Eco: George Delgarno, 2
“Figure 11.1 presents an extremely simplified, partial reconstruction of the tables, which limits itself to following only two of the subdivisions–animals with uncleft hooves and the principle...
View ArticleEco: John Wilkins
“Already in Mercury, a book principally devoted to secret writing, published in 1641, Wilkins had begun to design a project for universal language. It was not until 1668, however, that he was ready to...
View ArticleEco: The real Characters
“Figure 12.3 gives Wilkins‘ own illustration of the signs characterizing the 40 major genera as well as the signs used to indicate differences and species. The fundamental sign is a simple dash with a...
View ArticleEco: The Dictionary–Synonyms, Periphrases, Metaphors
“Wilkins‘ language provides names for 2,030 primitives, that is to say, species. These species include not only natural genera and artifacts, but also relations and actions. From these latter are...
View ArticleEco: An Open Classification?
“In reality, Wilkins’ classification ought to be regarded as an open one. Following a suggestion of Comenius‘ (in the Via lucis), Wilkins argued that the task of constructing an adequate classification...
View ArticleEco: The Limits of Classification
“Using 40 genera and 251 differences, Wilkins‘ tables manage to define 2,030 species. If, however, the division were dichotomic, as happens with the Aristotelian system of classification, in which each...
View ArticleEco:The Limits of Classification, 2
“Let us try to understand a little better what is happening here. Suppose we wanted to use the real character to understand the difference between a dog and a wolf. We discover only that the dog, Zitα,...
View ArticleEco: The Hypertext of Wilkins
“What if we regarded the defect in Wilkins‘ system as its prophetic virtue? What if we treated Wilkins as if he were obscurely groping towards a notion for which we have only recently invented a...
View ArticleEco: Francis Lodwick
“Lodwick wrote before either Dalgarno or Wilkins, both of whom had thus the opportunity to know his work. Salmon (1972: 3) defines him as the author of the first attempt to construct a language in...
View ArticleEco: Francis Lodwick, 2
“This idea of a non-hierarchical organization seems, at one point, to have occurred to Wilkins as well. Figure 13.2 reproduces a table found on p. 311 of his Essay. The table describes the workings of...
View ArticleEco: From Leibniz to the Encyclopédie
“In 1678 Leibniz composed a lingua generalis (in Couturat 1903). After decomposing all of human knowledge into simple ideas, and assigning a number to each, Leibniz proposed a system of transcription...
View ArticleEco: Characteristica and Calculus
“The theme of invention and discovery should remind us of Lull; and, in fact, Lull’s ars combinatoria was one of Leibniz’s first sources. In 1666, at the age of twenty, Leibniz composed his own...
View ArticleEco: The Problem of the Primitives
“What did Leibniz’s ars combinatoria have in common with the projects for universal languages? The answer is that Leibniz had long wondered what would be the best way of providing a list of primitives...
View ArticleEco: The Encyclopedia and the Alphabet of Thought
“The idea of a universal encyclopedia was something that Leibniz was never to give up. Leibniz was, for a long period, a librarian; as such, and as a historian and érudit, he could not have failed to...
View ArticleEco: Blind Thought
“We have seen that Leibniz came to doubt the possibility of constructing an alphabet that was both exact and definitive, holding that the true force of the calculus of characteristic numbers lay...
View ArticleEco: Blind Thought, 2
“As Leibniz observed in the Accessio ad arithmeticum infinitorum of 1672 (Sämtliche Schriften und Briefen, iii/1, 17), when a person says a million, he does not represent mentally to himself all the...
View ArticleEco: The I Ching and the Binary Calculus
“Leibniz’s tendency to transform his characteristica into a truly blind calculus, anticipating the logic of Boole, is no less shown by his reaction to the discovery of the Chinese book of changes–the I...
View ArticleEco: Side-effects
“Thus all of the ingenuity expended upon the invention of philosophic a priori languages allowed Leibniz to invent a language of a radically different type, which–though remaining a priori–was no...
View ArticleEco: The “Library” of Leibniz and the Encyclopédie
“During the Enlightenment there began to develop a critical attitude towards any attempt to construct a system of a priori ideas. It was a critique founded, in large part, upon the considerations...
View ArticleEco:Eighteenth Century Projects
“Even under the weight of the Enlightenment critique, the dream of the perfect language refused to die. In 1720 there appeared a “Dialogue sur la facilité qu’il y auroit d’établir un Caractère...
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