The Old New Logic: Essays on the Philosophy of Fred Sommers

255 Pages·2005·1.25 MB·English

by  David S. Oderberg

The Old New Logic

The Old New Logic
Essays on the Philosophy of Fred Sommers
edited by David S. Oderberg
with a foreword by P. F. Strawson
A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The old new logic : essays on the philosophy of Fred Sommers / edited by David S.
Oderberg; with a foreword by P. F. Strawson.
p. cm.
“A Bradford book.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-15113-8 (hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-262-65106-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Sommers, Frederic Tamler, 1923– . 2. Logic. I. Oderberg, David S.
B945.S7254O43 2005
160¢.92—dc22
2004055165
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
Foreword by P. F. Strawson xi
1 Intellectual Autobiography 1
Fred Sommers
2 Trees, Terms, and Truth: The Philosophy of Fred Sommers 25
George Englebretsen
3 Syntax and Ontology: Reflections on Three Logical Systems 49
E. J. Lowe
4 Exploring Boundary Conditions on the Structure of Knowledge:
Some Nonobvious Influences of Philosophy on Psychology 67
Frank C. Keil
5 General Terms, Anaphora, and Rigid Designation 85
Alan Berger
6 The Syntax and Semantics of English Prepositional Phrases 101
Patrick Suppes
7 Modeling Anaphora in TFL 111
William C. Purdy
8 An Elementary Term Logic for Physically Realizable Models of
Information 135
Steven Lindell
9 Sommers’s Cancellation Technique and the Method of
Resolution 169
Aris Noah
vi Contents
10 Predicate Logic and Bare Particulars 183
David S. Oderberg
11 Comments and Replies 211
Fred Sommers
Works by Fred Sommers 233
Contributors 237
Index 239
Preface and Acknowledgments
What makes a philosopher important? How can we know whether a
philosopher will have a reputation that places him firmly within the
lineage of figures who occupy a certain and inextinguishable place in the
history of ideas? It is a sad but commonplace observation among jurists
that by definition one does not become a recognized authority in legal
theory until one has “gone the way of all flesh.” For it is up to the histo-
rians of a discipline ultimately to determine which of its practitioners has
cemented his or her place as one of the beacons who light the way for
those to come. One thing of which we can be sure, however, is that there
are at present names on the lips of every philosopher that one day will
rarely be spoken, and yet others less often mentioned that will echo down
the generations.
Without prejudging the estimation of future historians, Fred Sommers is
one philosopher who has a strong claim to falling into the second cate-
gory. His work, so far spanning some fifty years, ranges primarily over logic,
philosophy of language and metaphysics, reaching even into philosophy
of mind and scientific methodology. From papers on category theory,
through logic, truth theory, realism, and related subjects, Sommers has
built up an impressive body of thought notable for its originality, rigor and
cohesiveness. Is originality what a philosopher should be striving for? In
the common acceptation of the term, certainly not. It is not the job of the
philosopher to dream up utterly new ideas and theories or to spin shiny
new systems out of virgin cloth. The best philosophy, of course, is always
marked by creativity and new thinking—it cannot and should not be a
sterile repetition of the past. Yet that new thinking must, if it is to have
any claim on our rational allegiance, build upon the wisdom and tradition
of the ages, on the finest fruit of mankind’s collective mental effort in
viii Preface and Acknowledgments
penetrating the deepest and most difficult problems of meaning and exis-
tence. The kind of originality that respects the best of the past is the orig-
inality which itself deserves the respect of present and future thinkers.
Fred Sommers is among a handful of the senior philosophers of the last
half-century to understand the intellectual, even moral, imperative of
building on the past rather than forsaking it for new fashions and radical
dead-ends. And it is in his virtually single-handed revival of the traditional
Aristotelian or syllogistic logic that this sensitivity to philosophical tradi-
tion is most manifest. The logic of Aristotle, despite revisions, corrections,
and additions, remained largely intact as the logical system taught and
researched by philosophers for more than two thousand years. Its over-
throw and replacement by the logic of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell
is the closest philosophy has ever come to a Copernican-style revolution
(paceKant). One cannot underestimate the sharpness of the break with the
past that the development of Fregean (or “modern predicate”) logic repre-
sented. If it is taught at all, Aristotelian syllogistic appears as no more
than a curious footnote, perhaps a short chapter, in contemporary logic
textbooks.
The opinion of most philosophers is that Aristotelian logic was good but
is now as good as dead. Most of them, one suspects, would sooner see a
revival of geocentrism than of syllogistic logic. Hence the vastness of the
task of rehabilitating it, let alone renewing and refashioning it into a
system with at least the elegance as well as the expressive and deductive
power of modern predicate logic. This Sommers has done, but he could
not have done it without building explicitly on the ideas not only of The
Philosopher himself but of the medieval scholastic logicians, Leibniz (who
himself worked hard and with ingenuity on refining and improving syllo-
gistic logic) and the nineteenth-century algebraic logicians such as George
Boole and Augustus De Morgan. His 1982 magnum opus The Logic of
NaturalLanguagesets out in detail the system TFL, which stands alternately
(and happily) for both term functor logic and traditional formal logic. It is a
dense and difficult work, and might seem quite baffling to readers not
familiar with Sommers’s previous writings or appreciative of the nature of
the task he set himself. And yet, like all great works, with careful and
patient study it yields up its secrets and rewards constant rereading. If
Sommers had not written anything else, his reputation would have been
assured in the eyes of all but those with an unchallengeable hostility to
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
the very idea of his task. Will traditional formal logic as conceived by
Sommers and developed by his followers, or syllogistic logic in general,
ever break out of its current position as an enclave within contemporary
logic and regain some of the ground lost in the previous century? Or is it
doomed to remain an intellectual curiosity defended by a small number
of largely traditionally minded thinkers? Again, this is for history to reflect
upon, not for the current generation to predict. That Sommers has done
the work of several philosophers in giving syllogistic logic its best chance
of recovery since the end of the nineteenth century is beyond doubt. One
cannot ask any more.
The present collection is a witness not only to the esteem in which the
work of Fred Sommers—in all the areas in which he has written—is held
by those who know it, but also to the influence of that work on the think-
ing of others. It is striking, however, in reflecting the extent of that
influence on disciplines outside philosophy. For The Old New Logic brings
together not just philosophers and logicians, but linguists, psychologists,
and computer scientists who have each in their own way felt the force of
Sommers’s ideas. It is my profound hope that this fascinatingly diverse
range of essays does its small part in bringing to the wider philosophical
and intellectual community the work of the man to whom it is, in admi-
ration, respectfully dedicated.
I would like to thank the graduate students to whom I have taught
Sommers’s logic in recent years, whose motivation and enthusiasm have
in turn aided my own attempts better to understand his work. I am grate-
ful also to George Englebretsen, whose unstinting support for this project
has helped make it possible. He has, more than anyone, assisted myself
and others in seeing the depth and importance of Fred Sommers’s thought;
may he continue to do so. I would like to record special thanks to every-
one at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State Uni-
versity, Ohio, where I was a Visiting Scholar during the summer of 2003,
for providing the immensely congenial conditions in which much of the
editorial work was undertaken. I would also like to thank Bill Purdy for his
generous technical help with last-minute preparation of the manuscript,
and Judy Feldmann of The MIT Press for her expert copyediting. Finally,
my gratitude goes to Tom Stone of The MIT Press for taking on this book
and for his advice and encouragement.