Monday, May 10, 2021

Historical note on quantifiers

I have read in a few places that C.S. Peirce was the first to introduce quantifiers into logic.

Hence, I draw attention to the words of Augustus de Morgan in an appendix to his Formal Logic, or, The Calculus of Inference, necessary and probable published in 1847, before Peirce's time.
In 1842, there was published anonymously 'Outline of the Laws of Thought'; London and Oxford (Pickering, and Graham) octavo in twos (small). The author is the Rev. Wm. Thomson, tutor of Queen's College, Oxford. It is a very acute work, and learned. The system of propositions is extended by the introduction of both the common quantifications of the predicate into the affirmatives only, which introduces the propositions U and Y, as the author calls them, or "all Xs are all Ys" or "some Xs are all Ys."

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