Re: Sir Edward Wright is dead

From: Jim Spriggs (jim.sprigs_at_ANTISPAMbtinternet.com.invalid)
Date: 02/14/05 

Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 17:27:47 +0000 (UTC)

Robin Chapman wrote:
>
> Mitch Harris wrote:
>
> > Robin Chapman <rjc@ivorynospamtower.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> >>
> >> Did Ludo contribute anything of value to mathematics?
> >
> > Supposedly he was the originator of the truth table (in Tractatus
> > Logico-Philosophicus). (I believe that Post had published on truth
> > functions and truth tables previously but Wittgenstein is more commonly
> > mentioned as the originator).
>
> So you are saying that he is often wrongly attributed as orignator
> of the truth-table ?

Here's a quotation from section 4 chapter VI of William & Martha
Kneale's "The Development of Logic", OUP:

  ... a short step to Frege's use of truth-tables (i.e. tabulations
  of alternative truth-possibilities) in his _Begriffsschrift_ of
  1879 for the clear exhibition of Boolean developments. In a
  paper of 1885 the American logician C. S. Peirce added the
  remark that a necessarily true formula was one which remains
  true under all assignments of truth-values to its constituents:
  'To find whether a formula is necessarily true substitute f and
  v for the letters and see whether it can be supposed false by
  any such assignment of values.' And with these two notions
  we have all the essentials for the tabular method in primary
  logic which was popularized by Post and Wittgenstein in 1920.

E&O (by me) E.