[FOM] Wittgenstein?

[sean.stidd@juno.com]

It is a common myth that Wittgenstein invented the truth-tables, but this is not so: one can find them in Frege. Wittgenstein himself specifically disavows any claim to having invented them in the Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cora Diamond, ed. (at work now so don't have the page number handy).

That said I do not dispute at all the claim that W's contributions to the philosophy of logic were (and IMO remain) very important. He just didn't invent the truth tables. What was original to W was his use of the truth tables to elucidate a combinatoric conception of the propositional connectives.