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Alternative claims to the discovery of modern logic: coincidences and diversification

No discipline could lay stronger claim to clarity and unequivocality than logic. Curiously, though, the historical genesis of modern logic presents a picture riven with rival claims over the discipline’s founding contributions. As will be shown, protagonists from highly different backgrounds assert that the genesis of modern logic—indeed, its very discovery—rests on their contribution. Not only are these claims, to some extent, mutually exclusive, they also cut across standards of scientificity and rationality. By standard narratives of the history of modern logic, some claimants to paternity seem downright obscure and anti-rational. Yet, all these claims are made within a narrow time-frame, and they all refer back to the same developments in mathematics. This makes it impossible to easily dismiss the rival claims. This paper argues that the co-existence of alternative claims concerning the discovery of modern logic, in fact, places the historian in an advantageous situation. It might appear as if the alternative claims make the the genesis of modern logic into a story of a multiple discovery, the coincidence of simultaneous discoveries of the same phenomenon. This is, however, not what the historical picture shows. The competing claims, very explicitly placed by the protagonists themselves, rather have to be viewed as stages within an open-ended process that would contribute not to an integrated picture of logic, but generate diversified conceptions of rationality. It is