Background
Ladd-Franklin, Christine was born in 1847 in New York, United States.
logician mathematician psychologist
Ladd-Franklin, Christine was born in 1847 in New York, United States.
Vassar College (1866-1869) and Johns Hopkins University (1878). lnfls:C. S. Peirce and Boolean logic.
1870-1879, taught science in secondary schools. 1879-1882, Fellowship. Johns Hopkins University.
1891-1892, worked in laboratories at Gottingen and Berlin. 1901-1905, Assistant Editor of James Mark Baldwin’s Dictionary Philosophy and Psychology.
Christine Ladd-Franklin vigorously pursued the life of a professional philosopher at a time when such achievements by women received scant professional recognition. By 1882, having managed to gain admittance as a graduate student to the all-male Johns Hopkins University, s*1® had fulfilled all the requirements for the award o a PhD, but the degree was not conferred until years later, in 1926, when she was 78. Ladd-Franklin worked in two main philos0 phical fields: symbolic logic and colour vision theory. By refining the well-known test ° syllogistic validity that uses symbols to produce an antilogism, she deve °Ped a procedure that provided an extremely efficient principle of recognition for valid forms of syllogism and that revealed the invalidity of four forms of the syllogism that had been considered valid by scholastic logicians, though not by mathematical logicians. This achievement was described by Josiah Royce as ‘the crowning activity in a field worked over since the days of Aristotle’. In her later work in logic, and to its detriment, she ignored the innovatory ideas of Frege, Peano and Russell. It has been remarked that ‘her desire to keep things simple made her reject some of the most fruitful developments in mathematical logic’. In her work on colour vision Ladd-Franklin’s logical acumen uncovered inconsistencies in the theories of others. Her own theory sought to embody the best ideas of her predecessors and gave prominence to her views on the evolutionary development of colour vision. Ladd-Franklin lived a full social and cultural me and was continually active in helping other Women to obtain graduate education. The bibliography of her articles and reviews on logic and eolour vision alone contains over 100 entries. Sources: Kersey; Biographical Cyclopaedia of Amer- 'can Women, vol. 3, New York: Halvord Publishing Co> >828. pp. 135-41.