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发帖数: 31659 | 1 www.degruyter.com/view/journals/semi/68/1-2/article-p33.xml
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A few years ago I became interested in the question of who had been the
designer of a particular unsigned diagram for an electrical 'logical machine
'. The diagram had been found by Alonzo Church, about 1950, among the Allan
Marquand papers at the Firestone Library of Princeton University. Because
Marquand had studied logic at the Johns Hopkins University, I wondered if
his teacher there, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), had any connection
with this design. Pursuit of the matter soon began to produce a defensible
case that Peirce actually made the design at Marquand's request. Further
background, plus evidence and argumentation for that thesis, is given in
Ketner (1984a). In the course of my earlier study I encountered additional
material which showed that Peirce's interest in logical machines was not
limited to this single episode, but perhaps was intimately connected with
his careful lifelong study of the nature of mathematical reasoning. That in
turn is part of the basis for his study of semeiosis or sign action (Ketner
1984b). From a very young age, principally through his well-informed father,
Benjamin Peirce, with whom he was very close both personally and
intellectually, he had been aware of the study of machine reasoning in the
work of figures such as Babbage (see Hyman 1982) and Jevons (see Ketner
1984a). That some logical machines then existed, either as designs or as
working models, and that they apparently could perform some logical
operations 'at the turn of a crank', was, in the eyes of Charles (see Peirce
1877), a new step in the development of science; and he regarded each such
step as a lesson that should be learned well by the historically sensitive
logician, of which genus he was a fine specimen. The ruling passion in his
life was the study of logic, understood broadly as the science of the nature
of scientific method (Ketner 1983a), so it is not surprising that he
quickly sought to extract the lesson of this particular 'new step' involving
logical machines. |
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