An Investigation Of The Laws Of Thought On Which Are Founded The Mathematical Theories Of Logic And Probabilities

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1854 Edition.

An investigation of the laws of thought on which are founded the mathematical theories of logic and probabilities - an unabridged edition."A classic of pure mathematics and symbolic logic ... the publisher is to be thanked for making it available." -- Scientific American George Boole was on of the greatest mathematicians of the 19th century, and one of the most influential thinkers of all time. Not only did he make important contributions to differential equations and calculus of finite differences, he also was the discoverer of invariants, and the founder of modern symbolic logic. According to Bertrand Russell, "Pure mathematics was discovered by George Boole in his work published in 1854."This work is the first extensive statement of the modern view that mathematics is a pure deductive science that can be applied to various situations. Boole first showed how classical logic could be treated with algebraic terminology and operations, and then proceeded to a general symbolic method of logical interference; he also attempted to devise a calculus of probabilities which could be applied to situations hitherto considered beyond investigation.The following work is not a republication of a former treatise by the Author, entitled, \The Mathematical Analysis of Logic." Its earlier portion is indeed devoted to the same object, and it begins by establishing the same system of fundamental laws, but its methods are more general, and its range of applications far wider. It exhibits the results, matured by some years of study and reflection, of a principle of investigation relating to the intellectual operations, the previous exposition of which was written within a few weeks after its idea had been conceived.

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The Laws of Thought, more precisely, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities, was an influential 19th century book by George Boole, the second of his two monographs on algebraic logic. It was published in 1854. Boole was Professor of Mathematics of then Queen's College, Cork in Ireland. Boole's work founded the discipline of algebraic logic. It is often, but mistakenly, credited as being the source of what we know today as Boolean algebra. In fact, however, Boole's algebra differs from modern Boolean algebra: in Boole's algebra A+B cannot be interpreted by set union, due to the permissibility of uninterpretable terms in Boole's calculus. Therefore algebras on Boole's account cannot be interpreted by sets under the operations of union, intersection and complement, as is the case with modern Boolean algebra. The task of developing the modern account of Boolean algebra fell to Boole's successors in the tradition of algebraic logic (Jevons 1869, Peirce 1880, Jevons 1890, Schröder 1890, Huntingdon 1904). In Boole's account of his algebra, terms are reasoned about equationally, without a systematic interpretation being assigned to them. In places, Boole talks of terms being interpreted by sets, but he also recognises terms that cannot always be so interpreted, such as the term 2AB, which arises in equational manipulations. Such terms he classes uninterpretable terms; although elsewhere he has some instances of such terms being interpreted by integers. The coherences of the whole enterprise is justified by Boole in what Stanley Burris has later called the "rule of 0s and 1s", which justifies the claim that uninterpretable terms cannot be the ultimate result of equational manipulations from meaningful starting formulae (Burris 2000). Boole provided no proof of this rule, but the coherence of his system was proved by Theodore Hailperin, who provided an interpretation based on a fairly simple construction of rings from the integers to provide an interpretation of Boole's theory (Hailperin 1976).

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