Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T00:34:59.054Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Syntactical Analysis of the Class Calculus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Gustav Bergmann*
Affiliation:
State University of Iowa

Extract

In a paper read before the last Congress for the Unity of Science, Dr. Milton Singer distinguishes three main phases in the recent history of logic. The achievement he considers most characteristic of the first period is the development of the class calculus or so-called Boolean algebra. It begins with the work of Boole and DeMorgan and culminates in Schroeder's Algebra of Logic. In a minimum formulation, the results of this first stage can be summed up as, first, simplification and generalization of the traditional syllogistic machinery by means of a rather efficient new symbolism, and, second, adoption of the axiomatic method. To restate the last point: Boolean algebra was, since Leibniz, the first explicit attempt to construct what we call a formal system or calculus. Not realized at that time, however, or at least not adequately expressed, was the importance of the more recent distinction between scientific calculi on the one hand and purely linguistic or logical calculi on the other. As a consequence of this lack of explicit insight, the class calculus appeared to be on a par with scientific calculi, say, for instance, axiomatized geometry, Euclidean or otherwise. Its analytical character, even if it was seen, could not be formulated.

Type
Technical Scientific Section
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1942

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 After this note was in the hands of the editor, I came across two recent publications in which the point here raised is touched upon. See the formulation of the relation between the two calculi by A. Church in The Dictionary of Philosophy (ed. Runes), New York, 1942, p. 179, 2nd column; and the discussion of ‘O’ and ‘I’ in Whitehead's Universal Algebra by W. V. Quine in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (ed. Schilpp), Northwestern University, 1941.

2 See also Milton Singer “On Formal Method in Mathematical Logic.” Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Univ. of Chicago, 1940.