The Logical Tracts by Charles S. Peirce Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen

Author:Charles S. Peirce, Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2021-05-10T17:31:00.963000+00:00

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Logical Tracts. No. 2. On Existential Graphs, Euler’s Diagrams, and Logical Algebra

[Copy-text is R 492, Houghton Library, including most variants and draft versions preserved in the folder.] Sometime around mid-1903, Peirce quite abruptly abandons his first attempt to write up The Logical Tracts and moves on to compose another, and much longer version, sequenced as Logical Tracts No. 2 (R 492), carrying the subtitle “On Existential Graphs, Euler’s Diagrams, and Logical Algebra”. Nearly 400 manuscript pages in length, this second attempt quickly grew into a book-length treatise on virtually everything that the theory of EGs had encompassed as the year was approaching its final quarter. Together, the two tracts make up a comprehensive manual on the philosophy, semiotics and logic, brought to maturation as a sound and complete graphical method of EGs. Indeed The Logical Tracts is the most extensive exposition of logical graphs that Peirce ever undertook to write. Even so, it was left incomplete, and the full treatise was planned to add several more chapters and sections. The ultimate version was projected to consist of as much as three large parts, only the first of them directly concerning EGs as appears in R 492. The second part was to add chapters on Euler Diagrams (see the next selection, R 479), while the third part was reserved for what may have remained as an altogether unwritten treatise on Logical Algebra. The part on Euler–Venn diagrams was separately produced sometime during 1903. As his Lowell Lectures were not meant to address algebra of logic, Peirce seemed to have lost the incentive to actually compose the planned last part. Moreover, an appendix was needed to accompany the first chapter in order to provide a “complete discussion” of the reasons for the introduction of an elaborate set of conventions, the system of norms and definitions upon which Peirce instituted the diagrammatic syntax and semantics of his graphical logic. These conventions are articulated at considerable length in the body of the second tract. His second Lowell Lecture pre-drafts will soon present such reasons as well (see e.g. R 454, R S-31), but no appendix survives among the Peirce Papers that would have been written for the purposes of The Logical Tracts in particular. A small notebook exists in folder R 1589, however, which possesses 52 definitions of technical terms on EGs. Proximal to the text of The Logical Tracts though probably composed slightly later, those definitions are interpolated into the present selection as the section beginning with an “outline of the imaginary Graphist’s procedure”, which in turn leads to the second chapter of The Logical Tracts. While most of the terms Peirce defines in R 1589 are his standard vocabulary, one also finds examples of some hapax legomena, suggesting that R 1589 may have been Peirce’s afterthought in the wake of the abandonment of the Tracts project, and preserved as an unfinished but fresh attempt from 1904 to patch some of the earlier omissions of that long text.

The reader will also take particular interest in one of the subsection of the second Tract, entitled “Note A.

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