•  167
    Diagrams
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
  •  109
    Kant's syntheticity revisited by Peirce
    Synthese 113 (1): 1-41. 1997.
    This paper reconstructs the Peircean interpretation of Kant's doctrine on the syntheticity of mathematics. Peirce correctly locates Kant's distinction in two different sources: Kant's lack of access to polyadic logic and, more interestingly, Kant's insight into the role of ingenious experiments required in theorem-proving. In this second respect, Kant's analytic/synthetic distinction is identical with the distinction Peirce discovered among types of mathematical reasoning. I contrast this Peirce…Read more
  •  106
    Parallelism has been drawn between modes of representation and problem-sloving processes: Diagrams are more useful for brainstorming while symbolic representation is more welcomed in a formal proof. The paper gets to the root of this clear-cut dualistic picture and argues that the strength of diagrammatic reasoning in the brainstorming process does not have to be abandoned at the stage of proof, but instead should be appreciated and could be preserved in mathematical proofs
  •  94
    Peirce and the logical status of diagrams
    History and Philosophy of Logic 15 (1): 45-68. 1994.
    In this paper, I aim to identify Peirce?s great contribution to logical diagrams and its limit.Peirce is the first person who believed that the same logical status can be given to diagrams as to symbolic systems.Even though this belief led him to invent his own graphical system, Existential Graphs, the success or failure of this system does not determine the value of Peirce?s general insights about logical diagrams.In order to make this point clear, I will show that Peirce?s revolutionary ideas …Read more
  •  83
    Euler’s visual logic
    with Eric Hammer
    History and Philosophy of Logic 19 (1): 1-29. 1998.
    The evolution of Euler diagrams is examined from Euler's original system through the modifications made by Venn and Peirce. It is shown that these modifications were motivated by an attempt to increase the expressivity of the diagrams, but that a side effect of these modifications was a loss of the visual clarity of Euler's original system. Euler's original system is reconstructed from a modern, logical point of view. Formal semantics and rules of inference are provided for this reconstruction o…Read more
  •  79
    Peirce's logic
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. forthcoming.
  •  79
    A case study of multimodal systems and a new interpretation of Charles S. Peirce's theory of reasoning and signs based on an analysis of his system of ...
  •  74
    Heterogeneous reasoning and its logic
    Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 10 (1): 86-106. 2004.
    Let me start by saying that I had the privilege of witnessing the birth of Jon Barwise's new research on heterogeneous logic and its subsequent developments. I entered the Stanford philosophy graduate program in the Fall of 1987, became Barwise and Etchemendy's first research assistant on the project of diagrammatic/heterogeneous reasoning during summer of 1989, and under their guidance completed my thesis, “Valid reasoning and visual representation,” in August, 1991. With this experience I woul…Read more
  •  68
    The Mystery of Deduction and Diagrammatic Aspects of Representation
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (1): 49-67. 2015.
    Deduction is decisive but nonetheless mysterious, as I argue in the introduction. I identify the mystery of deduction as surprise-effect and demonstration-difficulty. The first section delves into how the mystery of deduction is connected with the representation of information and lays the groundwork for our further discussions of various kinds of representation. The second and third sections, respectively, present a case study for the comparison between symbolic and diagrammatic representation …Read more
  •  64
    Review of Sun-Joo Shin: The Logical Status of Diagrams (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (2): 290-291. 1997.
  •  36
    Reconstituting beta graphs into an efficacious system
    Journal of Logic, Language and Information 8 (3): 273-295. 1999.
    Logicians have strongly preferred first-order natural deductive systems over Peirce's Beta Graphs even though both are equivalent to each other. One of the main reasons for this preference, I claim, is that inference rules for Beta Graphs are hard to understand, and, therefore, hard to apply for deductions. This paper reformulates the Beta rules to show more fine-grained symmetries built around visual features of the Beta system, which makes the rules more natural and easier to use and understan…Read more
  •  28
    Peirce's alpha graphs and propositional languages
    Semiotica 2011 (186): 333-346. 2011.
    Many do not doubt that Peirce's Existential Graphs are diagrammatic, as opposed to symbolic. However, when we are pressured to draw a distinction between the two different forms of representation, we find ourselves at a loss and our intuition quite vague. In this paper, I locate fundamental differences between two logically equivalent systems, Peirce's Alpha system and propositional languages. Suppose we have only two sentential connectives, ¬ and ^. In spite of its truth-functional completeness…Read more
  •  24
    Visual Reasoning with Diagrams (edited book)
    Birkhaüser. 2013.
    Logic, the discipline that explores valid reasoning, does not need to be limited to a specific form of representation but should include any form as long as it allows us to draw sound conclusions from given information. The use of diagrams has a long but unequal history in logic: The golden age of diagrammatic logic of the 19th century thanks to Euler and Venn diagrams was followed by the early 20th century's symbolization of modern logic by Frege and Russell. Recently, we have been witnessing a…Read more
  •  4
    Valid Reasoning and Visual Representation
    Dissertation, Stanford University. 1991.
    This thesis challenges a general prejudice against visualization in the history of logic and mathematics, by providing a semantic analysis of two graphical representation systems--a traditional Venn diagram representation system and an extension of it. While Venn diagrams have been used to solve problems in set theory and to test the validity of syllogisms in logic, they have not been considered valid proofs but heuristic tools for finding valid formal proofs. ;I present Venn diagrams which have…Read more
  • The Iconic Logic of Peirce's Graphs
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 39 (1): 127-133. 2003.