In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [14]
Upright walking does not work, because, while it is a pretty distinguishing characteristic of man, it is not the distinguishing characteristic. Apes walk pretty upright, and even a dog can walk upright if properly motivated. And as for the featherless-biped idea, Diogenes the Cynic responded to it by brandishing a plucked chicken and proclaiming, “Behold, Plato's man!” A description of man that lets you pick out man as opposed to something else is dependent not so much on the characteristics man has as on the characteristic that everything else does not have.
And that characteristic, it was commonly supposed, was the capacity to reason. Naturally, the people who were concerned with big questions like the essential nature of man—the philosophers—held this characteristic in high regard. After all, it was the tool of their trade. So they may have failed to focus on other human characteristics that are arguably just as distinguishing. Why is man not the vengeful animal or, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, “the animal who makes dogmas” or, in the words of Ambrose Bierce, the “animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be”?
Depends on what's important in your philosophy. Descartes thought the philosophical language idea was doomed because it required you to first figure out the true philosophy. Wilkins thought the philosophical language idea was possible because all you needed was a pretty good philosophy. Though he aimed to make his system “exactly suited to the nature of things,” he acknowledged that it fell short. He didn't know the Truth, but he had some not completely unreasonable opinions about it. They were, however, still opinions, and therefore informed by his own idiosyncratic viewpoint and the particular preoccupations of the times he lived in. Had he been younger or older when he crafted his tables (he was in his early fifties when he finished), he may not have categorized the age “betwixt the 50th and 60th year” as the “most perfect for the Mind … the Age of Wisdom.” Had he not lived in the seventeenth century, he may not have categorized “witchcraft” under judicial relations > capital crimes. Had he not lived in England, he may not have included a whole category of terms for ship rigging. The parrel, jeers, and buntline all get their rightful places in the universe of Wilkins.
So, to sum up the progression from “let's make a math for language” to “let's make a hierarchy of the universe”:
To make a math for language, you need to know what the basic units of meaning are, and how we compute more complicated concepts out of them.
To figure both of these things out, you need an idea of how concepts break down into smaller concepts.
To break down the concepts, you need a satisfactory definition for those concepts; you have to know what things are.
In order to know what something is, you have to distinguish it from everything it is not.
Because you have to distinguish it from everything, you have to include everything in your system. So there you are, crafting your six-hundred-page table of the universe.
Do you get the sense that each step in this progression doesn't necessarily follow from the last one? So did George Dalgarno. He was a Scottish schoolmaster of humble means who moved to Oxford in 1657 in order to start a school. After attending a demonstration of a new type of shorthand that could express phrases in “a more compendious way than any I had seen,” he was inspired to “advance it a step further.” In the process of working out how to stuff the most meaning into the fewest possible symbols, he realized that such a system could be used not just as a shorthand for English but as a universal writing that could be read off into any language. He was “struck with such a complicated passion