Re: Laws of Form • Dirk Baecker

DB:

I guess you know Fernando Zalamea’s work on Peirce.  He thinks that all of GSB’s important ideas are already in Peirce’s Existential Graphs.

I think he may be right, but then there is the issue of elegance, beauty, and clarity, and here, GSB leads the field.

Dear Dirk,

As you may have gleaned from the bio-graphical narrative I’ve been salvaging from the old LoF group, I started down the intertwining Logical Graph / Laws of Form road sometime in the late 60s, all of which took me pretty far along my own eigenvectors before I hit on the work of Zalamea and others of that persuasion in the present millennium.

In most of the things I’ve written in the past about the relative contributions of Peirce and those who came after, Spencer Brown in particular, I tended to give Peirce a lot of credit for anticipating the developments others clarified or brought to fruition.  More lately I’ve observed just how bewildered the untutored reader can become when faced with Peirce’s writings on logical graphs and logic generally, so I’ve been rethinking my apportionment of credit.  At any rate, I commented on what I thought was added by whom all through my bio essay and I will continue doing that as I go.

Regards,

Jon

cc: Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Ontolog • Peirce • Structural Modeling • Systems Science