The alphabet of human thought () is a concept originally proposed by
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (or Leibnitz; – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat who is credited, alongside Sir Isaac Newton, with the creation of calculus in addition to ...
that provides a universal way to represent and analyze
idea
In philosophy and in common usage, an idea (from the Greek word: ἰδέα (idea), meaning 'a form, or a pattern') is the results of thought. Also in philosophy, ideas can also be mental representational images of some object. Many philosophe ...
s and
relationships by breaking down their component pieces. All ideas are compounded from a very small number of simple ideas which can be represented by a unique character.
Overview
Logic was Leibniz's earliest philosophic interest, going back to his teens.
René Descartes
René Descartes ( , ; ; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and Modern science, science. Mathematics was paramou ...
had suggested that the
lexicon
A lexicon (plural: lexicons, rarely lexica) is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word () ...
of a
universal language
Universal language may refer to a hypothetical or historical language spoken and understood by all or most of the world's people. In some contexts, it refers to a means of communication said to be understood by all humans. It may be the idea o ...
should consist of primitive elements. The systematic combination of these elements, according to syntactical rules, would generate the infinite combinations of computational structures required to represent human language. In this way Descartes and Leibniz were precursors to
computational linguistics
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...
as defined by
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...
.
In the early 18th century, Leibniz outlined his ''
characteristica universalis
The Latin term ''characteristica universalis'', commonly interpreted as ''universal characteristic'', or ''universal character'' in English, is a universal and formal language imagined by Gottfried Leibniz able to express mathematical, scienti ...
'', an artificial language in which
grammatical and
logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the study of deductively valid inferences or logical truths. It examines how conclusions follow from premises based on the structure o ...
al structure would coincide, allowing reasoning to be reduced to calculation. Leibniz acknowledged the work of
Ramon Llull
Ramon Llull (; ; – 1316), sometimes anglicized as ''Raymond Lully'', was a philosopher, theologian, poet, missionary, Christian apologist and former knight from the Kingdom of Majorca.
He invented a philosophical system known as the ''Art ...
, particularly the ''Ars generalis ultima'' (1305), as one of the inspirations for this idea. The basic elements of his ''characteristica'' would be pictographic characters unambiguously representing a limited number of elementary concepts. Leibniz called the inventory of these concepts "the alphabet of human thought." There are quite a few mentions of the ''characteristica'' in Leibniz's writings, but he never set out any details save for a brief outline of some possible sentences in his ''
Dissertation on the Art of Combinations''.
His main interest was what is known in modern logic as classification and composition. In modern terminology, Leibniz's alphabet was a proposal for an
automated theorem prover
Automated theorem proving (also known as ATP or automated deduction) is a subfield of automated reasoning and mathematical logic dealing with proving mathematical theorems by computer programs. Automated reasoning over mathematical proof was a ma ...
or
ontology classification reasoner written centuries before the technology to implement them.
Semantic web implementation
John Giannandrea
John Giannandrea is a British software engineer and businessman.
Career
He co-founded Metaweb, led Google Search and artificial intelligence, was co-founder and CTO of the speech recognition company Tellme Networks, Chief Technologist of the ...
, co-founder and CTO of
Metaweb Technologies, acknowledged in a 2008 speech that
Freebase was at least linked to the alphabet of human thought, if not an implementation of it.
See also
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References
External weblinks
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{{Authority control
Philosophy of language
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz