Polymath Christine Ladd-Franklin is best known for her theory of the evolution of color vision, but her research spanned mathematics, symbolic logic, philosophy, biology and psychology. Born in Connecticut in 1847, she was clever and sharp-tongued, and she never shied away from a battle of wits. When she decided to go to college instead of pursuing a marriage, she convinced her skeptical grandmother by pointing to statistics: there was an excess of women in New England, so a husband would be hard to find; she’d better get an education instead. “Grandma succumbed,” Ladd-Franklin wrote in her diary. When a man didn’t give her credit for her “antilogism,” the core construct in her system of deductive reasoning, she took him to task in print, taking time to praise the beauty of her own concepts. And when Johns Hopkins University attempted to give Ladd-Franklin an honorary Ph.D. in 1926, she insisted that the university grant her the one she’d already earned—after all, she’d completed her dissertation there, without official recognition, more than 40 years earlier. Johns Hopkins succumbed.
EPISODE GUESTS
Frederique Janssen-Lauret is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Manchester.
Sara Uckelman is an associate professor of logic at Durham University in England.
HOSTS
Katie Hafner
Carol Sutton Lewis
PRODUCERS
Ann Taylor Moses
Producer
Ann Tyler Moses is a documentary producer who loves working with archives. She graduated from Stanford University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Elah Feder
Senior Producer
Elah is a journalist, audio producer, and editor. Her work has appeared on Science Friday, Undiscovered, Science Diction, Planet Money, and various CBC shows. She has a masters from the University of Toronto, where she studied evolutionary biology, and later completed a masters at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.
FURTHER READING
The Antilogism (1928) (paywalled with preview) Christine Ladd-Franklin takes W.E. Johnson to task for failing to credit her.
“Christine Ladd-Franklin's color theory: Strategy for claiming scientific authority.” (1995) by Lauren Furumoto. Can be read with a free archive.org account here.
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