Re: Peirce List Discussion • JW

It’s almost 50 years now since I first encountered the volumes of Peirce’s Collected Papers in the math library at Michigan State, and shortly afterwards a friend called my attention to the entry for Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form in the Whole Earth Catalog and I sent off for it right away.  I would spend the next decade just beginning to figure out what either one of them was talking about in the matter of logical graphs and I would spend another decade after that developing a program, first in Lisp and then in Pascal, that turned graph-theoretic data structures formed on their ideas to good purpose as the basis of its reasoning engine.  I thought it might contribute to a number of long-running and ongoing discussions if I could articulate what I think I learned from that experience.

So I’ll try to keep focused on that.