Abstract
Writing in 1901, Couturat believed that the source of the wide-spread seventeenth-century attempts to create a universal language could be easily identified. As he explains, it is obvious that these plans proceeded “from the intellectual movement of the Renaissance, which, renewing all sciences and philosophy, had revealed the fundamental unity of the human spirit”. New types of scientific research were undertaken, which led to the desire for a more modern logic better suited to the needs of the new sciences. “Reason became aware of its power and its independence, and tended to free itself from all the impediments of tradition and routine; one began to realize that one could surpass antiquity in knowledge of the universe, and to envisage the possibility of unlimited progress”. All this, Couturat claims, “naturally had to suggest the creation of a philosophical and scientific language, more logical than the vulgar languages, that would be common to all scholars, and, as a consequence, international” (1901: 55-56).
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Notes
Parts of this section have previously been printed in Maat & Cram 2000: 1030–1032.
Bacon 1887-1901, IV: 439. The following quotations are from the English translation of De Augmentis Scientiarum provided by Spedding, Ellis and Heath, the nineteenth-century editors of Bacon’s works. The De Augmentis was published in 1623, and is itself a modified, Latin version composed by Bacon of his The Advancement of Learning, written in English and published in 1605.
There are some beliefs about Chinese characters involved in this which today are known to be mistaken. Cf. Robins 1990: 127 for a short explanation, De-Francis 1984: 131-164 for extensive treatment.
The sources DeMott adduces as examples do not warrant his assertion. One of these is Lodwick, The Groundwork, p. 2-3, which repeats Bacon’s observation that figures’ stated at pleasure’ that describe things, and not sounds, may be used for universal communication, thus echoing the idea of a real and universal writ-ing once more. Lodwick does use the term ‘real’ in a deviant way to indicate pictorial types of script, that is, what is termed signs ‘ex congruo’ by Bacon. Lodwick’s universal character is however explicitly presented as an example of a commonplace universal writing using conventional symbols: “the Characters intending by a generali consent, the representations of things, and not of sounds” (Lodwick 1652: 3). DeMott adds that it is curious that nothing of what he thinks is involved in the concept of a real character is to be found in Bacon’s writings. In fact, there is nothing curious about this, since what DeMott thinks is involved in that concept is not to be found in the other authors he discusses either.
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Maat, J. (2004). The Background. In: Philosophical Languages in the Seventeenth Century: Dalgarno, Wilkins, Leibniz. The New Synthese Historical Library, vol 54. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1036-8_2
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