In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [13]
But where to look? I was holding a dictionary of concepts, not words. They were arranged not alphabetically but by meaning. To get the word for “shit,” I would have to find the concept of shit, which meant I had to figure out which of Wilkins's forty categories of meaning it fell under.
Wilkins's categories are organized into an overall structure of the type known as the Aristotelian hierarchy, or Porphyrian tree. This is the genus-species-difference organization we are most familiar with from taxonomies of plant and animal life. The higher positions in the tree are the most general categories, which are split into subcategories on the basis of some distinguishing feature. Daisies, spiders, woodpeckers, tigers, and porcupines all fall under the category of animate substances; they are all living things. But only some of them share the property of being sensate (bye, daisies) or of having blood (bye, spiders) or of being beasts (see ya, woodpeckers) or of being non-rapacious (so long, tigers). As we move down the tree, categories are narrowed and members more precisely defined by their membership.
Figure 5.1 shows Wilkins's tree of the universe, with his forty numbered categories as the bottom nodes. The first division, general versus special, separates the big abstract metaphysical ideas (notions like existence, truth, and good) from the stuff of the world (the notions those ideas can apply to). This division was consistent with the philosophy of categories, descended from Plato and Aristotle, as practiced at the time. The division between substances and accident (at the second node under “special”) also comes from this tradition. Substances are answers to the question, What is this? and accidents are answers to the question, How/in what way/of what quality is this? A glance at the table will show that these distinctions do not always hold up very well, but, as Wilkins was quite aware, the philosophy was incomplete and this was as good a place to start as any.
The bottom nodes of this tree, the forty main categories, are themselves top-level categories in their own sprawling trees. For example, if we zoom in on category XVIII, “Beasts,” we find it further divided into six subcategories, as shown in figure 5.2.
It doesn't stop there. Lift a subcategory and you find a tree of sub-subcategories that get even more specific. So under category XVIII (Beasts), subcategory V (oblong-headed), you will find six sub-subcategories under which specific animals are finally named (as shown in figure 5.3).
Figure 5.1: Wilkins's tree of the universe
Figure 5.2: Subcategories of beasts
Figure 5.3: Subcategories of oblong-headed beasts
Each one of his forty top-level categories expands in this manner into multiple sub- and sub-sub trees. A place is provided for everything from “porcupine” (substances > animate > sensate > sanguineous > beast > clawed > non-rapacious) to “dignity” (accident > quality > habit > instruments of virtue > concerning our conditions in relation to others) to “potentialness” (transcendentals > general > quality > degree of being). We are dealing with an enormous magnum opus here.
But why was all this necessary? What does the idea of a mathematics of language have to do with a gigantic conceptual map of the universe?
We have seen that a mathematics of language required two things: a list of the basic units of meaning, and a knowledge of how everything else was to be derived from those units. In Lodwick's system “to understand,” “one who …,” and “proper name” were primitives, and “man” was derived from the combination of those three primitives. Man was defined as the one who understands. For Leibniz the primitives were rational and animal, and man was derived by the combination of those primitives—the rational animal. Well, which is it? Is man the rational animal or the understander? It depends on the primitives you're working with. And finding the right set of primitives depends on finding the right definition.