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Notes
1Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1978), p. 13 (I–80): ‘Die Psychologie beschreibt, was beobachtet wurde’.
2See Jonathan Rée, I Hear A Voice: Language, Deafness and the Senses: A Philosophical History (London 1999), Afterword, esp. pp. 379–86. See also Ian Hacking, ‘Historical Ontology’, in Historical Ontology (Cambridge, Mass. and London 2002), pp.1–26, esp. pp. 6–7.
3See, for example, Hans Aarsleff, Language, Man and Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Princeton 1964); From Locke to Saussure. Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (London and Minneapolis 1982); ‘Leibniz and Locke on Language’, Philosophical Quarterly, 1964, 1:165–88; reprinted in Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure, pp. 42–83; ‘An Outline of Language-Origins Theory Since the Renaissance’, Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 1977, 280: 4–13.
4Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton 1985).
5See the excellent entry on ‘The Language of Thought Hypothesis’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/.
6See R. W. Rieber and J. L. Wollock, William Holder on Phonetics and Deafness: An Introduction to the New Edition of Elements of Speech (New York 1975), p. i.
7William Holder, Elements of Speech: An Essay of Inquiry into the Natural Production of Letters (London 1669; New York 1975), p. 15.
8See ‘Of an Experiment, concerning Deafness, communicated to the R. Society, by that Worthy and learned Divine Dr. William Holder, as followeth’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1668 (May 18), 35: 665–8. See also Roy Porter, ‘The Early Royal Society and the Spread of Medical Knowledge’, in French and Wear (eds), Medical Revolution, pp. 272–93, at p. 288.
9 Philosophical Transactions, 1668 (May 18), 35: 665.
10Ibid., p. 667.
11See Rée, I See a Voice, pp. 107–20 for his account of the cures by Holder and Wallis.
12Ibid., p. 11.
13Holder, Elements, p. 17.
14George Dalgarno, Ars signorum, vulgo character universalis et lingua philosophica (London 1661); Didascalocophus Or The Deaf and Dumb mans Tutor (Oxford 1680).
15Ibid., Introduction, pp. i–ii. See also Rée, p. 108.
16John Wilkins and Seth Ward, Vindiciae Academiarum, Containing, Some briefe Animadversions upon Mr Websters Book, Stiled The Examination of Academies. Together with an Appendix concerning what M. Hobbs, and M. Dell have published on this Argument (Oxford 1654). The text of the 1654 edition is reprinted in facsimile in A. G. Debus, Science and Education in the 17th Century: The Webster–Ward Debate (New York and London 1970), pp. 193–259.
17John Webster, Academiarum Examen: or, the Examination of Academies: Wherein is discussed and examined the matter, method, and customes of academick and scholastick learning, and the insufficiency thereof discovered and laid open; as also some experients proposed for the reforming of schools, etc. (London 1653). The text is reprinted in facsimile in Debus, Science and Education, pp. 67–192.
18Samuel Hartlib mentioned this in his notebook-diary, Ephemerides, quoted by Vivian Salmon in ‘The Evolution of Dalgarno's “Ars Signorum”’, in Vivian Salmon, The Study of Language in 17th-Century England (Amsterdam 1979), pp. 157–75: p. 161.
19Ibid., p. 164.
20John Wilkins had written an Art of Stenography (London 1628), a system of ‘simple analogous symbols’ in which ‘new Illiterall Characters be inuvented and vsed for certained words: betweene which words and their Characters, appeareth some Analogie and proportion of reason’. See Salmon, The Study of Language, p. 160.
21John Wilkins, Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London 1668).
22Ray and Willoughby produced a system of classification which would influence Carl Linnaeus, founder of modern taxonomy in natural history. See also Hans Aarsleff, ‘The Royal Society: Hooke, Ray, Boyle, and Locke’ in his Language, Man and Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Princeton 1964), p. 126.
23See, for instance, Debus, ‘The Paracelsians and Educational Reform’, in his Science and Education, ch. 3, pp. 15–32 and David S. Lux and Harold J. Cook, ‘Closed Circles or Open Networks? Communicating at a Distance during the Scientific Revolution’, History of Science 1998, 36: 179–211.
24John Webster, Academiarum Examen, or the Examination of Academies. Wherein is discussed and examined the Matter, Method and Customes of Academick and Scholastick Learning, and the insufficiency thereof discovered and laid open; As also some Expedients proposed for the Reforming of Schools, and the perfecting and promoting of all kind of science (London 1653), p. 28.
25Webster, Academiarum Examen, pp. 24–5.
26Ibid., p.25.
27Sir Kenelm Digby, Two Treatises: In the one of which, the nature of bodies; In the other, the nature of mans soule, is looked into: in way of discovery of the immortality of reasonable soules (Paris 1644; London 1645): ‘The First Treatise declaring the nature and operations of bodies’, pp. 307–9.
28See Rée, I See a Voice, pp. 98–9.
29George Dalgarno, Didascalocophus Or The Deaf and Dumb mans Tutor (Oxford 1680; reprinted Menston, 1971), pp. 37–40.
30Ibid., p. 40.
31There is an extensive literature on universal languages, universal grammars, universal characters and philosophical languages. See, in S. Auroux (ed.), Histoire des idées linguistiques, vol. II: Le développement de la grammaire occidentale (Liège 1994): ‘Les questions de l'âge de la science’, esp. Vivian Salmon's account of the tradition, ‘Caractéristiques et langues universelles’, pp. 407–23, and Marc Dominicy's bibliographical essay on the history of grammar, ‘Le programme scientifique de la grammaire générale’, pp. 424–41. See also James Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes in England and France, 1600–1800 (Toronto 1975); Mary M. Slaughter, Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge and New York 1982); Umberto Eco, La Ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea (Rome and Bari 1993).
32On the very first page of his introduction to the Didascalocophus, Dalgarno referred to his goal when publishing the Ars signorum some twenty years earlier, of ‘shewing a way to remedy the difficulties and absurdities which all languages are clogg'd with ever since the confusion, or rather since the fall; […] to cure even Philosophy it self of the disease of Sophisms, and Logomachies’.
33The literature on Wilkins's Essay is extensive. See, for example, Sidonie Clauss, ‘John Wilkins’ Essay Toward a Real Character: Its Place in the Seventeenth Century Episteme’, in Nancy Struever (ed.), Language and the History of Thought (Rochester 1995), pp. 27–49; Vivian Salmon, ‘”Philosophical” Grammar in John Wilkins's Essay’, in her The Study of Language in 17th-Century England, pp. 96–125; Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty, esp. pp. 49–71.
34See Salmon, Caractéristiques, in Auroux (ed.), Histoire, p. 410.
35Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing: Or Confidence in Opinions. Manifested in a Discourse of the Shortness and Uncertainty of our Knowledge. And its Causes, With some Reflexions on Peripateticism; And an Apology for Philosophy (London 1661), p. 132.
36John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (London 1690), P. H. Nidditch, (ed.) (London 1975), III, 2–4.
37See, for example, Lia Formigari, ‘Le langage et la pensée’, in Auroux (ed.), Histoire, pp. 442–54. On the respective positions of Locke and Leibniz with regard to language, see Hans Aarsleff's seminal article ‘Leibniz and Locke on Language’, Philosophical Quarterly 1964, 1:165–88; reprinted in his From Locke to Saussure. Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (London and Minneapolis 1982), pp. 42–83.
38Holder, pp. 4–6.
39See Michel de Montaigne, Essais (Paris 1580), II, xii, ‘Apologie de Raymond Sebond’; Charron, De la sagesse (Paris 1601), esp. Bk. 1.
40John Bulwer, Chirologia, or, the Naturall Language of the Hand: Composed of the speaking motions, and discoursing gestures thereof. Whereunto is added, Chironomia; or, The art of manual rhetoricke (London 1644). Bulwer also wrote a Philocopus, or the Deaf and Dumbe Mans Friend (London 1648) and a Pathomyotamia, or, A dissection of the significative muscles of the affections of the minde (London 1649).
41On Bulwer, see Rée, I See a Voice, pp.123–31.
42See Debus, Science and Education, pp. 33–64.
43Rée, in I See a Voice, gives a history of such attempts; see especially chs. 9–13 and references.
44Oliver Sacks, in Seeing Voices (London 1991), pp. 14–15, refers to a passage from the Cratylus (422d–423b) quoted by the Abbé de l'Epée, the official founder of sign-language in eighteenth-century France:
If we had neither voice nor tongue, and yet wished to manifest things to one another, should we not, like those which are at present mute, endeavour to signify our meaning by the hands, head, and other parts of the body?
45Dalgarno was the first to create a manual alphabet – dactylology – for the deaf, though John Bulwer preceded him in devising a complete sign language, or arthrologie, in his Chirologia and Philocophus (1648). For a brief account of the significance of Dalgarno, Bulwer, Holder and Wallis in the development of BSL (British Sign Language) see J. G. Kyle and B. Woll, Sign Language: The Study of Deaf People and their Language (Cambridge 1988), pp. 37–57.
46Van Leeuwen, Problem of Certainty, p. 48.
47Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, La logique ou l'art de penser (Paris 1662), Pierre Clair and François Girbal (ed.) (Paris 1981), p. 39.
48In this he followed Aristotle, De interpretatione, 16a3, citing his notion that ‘Words are the images of cogitations, and letters are the images of words’. See Bacon, Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane (first published London, 1605), G. W. Kitchin (ed.) (London 1861; reprinted 1973), XVI, 1, p. 36.
49Ibid., XVI, 2, p. 137.
50Ibid., XVI, 3, p. 137.
51Ibid., XVI, 3, p. 138.
52Ibid., XVI, 3, p. 137.
53Ibid., XVI, 4, p. 138.
54Ibid., XIII, 4, p. 126.
55Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civill (London 1651), C. B. Macpherson (ed.) (London 1981), p. 109 (I.4).
56Ibid., p. 100.
57Ibid., p. 101. See Ian Hacking, Why does Language Matter to Philosophy? (Cambridge 1975), pp. 15–25, for a discussion of Hobbes's theory of language.
58Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 109 and 165 (I.11).
59Ibid., p. 113. See also Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy (London 1656), Part I, On Computation or Logic, ‘Of Names’, in Hobbes, The English Works, Sir William Molesworth (ed.) (London 1839), I, p. 16:
A Name is a word taken at pleasure to serve for a mark, which may raise in our mind a thought like to some thought we had before, and which being pronounced to others, may be to them a sign of what thought the speaker had, or had not before in his mind. And it is for brevity's sake that I suppose the original of names to be arbitrary.
60See Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, p. 92.
61For a discussion of Hobbes's views on the relationship between language and scientific knowledge, and on the ways in which they bear upon his understanding of scientific inquiry, see Douglas Jesseph, ‘Hobbes and the method of natural science’, in Tom Sorell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (Cambridge 1996), pp. 86–107, especially pp. 96–102.
62Dalgarno, Didascalocophus, p. 18.
63Wallis, along with Seth Ward, was deeply hostile to Hobbes, and both Royal Society Fellows engaged in a heated debate with him that began after the publication of Hobbes's De corpore in 1650. For an analysis of the nature and significance of the conflict, and an account of the available sources, see Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, esp. pp. 106, 126, 131–54, 311–12, 323–31.
64Dalgarno, Didascalocophus, pp. 20–1.
65Ibid., pp. 100–1.
66See Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton 1995), pp. 3–38, esp. p. 10; Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago 1995). On the definition and function of thought-experiments, see Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, p. 55, n. 62, and Thomas Kuhn's ‘A Function for Thought Experiments’, reprinted in his The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago 1977), pp. 240–65, to which Shapin and Schaffer also refer and in which Kuhn analyses what kind of knowledge can be gained from thought-experiments.
67The theory needed to underpin such a notion was hardly available until the nineteenth century, but Hobbes, in Leviathan, pp. 103–4 (I.4), invoked the case of
a man that hath no use of Speech at all (such, as is born and remains perfectly deafe and dumb)’ to explicate the way in which, by imposing names, ‘we turn the reckoning of the consequences of things imagined in the mind, into a reckoning of the consequences of Appellations.
68See Galen, De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis, I.6.
69Descartes, Diotrique, in Alquié (ed.) Oeuvres philosophiques, I, pp. 681–2 .
70Locke, Essay, II.viii.1.
71Ibid., II.viii.7.
72For a provocative discussion of what one can understand to have been meant in the seventeenth century by the notion of ‘idea’, see Hacking, Why Does Language, pp. 26–42.
73Locke, Essay, III, ix, 5, p. 477.
74Locke, Essay, III.ii.1. For an analysis of Locke's point here and in the subsequent passage, see Frank Jackson, ‘Learning from Locke on Voluntary Signs’, the transcript of a Talk at the Moral Sciences Club (Cambridge 1998) at http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/people/people-defaults/fcj/learn.html.
75Locke, Essay, II.xix.1.
76Locke was the first to try to recognise consciousness as a phenomenon that could be discussed and described, primarily in terms of personal identity. See Essay, II.xxvii.17.
77See Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago 1995), pp. 153–6, for an exposition of the same point.
78The notion of an evolved tendency was described, for example, by Kenelm Digby, who, in his popular pamphlet on the powder of sympathy, referred to a question he attributed to Plutarch, of whether horses run fast because the fastest horse escapes from the wolf at his heels. See A Discourse made in a Solemne Assembly of Noble and Learned Men at Montpellier in France, by Sir Kenelme Digby, Knight &c., Touching the cure of wounds by the powder of sympathy, 2nd edn (London 1658), pp. 2–3.
79London 1691.
80These were collected as Physico-Theology: Or, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, from his Works of Creation (London 1713). Derham also edited works of John Ray and Robert Hooke's Philosophical Experiments (London 1726).
81Bacon, Advancement, XIV, 9, p. 133.
82Fénelon, De l'éducation des filles (Paris 1684; here, Lyon 1804).
83For a contextualized evaluation of egalitarian, ‘feminist’ thought in Cartesian circles through the case of Poulain de la Barre, see Siep Stuurman, ‘Social Cartesianism: François Poulain de la Barre and the Origins of the Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1997, 58: 617–40.
84Ibid., p. 2. In his Panégyriqe de Sainte Catherine (Paris 1660), Bossuet (1627–1704) wrote that women should avoid acquiring solid scientific knowledge not because it was beyond their means, but because doing so would be ‘une épreuve trop dangereuse pour leur humilité’. See L'éducation des filles in Fénelon, Œuvres, ed. by Jacques Le Brun (Paris 1983), I, p. 1271, n. 5.
85Fénelon, De l'éducation, p. 98.
86See Pastore, Selective History, pp. 19, 30–2.
87On the history of reactions to Cartesianism see, for example, Albert G. A. Balz, Cartesian Studies (New York 1951) and the useful collection by Vere Chappell (ed.), Essays on Early Modern Philosophers: Cartesian Philosophers (New York 1992). See also John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge 1998), esp. chs. 5–9.
88Fénelon, De l'éducation, (ed.) 1804, p. 15.
89Ibid., p. 36.
90Ibid., pp. 15–16. See also Augustine, Confessions, I.8.
91Ibid., p. 17.
92Ibid.
93The distinction between a ‘language of thought’, in the sense coined by Jerry Fodor in Language of Thought (Cambridge, Mass. 1975), and grammatical language is of course not new and goes back to Plato. In Leviathan, towards the beginning of I.3, Hobbes explicitly differentiated a ‘mental discourse’, which he assumed animals possessed as well as humans, from the ‘discourse in words’ established by humans themselves. He made a congruent point in De homine (1658), X.2: Traité de l'homme, ed. by Paul-Marie Maurin. (Paris 1974), p. 144: Adam chose to taste the tree of knowledge before there was any language in which God's entreaty could be expressed.
94Cordemoy was another friend of Bossuet and from 1673 a ‘lecteur ordinaire’ to the Dauphin; he was elected to the Académie française in 1675. He was an esteemed member of the Cartesian circles fashionable in Paris in the 1660s, around Mme de Bonnevaux, Henry Louis Habert de Montmort, Jacques Rohault, Guillaume de Lamoignon, the abbé Bourdelot, and Lefèvre d'Ormesson. For a full account of Cordemoy's life, see the ‘Introduction’ to Gérauld de Cordemoy, Oeuvres philosophiques, avec une étude bio-bibliographique (Paris 1968), Pierre Clair and François Girbal (eds).
95Cordemoy, Discours physique de la parole, in Oeuvres, p. 213.
96Ibid., p. 207 (Preface). See also p. 21.
97Locke, Essay, II, ix, 1–10. See also I, ii–iv.
98Cordemoy, Discours physique de la parole, in Oeuvres, p. 206 (‘Preface’).
99Aristotle, De interpretatione, 16a3. Cited in K. O. Apel, ‘The Transcendental Conception of Language: Communication and the Idea of a First Philosophy’, in H. Parret (ed.), History of Linguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics (Berlin and New York 1976), p. 36. Bacon cited the same Aristotelian passage for this fairly straightforward notion. Cordemoy does not seem to have been referring explicitly to Aristotle but the analogy is evident enough.
100Cordemoy, Discours, in Œuvres, p. 193 (dedication ‘Au Roy’).
101Ibid., p. 196.
102Cordemoy, Discours, p. 196. See also pp. 206–9.
103See the quotation from Holder's Elements above, p. 8.
104Locke, Essay, III.i.1–2. For an analysis of ancient conceptions of animal communication, see D. K. Glidden, ‘Parrots, Pyrrhonists and Native Speakers’, in S. Everson (ed.), Companions to Ancient Thought, 3: Language (Cambridge 1994), pp. 129–48. See also Elisabeth de Fontenay, Le silence des bêtes. La philosophie à l'épreuve de l'animalité (Paris 1998).
105Cordemoy, Discours, in Œuvres, p. 206.
106See Descartes, letter ‘Au Marquis de Newcastle’, 23 November 1646 in Descartes, Œuvres, Alquié (ed.), p. 694.
107 Discours, in Œuvres, p.196 (‘Preface’).
108Ibid., p. 206.
109Ibid., pp. 223–33. According to Cordemoy, the acoustic processes which allowed animals to hear each other were identical to those in humans insofar as speech was also a purely physical activity which did not on its own, or a priori, entail a soul.
110Ibid., p. 209. Cordemoy posits an equivalence between the relation of word to thought and that of animal, machine or rock to man: see Philippe-Joseph Salazar, Le culte de la voix au XVIIème siècle: Formes esthétiques de la parole à l'âge de l'imprimé (Paris 1995), p. 73; on Cordemoy, pp. 71–7.
111Ibid., p. 210.
112Ibid., p. 208.
113Ibid., p. 233.
114See Noam Chomsky's suggestive talk, published, along with the ensuing discussion, as Language and Thought (Wakefield and London 1993), p. 37, in which he briefly refers to this test, devised by Cordemoy (and other Cartesians, as well as Descartes himself) for ‘determining whether another object has a mind like ours’, as ‘normal, garden variety science, like developing a litmus test for acidity: the task is to determine whether one of the real components of the world is present in a certain case – acidity, or a mind’.
115Cordemoy, Discours, in Œuvres, pp. 233–4.
116Chomsky, Language and Thought, pp. 37–40, also points to the possibility of comparing the ‘Cartesian tests for the existence of other minds with the current reliance on the 1950 “Turing test” to determine “empirically” whether a machine can carry out some intelligent act (say, play chess)’. But he then speaks of a ‘conceptual regression since the cognitive revolution of the 17th century’ and argues that one should not submit the study of the mind to a rigidly defined field and set of methods.
117Cordemoy, Discours, in Œuvres, p. 210.
118Ibid., p. 249.
119Ibid., pp. 250–3. See also the ‘Preface’, p. 199.
120Ibid., p. 238.
121For an insightful analysis of the place of Cordemoy's thought on language in his metaphysics, see the essay by Balz, Cartesian Studies, pp. 3–27: ‘Geraud de Cordemoy 1600–1684’.
122Cordemoy developed the notion that we might be mistaking occasion for cause in his Six Discours sur La distinction & l'union du corps & de l'ame, first published in 1666.
123Cordemoy, Discours, in Œuvres, p. 29. See also Hans Aarsleff, ‘Descartes and Augustine on Genesis, language, and the angels’, in Marcelo Dascal and Elhanan Yakira, (eds), Leibniz and Adam (Tel Aviv 1993), pp. 169–95, at p. 175.
124Aristotle, in De anima, II, 8, 420b, describes the human voice as an animal sound produced by the impact of air on the trachea along with an image. See Salazar, Culte de la voix, p. 31.
125Cordemoy, Discours, in Œuvres, p. 241: Les causes physiques de l'Eloquence.
126Cordemoy, Discours, in Œuvres, pp. 223–4.
127Ibid., p. 224.
128First published posthumously in Paris in 1664, but written as a companion treatise to L'Homme, which itself was first published at Leiden in 1662, in a Latin translation, and, again by Clerselier, in Paris, in the original French in 1664.
129Descartes, Le monde ou Traité de la lumière, in Oeuvres, Alquié (ed.), I, p. 319.
130Ibid., p. 315.
131Hacking, in Why does Language, p. 23, shows how Hobbes, despite having a definite notion of language, ‘did not have a theory of meaning’ (Hacking's italics). Precisely because thought and language were not construed as interdependent, the concept of meaning was not supervenient on the analysis of the linguistic function. See also Chomsky, Language, pp. 22 and 59 (the observation by Eric Wanner).
132Descartes, Le monde, in Œuvres, Alquié (ed.), p. 316.
133Ibid., pp. 316–17.
134Ibid., p. 317.
135Ibid., p. 318.
136Robert Hooke, Posthumous Works, Richard Waller (ed.) (London 1705), p. 165. Quoted by John Henry, ‘Robert Hooke’, in Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer (eds), Robert Hooke: New Studies, pp. 149–80, at p. 163. See also the Preface to Hooke's Micrographia (London 1665; reprinted New York 1961), a1r.
137Thanks are due to the Warburg Institute, University of London, where versions of this paper were researched and first written during my doctoral tenure there (1998–2001), and particularly to Jill Kraye; to the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University, New York, where the text was re-drafted; to Rhodri Lewis, for his expert remarks on the paper; and to the anonymous referees of the BJHP for their suggestions.