DAVID L. PEARCE TO BR, 24 APR. 1965
BRACERS 42867. ALS. McMaster
Edited by James Levine. Proofread by K. Blackwell

124 West 93 Street
New York 25, N.Y.
U. S. A.1
April 24, 1965

Lord Bertrand Russell
Plas Penrhyn
Penrhyndeudraeth
Merionethshire
Wales

Dear Lord Russell,

It has recently been my pleasure to read several of your letters which I have found among the papers of Christine Ladd-Franklin.2 The letters date from 1912 to 1916. They are very fine letters and deal with a variety of subjects ranging from comments on The Principles of Mathematics to your concern over the First World War. I was particularly impressed by your willingness to raise questions about your own philosophical views. Ladd-Franklin obviously respected your philosophical ability and there are literally thousands of pages of her comments on your logical and philosophical views.3

Evidently, I am the first person to examine her papers and find them, unfortunately, in a state of absolute confusion.4 Since there are so few people who knew her, I wonder if it would be possible to obtain some of your reflections about her? This may be presumptuous on my part but I need to draw on whatever sources may be available for aid in organizing my thoughts about her.

I would also like to presume on your time and ask if you had any acquaintance—either personal or through correspondence—with the American logician Charles S. Peirce. For some time now, I have been working on Peirce's categories and theory of signs. It is my opinion that most of the work on Peirce is either superficial or mistaken and I hope to publish something on the categories and signs in the near future.

In closing let me dispute a comment of yours to Ladd-Franklin. In one of your letters you stated that words do not have as much effect as bullets.5 Although I do not agree with much that you have said, I must insist that words spoken by men like yourself shall overcome.

Sincerely yours,
David L. Pearce

• 1

  [document] Proofread against the original letter.

• 2

  papers of Christine Ladd-Franklin. Pearce has evidently been to the collection of Christine Ladd-Franklin papers at Columbia University, which contains the letters from Russell (see https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/archives/cul-4078783).

• 3

  philosophical views Ivor Grattan-Guinness (The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870–1940 [Princeton: University Press, 2000], p. 428) comments on the “mass of notes” on Russell’s logic in Ladd-Franklin’s papers at Columbia. Similarly Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen (“Christine Ladd-Franklin’s and Victoria Welby’s Correspondence with Charles Pierce”, Semiotica, 196 [2013]: 150 n.24) writes that “Ladd-Franklin drafted numerous notes, mostly undated” in which she “criticize[s] both [Peano’s] Formulario project and its influence on Russell”.

  Pietarinen further writes on the Ladd-Franklin/Norbert Wiener correspondence: “She wrote to Norbert Wiener in order to find out whether the origins of his 1913 dissertation on relational algebra were in Peirce’s or Russell’s work. Wiener … replied that he had learned the subject entirely from “Schröder's version of Pierce’s [sic] work” (NW to CLF, 16 Jan. 1916). Ladd-Franklin pressed Wiener to admit that Schröder and Peirce’s contributions were superior to Russell’s, to which Wiener laconically replied that “much of Schroeder’s work anticipates results which Russell reached independently under a totally different symbolism. These results, however, do not cover those points which are most interesting in the Principia, which originate rather from Frege” (NW to CLF, 9 Sept. 1918).

• 4

  confusion Grattan-Guinness writes of the Ladd-Franklin papers that it “forms a large and splendid source, but it needs much sorting” (op. cit., p. 154).

• 5

  bullets Pearce is here referring to Russell’s 1915 letter (BRACERS 132294) to Ladd-Franklin in which he writes: “Thank you for your kindness about my remarks on the war. I am utterly ashamed of their feebleness and futility. One ought to be able to speak words that would be more powerful than battleships and have more effect than masses of great guns.” (See Adam Trybus, “Two of a Kind: Setting the Record Straight on Russell’s Exchange with Ladd-Franklin on Solipsism”, Russell, 39 [2019]: 101–20 [at 119].)