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I know that the latter authors were Fabian and Christine Ladd Franklin. She was a student of C.S. Peirce who worked primarily on various problems in logic.
I have not been able to make a positive identification of Towry, although there is circumstantial reason to think that it was Mary Helen Towry White. She wrote a diverse array of stuff over a period of decades. There is a book titled Clanship and the Clans in 1869, which one reference credits to "M. H. Towry (pseud. [i.e. Mary Helen White.])" There is an edited volume Spencer for Children and an adaptation of a French book Life Stories of Famous Children, both from the 1870s. The Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire has an article by "Miss M. H. Towry White, Author of 'Memoirs of the Whites of Wallingwells'."
Although I have e-mailed an antiquarian society and the editorial offices of Mind, I have been unable to confirm that "On the Doctrine of Natural Kinds" is by that very same M. H. Towry. For the purposes of my own writing, it does not matter too much. Towry's article is concise and clear. I can discuss its argument regardless of the author.
Yet it is a striking illustration of how women can easily be written out of history. The initials make it seem like any other Victorian philosopher. Even Franklin&Franklin, responding the Towry the following year, take it to be Mister Towry. I only know that one of the Franklins is a women because I know some backstory about her.
There is another reply to Towry by W. H. S. Monck. Google suggests that this might be William Henry Stanley Monck (1839-1915) who was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin and an amateur astronomer. It was pretty easy to find out about him because he was an academic. Of course, only men were academics.
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Consider the sentence, "Tautologists all agree."*
Especially uttered in context, we can readily understand that tautologists are folks who announce tautologies. Tautologies are necessarily true, so people who know tautologies have matching beliefs. So tautologists all agree. QED
One might argue against this proof on any of several grounds.
One might object: Neologisms can't just be uttered in ways that give them precise meanings. The entirety of neologizing English literature, from William Shakespeare to Joss Whedon, stands as evidence against this. Neologisms can (at least sometimes) have meanings that are as precise as paleologisms.
One might instead object: Tautologists might announce different tautologies. For example, Timmy says "If p, then p" but Tammy says "All bachelors are unmarried". They don't disagree, but they don't explicitly agree either.
Here's another possible objection: Tautologists might disagree on matters besides the tautologies they utter. So they would disagree as speakers if not strictly qua tautologists.
Let's suppose that the objections can be answered and that the proof given above goes through. That would mean that "Tautologists all agree" is itself a tautology.
Yet "tautologist" is a neologism. Before the first time the sentence was uttered, the word was not explicitly part of anyone's vocabulary. Was the sentence already a tautology before that first utterance?
We might answer no to this question by distinguishing the language pre-utterance from the language post-utterance. The word is not part of English-before, and so the sentence is not a tautology in English-before. The word is a part of English-after, and the sentence is a tautology in that so-slightly different language. This would also allow us to avoid saying that introducing the neologism creates a new tautology. Instead, coining a word shifts from English-before to English-after, and the sentence had (in some logical sense) always been a tautology of the latter language.
We are still left with some staggering consequences, though. Not only is it the case that there is a countable infinity of tautologies you might utter using familiar vocabulary. You might introduce a neologism at any time, and so there are at least as many word-coining tautologies which you could bust out with at any moment.
* Credit for this goes to Cristyn, who said it in response to some tautology which I uttered. She was being snarky, though, because I had uttered the tautology for purposes of non-trivial conversational implicature. As one does.
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Gregory Frost-Arnold will be visiting us on Friday to deliver a colloquium entitled "When, How, and Why Did People Begin Classifying Themselves as 'Analytic Philosophers'?" It promises to be a cool smoothie of philosophical content and history of ideas, garnished with whatever plays the role of fresh fruit in this metaphor.
For anyone who will be in the Albany region and who is reading this before it has already happened, here's the haps:
Friday, November 2
3:30-5:30 PM
University at Albany, Humanities 290
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This morning, Brian Leiter made this post about Open Access publishing:
The Not-so-High Standards at (at least some) "Open Access" Journals
Not a great advertisement for the genre.
I hammered out a reply, which he added as an update. Here's what I said:
Your recent blog post rightly decries "The Not-so-High Standards at (at least some) "Open Access" Journals" and describes the case as "Not a great advertisement for the genre".
Importantly, the genre in question is not Open Access journals tout court. The real problem here is OA journals that use an author-pays model. Lots of them are straight forwardly scams to chisel money out of institutions that cover that kind of publishing and out of authors who need a line on their CV.
There are other models of OA. Quality OA journals don't charge author fees. I'm thinking here especially of Philosophers' Imprint, but also of less well-known and less prestigious ones like Logos&Episteme. We can argue about their stature in the field, but their being OA is not a demerit.
There is also the model which is sometimes called "green OA", in which authors' papers are systematically hosted in institutional or disciplinary archives. Although this does not result in OA journals as such, traditional journals can facilitate or thwart the practice depending on how they handle rights.
Qualifying your post with the caveat "at least some" is importantly not enough, because we can state precisely what's wrong here. For-profit publishers have an interest in suspicion being raised about OA in general, when really it's a specific business model that leads to egregious abuses like the one that you point to.
Long time readers might remember that I've fumbled this distinction in the past, so my point isn't to excoriate Leiter. Given the long-term importance of Open Access publishing for academia, it's important not to let bad practices tar the whole enterprise. The distinction between different kinds of OA (author-pays, author-doesn't-pay, and self-archived) is important.
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