Talk:Laws of Form

Request

Can someone please take the italicized abbreviation "pa" used in the main article and expand it into either italicized "primary algebra" or "primary arithmetic" ("pa" is also informally "father") as appropriate? I feel unqualified to do this expansion myself at the present. This abbreviation seems to me to make this wonderful article much less fluent by means of the resulting unfortunate triple collision. Thanks, 97.76.197.20 (talk) 15:36, 28 August 2009 (UTC).

I've expanded every occurrence (many) of the abbreviation "pa" to "primary algebra", and (3) of the abbreviation "PA" to "primary arithmetic". Does this improve the article? I hope so. yoyo (talk) 16:26, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

I note that the use of the abbreviation "pa" is still inconsistent: In the introductory paragraph it is defined as an abbreviation for 'primary algebra', while in section 4 it appears as a reference to primary arithmetic. George963 au (talk) 04:31, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

True, but only once, and in caps: "PA". Easily fixed - I'll remove it. yoyo (talk) 15:46, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

Done. yoyo (talk) 15:51, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

Rewrite proposal

I've decided to take on the long needed editing of this article. As the article stands, it is a summary of original research, and addresses an opinion of Spencer Brown's work, rather than describing Spencer Brown's work directly. Here are some suggested guidelines:

 -- description of LoF should be in the terminology of the book itself.
 -- comments and description of the mathematics should include direct quotes from the book.
 -- mathematical interpretations should be separated from the math described in the book.

One reason to edit is that the current article is permeated with interpretative errors. This should of course be expected when a mathematical system introduces new styles of thinking. The article should address these new styles without editorializing or interpreting. Importantly, the innovative characteristics of a new mathematics should not be obscured by overwriting the new ideas with old ideas.

Prior to introducing these edits, I thought I provide for discussion some examples of what I have in mind. All of these snippets from the article are unsupported in the text. Many are in direct contradiction of Spencer Brown's words.

 -- "...the dualistic Mark...":  
 -- "There are two inductive rules..."
 -- "Any two expressions can be concatenated."
 -- "These excerpts relate to the distinction in metalogic..."
 -- "A pa variable indicates a location where one can write the primitive value..."
 -- "If one replaces '=' in R1 and R2 with the biconditional..."
 -- "J2 is the familiar distributive law of sentential logic..."
 -- "another set of initials, friendlier to calculations..."
 -- "It is thanks to C2 that the pa is a lattice."
 -- "any pa (or sentential logic) formula B can be viewed as an ordered tree..."
 -- "LoF asserts that concatenation can be read as commuting and associating by default..."

The essential issue is that these snippets (and many others) are interpretations, and within the context of LoF, inaccurate interpretations. Since my edits must be extensive, it may be appropriate to construct a new page, in order to separate description of the actual text from the current collection of opinion. Thoughts? --William.bricken (talk) 01:50, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Since Boolean algebra and related technical subjects are already treated elsewhere on Wikipedia, this article would most appropriately be about Spencer Brown's book itself rather than an exposition of the subject Brown appeared to be aiming to create. Currently this article stands at 54 kilobytes. The first order of business in rewriting it to Wikipedia standards would be to decide how long the article should be. The length should be commensurate with its influence; for example the article on James Joyce's Ulysses (novel) is 46 kilobytes, while that on Charles Dickens' "Tale of Two Cities" is 52 kilobytes. What would Laws of Form warrant? Google returns 4.3 million results for "Tale of Two Cities" and 50,000 results for "Laws of form", so if one were to prorate it on that basis the article would warrant less than a kilobyte. An argument for four kilobytes could be based on the statistics that Google returns 800,000 results for "Boolean algebra" which Wikipedia devotes 61 kilobytes to. --Vaughan Pratt (talk) 06:12, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Good luck convincing the WP:FRINGE editors of that. I already hear WP:NOTPAPER etc. Tijfo098 (talk) 07:33, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

That may not be a problem if there's a consensus that this article should be about the book and not an article on its subject matter. The latter is covered more clearly and succinctly elsewhere. Are there any editors still proposing to hold forth at length on the latter from Brown's idiosyncratic point of view at this point? --Vaughan Pratt (talk) 09:18, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

If doing any rewrite, then in so doing, we should at bare minimum restore one of the more important features in Spencer-Brown omitted from the article: the labelled bi-directional arrows used for equations. Spencer-Brown's formalism is an example of a categorical logic, and the arrow rules are actually the basic morphisms. Technically, the Spencer-Brown formalism is a monoidal category whose terminal object is the empty picture and whose product is 2D-concatenation of pictures. The two-dimensionality of concatenation is just a way of expressing commutativity, which means that this is actually a braided monoidal category. The enclosure operator is an anti-functor on this category, and the bi-directionality of the arrows means the morphisms all have inverses - which makes the category a groupoid. The use of groupoids for formulating an equational algebra for logic (and type theory) is an integral part of what's today known as Homological Type Theory (HoTT) and was a tacit feature, also, of the type theory underlying deBruijn's Automath, Martin-Löf's type theory, and which was made more explicit in the Calculus of Constructions, all of which are predecessors of HoTT and all of which fall into the Curry-Howard paradigm. So, there should be comparative cross-links also to these other formalisms. There should also be some indication that the Spencer-Brown formalism can also be used for Ortholattices (and, by extension, Quantum Logic), not just for Boolean lattices, by taking a suitable subset of his arrows as axioms. In essence, Spencer-Brown is an extension of the Curry-Howard paradigm to this family of lattices and logics. (So in the "Relation to Magmas" section, there is not only a relation to "groupoid" in the older sense - "magma" - of the term, but also a relation to "groupoid" in the category-theoretic sense of the term.)

Wrong information?

>>The mathematics fills only about 55pp and is rather elementary....

>>The entire book is written in an operational way, giving instructions to the reader instead of telling him what is. In accordance with G. S. Browns interest in paradoxes, the only sentence that makes a statement that something is, is the statement, which says no such statements are used in this book.

After reading over the book for like 10 minutes, this whole paragraph seems completely wrong. The word "be" appears frequently and the book consists more or less ONLY of mathematical logic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.89.79.41 (talk) 08:30, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Invalid Links

Resolved

http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/spark/Researcher.aspx?researcherid=84894 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Noeon (talk • contribs) 09:48, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

As at 2016.06.11, the link to www.lawsofform.org appears to be invalid. It links to something in Chinese. George963 au (talk) 04:18, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

Japanese, actually. Something about oysters. In any case, both of the above links have been replaced in the article with links to the Wayback Machine. I didn't attempt any more extensive update.  —jmcgnh^{(talk) (contribs)} 05:30, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

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The "Resonances in religion, philosophy, and science" section

@Maven111: This section was tagged as WP:OR since 2011. All the claimed "resonances" are from sources predating publication of LoF. If you can provide reliable sources that explicitly make the connection between one or more of the religious texts and LoF, then by all means, provide it. But as long as the references aren't on hand, Wikipedia policy is clear: "Any material lacking a reliable source directly supporting it may be removed and should not be restored without an inline citation to a reliable source" (my emphasis). Paradoctor (talk) 10:38, 6 June 2018 (UTC)