Artificial Languages
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Artificial Languages Claudia Dumitru Philosophy Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA Related Topics
Philosophy of language · Encyclopedic projects · Taxonomy · Logic
Synonyms Characteristica Universalis; Philosophical language; Real character; Universal language
Introduction The early modern period saw the rise of a remarkable interest in language and possible ways of reforming it. This interest found its most ambitious manifestation in various projects for creating an artificial language, which flourished in England and on the Continent in the seventeenth century, culminating in the 1660s with the publication of George Dalgarno’s Ars signorum (1661) and John Wilkins’s Essay towards a real character and a philosophical language (1668). A number of causes lay behind this pursuit of artificial languages: (i) the decline of Latin as a lingua franca and the rise of vernaculars,
(ii) increased contact with extra-European civilizations, which brought with it both a need for interlinguistic communication (for purposes of diplomacy, commerce and proselytism) and a mass of new information about other languages and notation systems, (iii) religious concerns for recovering the prelapsarian language, (iv) the rise of sweeping projects for reforming human knowledge, which extended themselves rather naturally to reforming human language as well (Knowlson 1975: 1–44; Maat 2004: 7–16; Salmon 1979: 129–56). Three benefits were usually claimed on behalf of artificial languages. First, it was hoped that they would avoid many of the flaws of natural languages, by dint of being constructed intentionally and in accordance with rational rules. Behind this hope, one can hear the echo of typical sixteenthand seventeenth-century dissatisfaction with language and its imperfections. Second, they were to provide a universal medium of communication. This function was most often assigned not to the language as a whole, but merely to a notation system (the character). The hope was that the system at work in Arabic numerals and musical notation (i.e., symbols that were stable and recognizable across languages, despite being assigned different sounds in each language) could be extended to the entire vocabulary of a language. Third, artificial languages were frequently claimed to map on to the structure of reality, which natural languages obscured or outright distorted. In this sense they were called
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 D. Jalobeanu, C. T. Wolfe (eds.), Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_217-1
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“philosophical languages.” Learning the language would automatically mean learning things about the world, an obvious pedagogical advantage. By eliminating merely verbal debates, it would facilitate the progress of philosophy (together with other goals such as religious unity and secular peace). In more ambitious schemes, such as that of Leibniz, manipulating the language could potentially also allow one to discover new truths about the world. Surveying these
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