Carroll’s ‘Symbolic Logic’ (1896): ‘b = Jews’.
It’s well known that Lewis Carroll, in addition to being the author of the peerless Alice books and Hunting of the Snark, was an academic mathematician with a special interest in logic. Here’s what the Encyclopedia Britannica says (in its entry on ‘Logic’):
The contributions of Lewis Carroll (Charles L. Dodgson, 1832–1898) to logic consist of several pieces published between 1887 and 1899. The Game of Logic (London, 1887) is a book written for young people to teach them to reason logically by solving syllogisms using diagrams and colored counters. His diagrammatic method is a visual logic system that we know now to be sound and complete. In Symbolic Logic, Part I (London, 1896) Carroll developed two formal methods to solve syllogisms and sorites …Carroll used his method to reduce the nineteen or more valid forms of inference codified by medieval Aristotelian logicians first to fifteen forms and then to just three formulas. Carroll published two pieces in the journal Mind. The first, “A Logical Paradox” (N. S. vol. 3, 1894, 436–438) is an example of hypothetical propositions. The second piece in Mind, “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles” (N. S. vol. 4, 1895, 278–280) is a humorous example of an important problem about logical inference that Carroll was perhaps the first to recognize: the rule allowing a conclusion to be drawn from a set of premises cannot itself be treated as an additional premise without generating an infinite regress. We see in Bartley’s 1986 publication of Carroll’s lost book, Symbolic Logic, Part II, that Carroll introduced two additional methods of formal logic. The first, the method of barred premises, a direct approach to the solution of problems involving multiliteral statements is an extension of his Method of Underscoring. The second and most important, the Method of Trees, a mechanical test of validity using a reductio ad absurdum argument, is the earliest modern use of a truth tree to reason in the logic of classes.
I am no logician, but it seems that Carroll’s ‘Method of Trees’ (posthumously published in 1986) was an important anticipation of later developments in the history of the discipline.
Carrollian though I be, I had never got around to reading either Symbolic Logic, Part I or the posthumously published Symbolic Logic, Part II. And now that I’ve dipped into the former volume, I’m not going to suggest anything with respect to the specifically logical content of these volumes. My eye was struck, rather, by a different aspect of the text. This one:
No Jews are …. hang on a minute. What?
But, look: one particular instance of anti-Semitic generalisation surely doesn’t mean that Carroll himself hated Jews. Surely this is just one example of the ways that the background radiation of 19th-century British anti-Semitism fed-through into particular texts. It’s not as if Carroll goes on and on about Jews in his dry little book about inductive logic. Is it?
Shpoonj. Hmm.
Uh, what?
I mean, some Jews are rich. Not my Jewish wife, or our Jewish children, I have to say. Alas. But OK.
I’m going to level with you: my experience is that ‘some men are not-Jews’ has very been much a feature of my Gentile life, married as I am to a Jew. Ah well. I’m going to leave this whole thorny topic alone for a bit, and go off to polish our household shpoonj.
