The alphabet of human thought ( la, alphabetum cogitationum humanarum) is a concept originally proposed by

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of ...

that provides a universal way to represent and analyze ideas 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 ( or ; ; Latinized: Renatus Cartesius; 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 science. Ma ...

had suggested that the

lexicon A lexicon 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 (), neuter of () meaning 'of or fo ...

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 of ...

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 public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...

. 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 In linguistics, grammaticality is determined by the conformity to language usage as derived by the grammar of a particular variety (linguistics), speech variety. The notion of grammaticality rose alongside the theory of generative grammar, the go ...

and

logic Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from prem ...

al structure would coincide, which would allow reasoning to be reduced to calculation. Leibniz acknowledged the work of

Ramon Llull Ramon Llull (; c. 1232 – c. 1315/16) was a philosopher, theologian, poet, missionary, and Christian apologist from the Kingdom of Majorca. He invented a philosophical system known as the ''Art'', conceived as a type of universal logic to pro ...

, particularly the ''Ars generalis ultima'' (1305), as one of the inspirations for this idea. The basic elements of his ''characteristica'' would be pictographic characters representing unambiguously 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 m ...

or ontology classification reasoner written centuries before the technology to implement them.

Semantic web implementation

John Giannandrea, co-founder and CTO of Metaweb Technologies, acknowledged in a speech that Freebase was at least linked to the alphabet of human thought, if not an implementation of it.

References

{{Authority control Philosophy of language History of philosophy

Overview

Semantic web implementation

See also

References