First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

ABSTRACT Although in recent years Christine Ladd-Franklin has received recognition for her contributions to logic and psychology, her role in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophy, as well as her relationship with American pragmatism, has yet to be fully appreciated. My goal here is to attempt to better understand Ladd-Franklin’s place in the pragmatist tradition by drawing attention to her work on the nature and unity of the proposition. The question concerning the unity of the proposition (...) – namely, the problem of how to determine what differentiates a mere collection of terms from a unified and meaningful proposition – received substantial attention in Ladd-Franklin’s time, and would continue to interest analytic philosophers well into the twentieth century. I argue that Ladd-Franklin had a distinct theory of the proposition and solution to the problem of the unity of the proposition that she developed over the course of her writings on logic and philosophy. In spelling out her views, I will also show her work interacted with and influenced that of the pragmatist who was her greatest influence, C.S. Peirce. (shrink)

Christine Ladd-Franklin is often hailed as a guiding star in the history of women in logic—not only did she study under C. S. Peirce and was one of the first women to receive a PhD from Johns Hopkins, she also, according to many modern commentators, solved a logical problem which had plagued the field of syllogisms since Aristotle. In this paper, we revisit this claim, posing and answering two distinct questions: Which logical problem did Ladd-Franklin solve (...) in her thesis, and which problem did she think she solved? We show that in neither case is the answer “a long-standing problem due to Aristotle.” Instead, what Ladd-Franklin solved was a problem due to Jevons that was first articulated in the nineteenth century. (shrink)