In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [22]
the [compages or frame of the whole creation]
is.
Got that?
Whether or not Wilkins's language could improve your ability to reason (and I have my doubts), it would certainly do little for your ability to communicate. What had seemed so exciting a possibility when presented in sketch form—a language of concepts rather than words!—turned out to be less exciting in its fully realized form. Wilkins's project effectively put an end to the era of the universal philosophical language. He produced something brilliant and valuable. As a study of English at a particular moment in time, it is remarkable. His work gave rise to the thesaurus, to new methods of library classification, and to the taxonomy of the natural world later perfected by Linnaeus. But as a language, it was simply unusable.
It seemed clear to me (manifestly so), as I emerged from my long weekend with An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, that Wilkins had performed another valuable service in taking the philosophical language idea as far as it could go. He had shown that it was a ridiculous idea. And so the idea could be put to rest.
But, alas, it would not be. History forgets. The philosophical language idea persisted, and would from time to time plant itself in the minds of ambitious types who had never heard of Wilkins. The graveyard of invented languages is littered with their efforts.
But even those who had heard of Wilkins were not always deterred. They thought the idea was good, but Wilkins had just done it wrong. Leibniz thought that he could do it right, but he never figured out how. And 180 years after Wilkins's death, Ro-get, in the introduction to his thesaurus, expressed the hope that his classification scheme would lay the groundwork for a universal philosophical language. He was familiar with Wilkins's work, but declared it, in true thesaurus-writer fashion, to be “too abstruse and recondite for practical application.”
I wondered if any of those who thought they could do better than Wilkins ever tried their hand at a “practical application” of his system. It is easy to take issue with his tables or his grammatical apparatus or his general view of the universe. You barely have to look at any of these things before you can find something to criticize. But if you sit down and make a sincere attempt to use the language, you discover the really important flaw, not in his language, but in the whole idea of a philosophical language: when you speak in concepts, it's too damn hard to say anything.
People find something very comforting about the notion that words are the problem, not concepts. When words fail us, we tend to blame the words. We've all experienced the frustration of not being able to say what we mean to say. When we struggle with language, we have the sensation that our clean, beautiful ideas remain trapped inside our heads. We accuse language of being too crude and clumsy to adequately express our thoughts. But perhaps we flatter ourselves.
Sometimes we do find the words to express an idea, and only then realize what a stupid idea it is. This experience would suggest that our thoughts are not as clean and beautiful as we would like to believe. Instead of blaming language for failing to capture our thoughts, maybe we should thank it for giving some shape to the muddle in our heads.
I'm no philosopher, and I am not qualified to make claims about whether thought is possible without language (although I think it is), or whether there may be other means than language by which we can give shape to the muddle (sure, why not?). I'm just saying that when it comes to expressing ourselves, we need some fuzzy edges, a chance to discover what we're trying to say even as we say it. We should be grateful to our sloppy, imperfect languages for giving us some wiggle room.
To be fair, Wilkins didn't assume our thoughts were as organized as his