The Iconic Logic of Peirce's Graphs [Hardcover]

Sun-Joo Shin (Author)

Book Description

Series: Bradford Books | Publication Date: May 1, 2002

At the dawn of modern logic, Charles S. Peirce invented two types of logical systems, one symbolic and the other graphical. In this book Sun-Joo Shin explores the philosophical roots of the birth of Peirce's Existential Graphs in his theory of representation and logical notation. Shin demonstrates that Peirce is the first philosopher to lay a solid philosophical foundation for multimodal representation systems.Shin analyzes Peirce's well-known, but much-criticized nonsymbolic representation system. She presents a new approach to his graphical system based on her discovery of its unique nature and on a reconstruction of Peirce's theory of representation. By seeking to understand graphical systems on their own terms, she uncovers the reasons why graphical systems, and Existential Graphs in particular, have been underappreciated among logicians. Drawing on perspectives from the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, logic, and computer science, Shin provides evidence for a genuinely interdisciplinary project on multimodal reasoning.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This book reports extremely exciting new results which have major importance for the understanding of graphical logics and important implications outside logic for understanding cognition."--Keith Stenning, The Human Communication Research Centre, University of Edinburgh

"This book makes a significant contribution to the field. The concept that being formal does not necessarily entail being sentential is a refreshing change for modern logic."--Gerard Allwein, Department of Computer Science, Indiana University

About the Author

Sun-Joo Shin is Professor of Philosophy at Yale University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 220 pages
• Publisher: A Bradford Book (May 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262194708
• ISBN-13: 978-0262194709
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,166,591 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Fails to advance our understanding of Peirce's graphs, June 17, 2005

By 

galloamericanus "galloamericanus" (Podunk, Iowa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Iconic Logic of Peirce's Graphs (Hardcover)

From 1889 to 1909, C S Peirce devised three systems of graphical logic:
* alpha, isormophic to sentential logic. Alpha also suffices for syllogisms and elementary Boolean algebra.
* beta, isomorphic to first order logic.
* gamma, isomorphic to a peculiar modal logic easily transformable to S4 and S5.

The alpha graphs are well-understood, but have yet to attract the intellectual and pedagogic respect they deserve. Shin chose to exclude gamma from her book; fair call.

Shin claims her book is necessary in substantial part because the 1973 book by Don Roberts makes major errors in interpreting the beta graphs, and Jay Zeman's 1964 Ph.D. thesis makes lesser errors. She may be right, although Roberts (1973) is a good deal easier to read than Shin's book. But I have found a number of errors and misprints in Shin. Moreover, I largely agree with Dale Jacquette's highly critical review of Shin in the Transactions of the CS Peirce Society.

The main difficulty I have with this book is that it fails to clarify the beta graphs. No one will come away from her book thinking "this is neater than the refutation tree or natural deduction approach to the quantifiers." I know that the alpha graphs have been taught to middle school students in pilot programs, and suspect that they could be taught as part of 11th grade algebra. There is a possibility that a simplification of the beta graphs could be taught in high school as well, and to undergrads who are not logicians. But Shin's book does nothing to make Peirce's graphical logic more popular and more teachable.

Shin also uses the graphical logic to whip the standard approach to logic using algebraic notation. She ignores a very real problem with graphical logic, namely that it is wasteful of the printed page. I see Peirce's graphical logic not so much as something we should actually practice, but as a source of insights by which to improve standard logic.
For instance, the alpha graphs suggest that the natural deduction approach to truth functors can be considerably simplified. I think that the beta graphs could likewise inspire major simplifications of extant ways of handling quantified formulae. (On the other hand, it is possible that the beta graphs cannot improve on Quine's Main Method, which simply works UI and EI hard.) But I doubt that Shin's book will inspire anyone to find such simplifications.

Shin includes more than 50pp on Peirce's philosophy of logic, including his semeiotic approach. This is a fascinating subject, and Shin does a fair job of summarizing some well-understood parts of the Peirce scholarship. But she does not add all that much to our understanding of these topics.

Shin was a student of the late Jon Barwise and a product of Stanford's interdisciplinary group on visual systems. So her book chatters on about "multimodal," "iconic," etc. I agree that we need careful empirical and philosophical reasoning about visual representation of knowledge, data, and reasoning, if only to design more effective web sites, but prefer the approaches of Edward Tufte and John Sowa.