Christine Ladd-Franklin on the nature and unity of the proposition

ABSTRACT

Although in recent years Christine Ladd-Franklin has received recognition for her contributions to logic and psychology, her role in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophy, as well as her relationship with American pragmatism, has yet to be fully appreciated. My goal here is to attempt to better understand Ladd-Franklin’s place in the pragmatist tradition by drawing attention to her work on the nature and unity of the proposition. The question concerning the unity of the proposition – namely, the problem of how to determine what differentiates a mere collection of terms from a unified and meaningful proposition – received substantial attention in Ladd-Franklin’s time, and would continue to interest analytic philosophers well into the twentieth century. I argue that Ladd-Franklin had a distinct theory of the proposition and solution to the problem of the unity of the proposition that she developed over the course of her writings on logic and philosophy. In spelling out her views, I will also show her work interacted with and influenced that of the pragmatist who was her greatest influence, C.S. Peirce.

KEYWORDS:

• Proposition
• Christine Ladd-Franklin
• pragmatism
• Peirce

Acknowledgements

This paper has been a lot of different things over the years, and has received a considerable amount of feedback as a result. Thanks to Cheryl Misak, Pierre-Luc Dostie Proulx, and Diana Heney for comments on various versions of the paper, as well as to audience members at the 2017 Eastern meeting of the APA, the 2019 Tilburg-Groningen Workshop on Women in the History of Analytic Philosophy, and the Toronto Pragmatism Reading Group. Thanks also to two referees and the editors of this special collection for their helpful feedback.

Notes

1 In what follows, I will follow the standard method of referring to works by Peirce, where EP followed by volume number refers to the Essential Peirce (1991), CP refers to the Collected Papers (1931–66), MS refers to the Manuscripts (1967), and W followed by volume number refers to the Writings (1982).

2 This solution can be found in several of her earlier works as well, for instance in (Ladd-Franklin, “On the Algebra of Logic”).

3 I do not have space here to do justice to Ladd-Franklin’s proof in its entirety. Fortunately there are several excellent reconstructions available: for example, Russinoff (“The Syllogism’s Final Solution”) provides a proof of Ladd-Franklin’s solution using modern development in logic, and Janssen-Lauret (“Grandmothers of Analytic Philosophy”) provides a thorough explanation of the proof with an emphasis on Ladd-Franklin’s innovations in developing logical operators.

4 Some of these entries were co-authored with Peirce, while others are listed as being co-authored with Baldwin or other editors, although it is unclear how much content the editors themselves contributed.

5 Pietarinen (“Christine Ladd-Franklin’s and Victoria Welby’s correspondence with Charles Peirce”) notes that there are 51 surviving letters between them in total. Transcriptions of the letters that appear in what follows are my own.

6 Ladd-Franklin will use the term ‘asservation’ fairly consistently throughout her letters and her published work; Peirce will switch between using the terms ‘asservation’, ‘asseveration’, and ‘assertion’, although he treats them as synonymous.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond: [grant number 8018-00053B].