The following two emails are, I think, of interest because they address, in very personal terms, what Sowa has to share with us re "brilliant but one-sided" people. I do think it's amazing how Harvard and the Boston community managed to bury C.S. Pierce's work so completely. -Fred Chase Date: Fri, 02 May 2003 18:46:46 -0400 From: "John F. Sowa" To: wtepfenhart@monmouth.com Bill, I worked at IBM for 30 years, and I am painfully aware of that problem: > Although I am being sarcastic, my statements > above reflect real attitudes of many computer > professionals. You might ask why would a computer > professional take such an attitude. And I know perfectly well why they take that attitude: they're ignorant. But it's not their fault because the people they hoped would enlighten them were just as ignorant. And you can trace the chain of ignorance back to the person who has done more to contribute to the downfall of logic in the 20th century than anyone else: Bertrand Russell. Bertie was certainly brilliant, but he was very one-sided, and his brilliance gave other people the illusion that he knew what he was talking about. That is why anything he ignored or derided was ignored and derided by a much larger group. Other people who were also brilliant, but one-sided must share some of the blame. Among them, I include Ernst Mach, Gottlob Frege, Rudolf Carnap, and Willard Van Orman Quine. In his youth, Wittgenstein was lured by Russell into the same trap, but he learned his lesson and spent the remainder of his life doing penance for his earlier sins. But by the middle of the 20th century, philosophy was divided into two warring camps: one that promulgated a very one-sided view of logic, and another that denounced logic or ignored it altogether. When computers came around, the people who used them were divided in two camps -- the primitives and the space cadets. The primitives used "seat-of-the-pants" coding to get results, and the space cadets were misled by the Russell-Carnap-Quine crowd to use the most esoteric imaginable theories and ignore anything practical. ..................... ....... The strategy that I have adopted is twofold: 1. For those people who know enough to realize that there's an awful lot they don't know, I'm recommending some suggested readings. 2. For the great majority who consider money to be the only measure of success, I am hoping that the VivoMind company will produce logic-based software that will be sufficiently successful to demonstrate that logic does have value. I don't know whether this strategy will work, but I'll try. Who knows? John We'll probably be hearing more about VivoMind: http://www.genumerix.com/rfi/AboutVivoMind.htm The second, follow-up message: Date: Fri, 02 May 2003 23:20:36 -0400 From: "John F. Sowa" To: cg@cs.uah.edu, standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org Bill Tepfenhart and I received an offline note from somebody who felt that we were being too harsh in our criticisms of the field of computer science. I replied that we were so critical because we knew it so well that the lapses were painful to us. But I also responded that I had personal reasons for being so harsh on some of the logicians themselves. And I want to emphasize that I am not criticizing people who haven't studied logic. It's not their fault. It's the fault of the people who should have been their teachers. Following is the explanation of my personal discovery, which makes me so angry at some of the people who should have taught me. John Sowa ___________________________________________ ... I was directing my harshest criticism at Bertrand Russell, who was one of the smartest guys in the world and who was one of the leaders in the field of logic. And one of the other targets of my criticism, Quine, was another of the most brilliant philosophers of the 20th century. But he was so brilliant that he dominated the field of logic at Harvard for about 40 years, during which the philosophy department at Harvard was sitting on Peirce's collected manuscripts -- and doing absolutely nothing with them. In 1968, I was a graduate student at Harvard in comp. sci., and I took some courses in logic in the philosophy department. But during that time, I never heard anyone at Harvard mention a single word about Peirce. In fact, I was talking with another grad student in philosophy, who was doing a dissertation on Frege with Quine as his thesis adviser. But nobody, absolutely nobody was doing a dissertation on Peirce, even though they had all the resources there. I didn't learn about Peirce's existential graphs until 1978 -- ten years later. And I learned about them by reading an article in the mathematical games section of the Scientific American by Martin Gardner. That article happened to mention the book on Peirce's EGs by Don Roberts. I asked the IBM librarian to order it, and it was a revelation. But I never heard about it at all when I was at Harvard -- and that should have been the fountainhead of knowledge about the subject. Even worse, when I was at Harvard, I bought the _Sourcebook on Mathematical Logic_, which reprinted key articles in the history of logic from Frege to Goedel. But there was not a single article in it by Peirce. The book was published by Harvard University Press, and the author, who was from the Netherlands, thanked Quine for helping him select the key articles to include. The fact that you had never studied much about logic is excusable. But what is inexcusable is that somebody like me, who had been studying logic since 1958 (when I was a freshman at MIT) and who had taken some courses in logic at Harvard, had never heard about Peirce's contributions to logic and his existential graphs until 1978, when I read Martin Gardner's article. That is what I meant about the gulf of ignorance that was being spread by people who should have been the source of enlightenment. John PS