Wells, Rulon Seymour, 1854-1941.

Rulon S. Wells III (1919-2008) was born 30 April 1919, in Salt Lake City, Utah to Rulon S. Wells Jr., and Helen Clawson Wells. Wells received his B.A. from the University of Utah in 1939, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1941 and 1942 specializing in Philosophy and Science of Languages. He was recruited by the Armed Services during World War II. He worked first for the Office of Naval Research, producing a monograph on the matrix method in linguistics, and then for the Army Specialized Training, teaching Japanese to special operatives who would act as interrogators to extract information from captured Japanese prisoners. During this time he met Virginia H. Bennett, whom he married 21 July 1945. After the war, he joined the Yale faculty in philosophy in 1945 and was appointed professor of linguistics and philosophy in 1962. While there, Wells emerged as one of the leading linguists of the country, setting solid and critical standards for future linguistic research in a series of seminal articles that included The Pitch Phonemes of English, Immediate Constituents, De Saussure’s System of Linguistics, Automatic Alternation and Meaning of Use. For his unique contributions to the field, Wells was elected president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1976. Parallel to his researches in linguistics, Wells also wrote extensively on logic, metaphysics, epistemology and semantics – considering the latter more closely allied with philosophical issues than with linguistic ones. The mind of 19th-century logician Charles S. Peirce held a special fascination for Wells, and he explored Peirce’s ideas in a number of studies. In recognition of these, he became president of the Charles S. Peirce Society in 1973. He was also a co-founder, with fellow Yale philosophy professor Robert S. Brumbaugh, of the Plato Microfilm Project, which began in 1957. The goal of the project was to microfilm the 260 extant manuscripts in Greek prior to 1600 that contain Plato’s texts. Finally completed in 1990, The Plato Project now allows a researcher to compare variant readings in critical passages of Plato in order to explore differences in meaning.

From the guide to the Rulon S. Wells papers, 1916-2008, (J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah)

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