FOM: Adverse comment on the Archie project

[Roger Bishop Jones]

I have two critical remarks to make in relation to the Archie project
recently mentioned on fom.

Firstly, in its statement of "the research problem"
http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~arche/ahrbresearch.shtml
the Archie website grossly distorts the history of its subject by suggesting
that logicism received absolutely no further support from philosophers after
its abandonment by Frege.

In fact, the word logicism does not seem to have been applied to the
philosophy of mathematics until decades later (1931)
(see "On the origins of the word Logicism":
http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/philos/glossary/logicism.htm )
and arguably its most robust statement is to be found in A.J.Ayer's
"Language Truth and Logic" first published in 1936.

Secondly I observe that it seems to me a sad comment on contemporary
Philosophy of Mathematics that philosophers should consider that the status
of the axiom of infinity is materially changed when it is disguised as
"Hume's Principle".
I doubt very much that Frege would have taken refuge in such equivocation.

On the basis of the establishment of this project I forecast that it will
take about a decade and $3M of research funding for philosophers eventually
to make the astounding discovery that the logicists were right all along.

Roger Jones