John Venn

John Venn (born August 4, 1834, Kingston upon Hull, England—died April 4, 1923, Cambridge) was an English logician and philosopher best known as the inventor of diagrams—known as Venn diagrams—for representing categorical propositions and testing the validity of categorical syllogisms. He also made important contributions to symbolic logic (also called mathematical logic), probability theory, and the philosophy of science.

Venn was the first child of Henry Venn, an Anglican clergyman, and Martha Sykes Venn. He was educated by tutors and in private schools before entering Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge, where he graduated with a degree in mathematics and became a fellow in 1857. He was ordained an Anglican priest in 1859. Appointed lecturer at Gonville and Caius in 1862, he taught logic and the philosophy of science, later devoting himself to the history of the college and of his own family. He resigned from the clergy in 1883, having concluded that Anglicanism was incompatible with his philosophical beliefs. He served as college president from 1903 until his death.

The diagrams that bear his name were introduced by Venn as a means of depicting relations of inclusion and exclusion between classes, or sets. They consist of two or three intersecting circles, each representing a class and each labeled with an uppercase letter. Lowercase x’s and shading are used to indicate the existence and nonexistence, respectively, of some (at least one) member of a given class.

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Philosophy 101

Two-circle Venn diagrams represent categorical propositions, the basic forms of which are: “All A are B,” “No A are B,” “Some A are B,” and “Some A are not B.” Three-circle diagrams (in which each circle intersects the other two) represent syllogisms, an ancient form of deductive argument consisting of two categorical premises and a categorical conclusion. An example is:

Some mammals are carnivores. All mammals are animals. Therefore, some animals are carnivores.

The Venn diagram corresponding to this syllogism is:

If, after both premises have been represented in the diagram—universal (“All” or “No”) premises first—the conclusion is also represented, the syllogism is valid (i.e., its conclusion follows necessarily from its premises); if not, it is invalid. The syllogism above is valid. Venn diagrams were soon recognized for their pedagogical value, and they have since been a standard part of the curriculum in introductory logic.

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Venn developed his diagramming method in Symbolic Logic (1881), a work that was primarily a sophisticated defense of the attempt by the English mathematician George Boole to represent logical relations in algebraic terms (see logic, history of: Boole and De Morgan). In The Logic of Chance (1866) Venn presented the first systematic formulation of the frequency theory of probability, according to which statements of the probability of an event are predictions of the frequency with which events of that type will occur in the long run, rather than descriptions of the strength of a rational person’s belief that such events will occur, as the then-reigning theory held. Venn’s last major philosophical work, The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic (1889), was a critique of John Stuart Mill’s inductive account of scientific reasoning. In 1897 Venn published Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College, 1349–1897; his Alumni Cantabrigienses (1922), compiled with the help of his son, is a historical list of students, alumni, and officials of Cambridge from its founding to 1900.