Re: Laws of Form • Leon Conrad
- LC:
- As someone who has worked on, teaches, and uses the CoI [Calculus of Indications] to make classical syllogistic logic much easier to practice and more visually intuitive than any of the visualisations we have to date, I would be very interested in finding out more about your work in applying GSB’s work to logical tables, particularly if it does a similar thing.
Dear Leon,
Gauging the gap between entry-level formal systems like propositional calculi and calculi qualified to handle quantified predicates, functions, combinators, etc. is one of my oldest research pursuits and still very much a work in progress. When I point people to the live edges of my understanding, the places where I break off in my searches, I usually end up numbering those episodes of risk-taking under the heading of “Failures to Communicate” — but it doesn’t stop me from trying. So I’ll take a chance and post a few links along those lines in a little while but it may avert a measure of misunderstanding if I mention the main forces setting me on my present path.
I had already been studying Peirce’s Collected Papers from my first couple of years in college, especially fascinated by his approach to logic, his amphecks, his logical graphs, both entitative and existential, his overall visual and visionary way of doing mathematics. And then a friend pointed me to the entry for Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form in the first Whole Earth Catalog and I sent off for a copy right away. My computer courses and self-directed programming play rounded out the triple of primary impacts on the way I would understand and develop logical graphs from that point on.
To be continued …
cc: Category Theory • Cybernetics • Ontolog • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
cc: FB | Inquiry Driven Systems • Laws of Form • Peirce List (1) (2) (3)
