebra of logic circa 1890, together with derivations of thousands of theorems and an extensive bibliography of the history of logic. It is an extensional logic with a special sign for inclusion “
” (paralleling Peirce’s “⤙”; see ), an inclusive notion of class union, and the usual Boolean operations and rules.
The first volume is devoted to the basic theory of an extensional theory of classes (which Schröder called Gebiete, logical “domains,” a term that is somewhat suggestive of Grassmann’s “extensions”). Schröder was especially interested in formal features of the resulting calculus, such as the property he called “dualism” (carried over from his 1877 work): any theorem remains valid if the addition and multiplication, as well as 0 and 1, are switched—for example, A Ā = 0, A + Ā = 1, and the pair of De Morgan laws. The second volume is a discussion of propositional logic, with propositions taken to refer to domains of times in the manner of Boole’s Laws of Thought but using the same calculus. Schröder, unlike Boole and Peirce, distinguished between the universes for the separate cases of the class and propositional logics, using respectively 1 and {dotted 1}. The third volume contains Schröder’s masterful but leisurely development of the logic of relations, borrowing heavily from Peirce’s work. In the first decades of the 20th century, Schröder’s volumes were the only major works in German on symbolic logic other than Frege’s, and they had an enormous influence on important figures writing in German, including Hilbert and Tarski. (Frege’s influence was felt mainly through Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, but this tradition had a rather minor impact on 20th-century German logic.) Although it was an extensional logic more in the English tradition, Schröder’s logic exhibited the German tendency of focusing exclusively upon deductive logic; it was a legacy of the English textbook tradition always to cover inductive logic in addition, and this trait survived in (and often cluttered) the works of Boole, De Morgan, Venn, and Peirce.
Georg Cantor
A development in Germany originally completely distinct from logic but later to merge with it was Georg Cantor’s development of set theory. In work originating from discussions on the foundations of the infinitesimal and derivative calculus by Baron Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789–1857) and Karl Weierstrass (1815–97), Cantor and the German mathematician Richard Dedekind (1831–1916) developed methods of dealing with the large, and in fact infinite, sets of the integers and points on the real number line. Although the Booleans had used the notion of a class, they rarely developed tools for dealing with infinite classes, and no one systematically considered the possibility of classes whose elements were themselves classes, which is a crucial feature of Cantorian set theory. The conception of “real” or “closed” infinities of things, as opposed to infinite possibilities, was a medieval problem that had also troubled 19th-century German mathematicians, especially the great Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855). The Bohemian mathematician and priest Bernhard Bolzano (1781–1848) emphasized the difficulties posed by infinities in his Paradoxien des Unendlichen (1851; “Paradoxes of the Infinite”); in 1837 he had written an anti-Kantian and pro-Leibnizian nonsymbolic logic that was later widely studied. First Dedekind, then Cantor used Bolzano’s tool of measuring sets by one-to-one mappings; using this technique, Dedekind gave in Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen? (1888; “What Are and Should Be the Numbers?”) a precise definition of an infinite set. A set is infinite if and only if the whole set can be put into one-to-one correspondence with a proper part of the set. (De Morgan and Peirce had earlier given quite different but technically correct characterizations of infinite domains; these were not especially useful in set theory and went unnoticed in the German mathematical world.)
Although Cantor developed the basic outlines of a set theory, especially in his treatment of infinite sets and the real number line, he did not worry about rigorous foundations for such a theory—thus, for example, he did not give axioms of set theory—nor about the precise conditions governing the concept of a set and the formation of sets. Although there are some hints in Cantor’s writing of an awareness of problems in this area (such as hints of what later came to be known as the class/set distinction), these difficulties were forcefully posed by the paradoxes of Russell and the Italian mathematician Cesare Burali-Forti (1861–1931) and were first overcome in what has come to be known as Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (see set theory: The Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms).