Philosophical language schemes: crossroads for study

ABSTRACT

The four papers printed in this themed issue of the journal are on the general topic of seventeenth-century attempts to devise a philosophical language scheme or what was known as a ‘real character’. Each article approaches the topic from a distinctive perspective: two of the papers focus on the work of a single thinker; a third paper examines the technical notations being concurrently developed in the areas of mathematics, music, and chemistry; and the fourth explores the way such schemes rest on semi-submerged and controversial assumptions about the nature of speech and writing. What is common to the four papers is a consensus that, while previous work in this area has tended to focus primarily on a handful of the fully worked-out schemes, there are rich avenues yet to be fully exploited if the scope of research is re-oriented towards the study of notational systems in the context of their specific application. It is in this sense that we invite readers to view our topic as an open cross-roads of intersecting avenues for study, rather than as a closed market-place for the display and comparison of the models available.

KEYWORDS:

• Philosophial language schemes
• real character
• shorthand
• alphabet
• notational systems

We present here four papers which deal, directly or indirectly, with seventeenth-century schemes going under the title a Philosophical Language, a Universal Language, a Real Character, and so on. Paradigm examples of such schemes are the ones published by George Dalgarno in Ars signorum (1661), by John Wilkins in An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), and by Jan Amos Comenius in a number of different guises over a number of different publications.¹ This topic has been grist to the mill for a thriving industry of study over the past fifty years, including comprehensive overviews of such seventeenth-century schemes, detailed critical editions of the major texts, articles with close analysis of specific technical and philosophical issues, and biographical accounts of the analyses of individual thinkers.²

It is fair to say that the main focus of much, if not most, previous work has been on the schemes themselves, on the authors of them, and on the institutions under whose auspices the schemes were developed and refined – notably the Royal Society of London and its equivalents elsewhere on the continent of Europe. But Philosophical Languages draw their inspiration from a network of ideas and practices in a wide variety of different disciplines, including developments in nomenclature in the biological and plant sciences, in algebra and geometry, in medical and [al]chemical theory and practice, and they cannot be properly understood without being carefully positioned in their intellectual and institutional background. As a consequence, work in this field has ranged widely over relevant background materials from a variety of disciplines so as to bring these fully to bear on the technical aspects of the schemes which are the centre of attention. The ‘Reader’ of selected articles on the topic edited by Subbiondo (1992), and the university-level textbook by Lewis (2007) are both representative of what one might characterise the centripetal organisation of this secondary literature – centripetal in the sense that background material derives its relevance and orientation by reference to a single focal point.

The present set of papers aims to match the scope of this previous work, but also to complement it by attempting to reverse the primary direction of approach in a way which can be characterised as centrifugal rather than centripetal. This, we believe, has the beneficial effect of loosening and broadening the boundaries of the topic, as can best be explained by concrete examples. Beside the set of major and minor thinkers who self-identified as inventors of a Philosophical Language scheme (or of a proposal for its design), there are also any number of individuals who were directly engaged with such schemes in an ancillary rather than an innovatory capacity. A clear example would be John Ray, an expert on plant taxonomy, who was brought in by John Wilkins as one of several named experts who helped construct the relevant sections of the encyclopaedic ‘Tables’ for his scheme. And while Ray was providing the set of terms for plants and animals, another fellow member of the Royal Society, Samuel Pepys, who happened to be the administrator of the Royal Navy, was busy devising the terms for naval and maritime matters. In these cases of secondary support, the flow of information and expertise was towards the Philosophical Language scheme. The same directionality also holds for other thinkers whose scientific and/or philosophical expertise prompted them to be active critics of the schemes, either quietly and constructively like Robert Boyle or publicly and satirically like Jonathan Swift in his depiction of the activities of the Academy of Lagado in Gulliver’s Travels (Swift 1726: Part III. ‘A voyage to Laputa’).³ But besides these individuals playing expert supportive roles, there are also cases where the flow of expertise is in the opposite direction, as is well illustrated by the account of developments in chemical notation given in O’Neil (2019, O’Neil 2021 and in the present volume).

These notational developments in chemistry were the result of major advances in experimental method in the late seventeenth century, notably by Robert Boyle and his associates in the Royal Society, and a strong argument can be made that the theoretical discussion of physical elements and their combinatorial properties was fully informed by the parallel discussions among members of the Society about the criteria on which a Real Character should be constructed, in which the structure of a complex notational unit would directly reflect its combinatory physical make-up. It is noteworthy that in the tract The origine of formes and qualities Robert Boyle makes a commonplace reference to the alphabetical metaphor originating from Lucretius in his De natura rerum⁴—that a finite set of indivisible ‘elementa’ combine to form all the different things in the created world in the same way as the indivisible letters of the alphabet can be recombined in a variety of ways to create all possible words (Boyle 1666, 94–95); however, he does not, in the same work, make any explicit mention of the schemes for a Real Character which were currently under discussion. Boyle is known to have been one of those who held the opinion that a new ‘general purpose’ Philosophical Language was both unnecessary and probably a futile pipedream, but he was, at the same time, firmly committed to the development of new chemical notation for the specific purposes of that discipline. And what is the case here for chemical notation is also relevant for the early-modern development of notation in other disciplines, as we shall see below. These are analytic activities that may be radically informed by contemporary thinking about Real Character but which identify themselves as free-standing projects, and thus fly under the radar of commentators with a narrowly centripetal perspective.

The idea of loosening the boundaries around our area of study – of adopting a centrifugal rather than a centripetal approach to it – is one that gradually emerged in ongoing discussion among the four authors here represented. For the record, these were initiated by their participation in a panel session with the rubric ‘Universal Language in the Early Modern Period: New Directions in Research’, which was proposed and organised by Sean O’Neil. This event took place at the online conference of the Renaissance Society of America in November 2022. The panel had a useful balance, comprising two scholars who had completed, or were in the process of completing, doctoral dissertations on immediately relevant topics (O’Neil and Kelly), and two other scholars with relevant expertise who were equally young at heart but longer in the tooth (Pavlas and Cram).

In fact, our discussion did not start with the boundaries or periphery of our common area but rather with its focal centre. When, following the RSA panel session, we decided to submit our papers for this special issue of Language & History, we found ourselves at a loss to come up with an agreed label for the range of schemes that were under discussion. None of the terms used by the authors of the schemes – Real Character, Universal Language, Philosophical Language – seemed either accurate or general enough, and indeed finding an adequate term for the authors of the schemes was similarly tricky: were they planners, projectors, inventors, or what?

It was at this stage that the boundary issue started to present itself, since whatever the general label, it seemed that a designation would also be needed to cover the just-mentioned category of person who was working on a problem involving nomenclature that a contemporary might immediately have described as being a Real Character, when they themselves would have resisted using that label. There is a further dimension that complicates this difficulty in an important fashion. For many language planners (to employ a term we found handy for interim use) the search for a Philosophical Language was not an ongoing, piecemeal, and cumulative activity, but a task with a unitary target and watershed effects: it was not like seeking for gradual improvements in husbandry, but more like solving the problem of squaring the circle or the invention of calculus. Once the key had been found, the problem would be solved once and for all. For many, the anticipated outcome would be a world-changing discovery of eschatological proportions: a reversal of the curse of Babel and a panacea for human problems of every sort. With the benefit of hindsight, of course, we know that the search for a Philosophical Language was in fact a quest for a chimera; no single scheme could possibly serve all the incompatible functions that it was supposed to do. As historiographers, we therefore need to pick our terms carefully and tactfully. While it is inappropriate to use labels for the activities of the language planners that assume the target to be a unitary one that would eclipse all its sources and influences, for the modern commentator it might turn out that the developments in nomenclature in the free-standing disciplines on the margins of the language planners’ territory might be judged of greater long-term importance than the central quest itself.

There was one final stage in our discussions that proved to be a turning point. It became clear, as we put together our four fairly disparate papers, that one striking thing we as authors have in common is that each of us has a published study of a topic related to terminology or taxonomy which qualifies as one of the free-standing areas of activity which are at, or just outside, the boundary of the Philosophical Language project. These considerations have led us to think about each of our various contributions as a ‘crossroads for study’, and indeed a major one rather than a minor one. A minor crossroads is when two minor roads happen to intersect, each going in its own direction; a major crossroads is where four (or more) roads meet at a point where each can be said both to arrive and depart.⁵

On the basis of the above considerations, we would like in this introduction to present this special issue of the journal as a Virtual Reader on the topic of a Real Character and a Philosophical Language. This comprises one part of a set of eight studies in all: the four studies which appear here in print for the first time being set in the larger context of four other publications, one by each of the same four authors, which are already accessible in print or online. In introducing each author in turn, we will not attempt to provide a summary of the paper here printed, which their own abstracts do quite efficiently, but rather to explain the reasons how and why their studies belong together in our Virtual Reader.

The first two papers presented here have as their starting point the role of sound-symbolism in the design of a Real Character, that is, where the phonetic form of a word is an acoustic image of what it represents, e.g. where the word ‘splash’ is perceived as imitating the sound of something falling into water. But, the two papers open rather different avenues of ideas as regards iconicity more generally, including cases where there is an isomorphism between the internal structure of words and the structure of the world of things they represent. So there is some overlap in the starting point of the two papers, but their end-point destinations are different.

The paper by Petr Pavlas focuses on the ideas and influence of Jan Amos Comenius. This scholar is for the Czechs a national figure with a stature similar to that of Shakespeare in the anglophone world, and there is a very large literature on his life and thought on which the present study rests. But Comenius is also a thinker of Europe-wide importance, and his visit to England in 1641 is widely recognised as having left a lasting impact in the development of the Universal Language schemes that were subsequently to be developed in the context of the Royal Society. The thrust of the present paper is that Comenius’s key legacy was to have established that the notion of the ‘self-defining word’ (word as definition) was the key to the design of a Philosophical Language, which depends on the combinatorial nature of the radical words of the scheme having a structure which iconically reflects the structure of the world of things which they represent. To use Comenius’s terms, the key to the gate of languages (Janua Linguarum) must also be one that opens the gate to the world of things (Janua Rerum). This, as Pavlas persuasively argues here and elsewhere, is the notion which connects Comenius’s project not just with language planners in the Royal Society but also with leading thinkers elsewhere in Europe, notably Leibniz and Mersenne (Pavlas 2017).

Although Pavlas has a goodly number of other publications specifically devoted to Comenius, the paper that we wish to single out for inclusion in our Virtual Reader is his recent study of Herborn encyclopaedism (Pavlas 2022). Encyclopaedism connects, of course, with Comenius’s Philosophical Language schemes, since one dimension of it – the Janua Rerum—is in effect an encyclopaedia (or an introduction to encyclopaedic thinking). But encyclopaedism in the seventeenth century is in itself a free-standing and institutionally well-established area of investigation. It has its own secondary literature in the historiography of ideas (cf. Hotson 2022), to which the present paper makes a substantial contribution, positioning the Herborn encylopedists in the context of their pedagogical and theological aims and assumptions (cf. also Pavlas 2020).

The paper by David Cram analyses the account of sound symbolism given by John Wallis in his English Grammar (1653), comparing and contrasting this with the accounts given by Comenius, Mersenne and others in the context of proposals for a Philosophical Language. Wallis did not himself publish any design for a Real Character, but, as this paper attempts to demonstrate, he provided the basic elements for two different phonetic alphabets incorporated into Wilkins’s scheme. Paradoxically, from Wallis’s viewpoint, these alphabets do not aim to be an acoustic Real Character, based on sound symbolism, but an articulatory one, where the structure of each symbol directly represents the movements of the organs of speech needed to produce the sound in question. However, Wallis clearly did not himself think that these proposals were the key to how a Philosophical Language might be constructed, since he continued to explore and elaborate his analysis of sound symbolism throughout his later life, and sadly died in the knowledge that he had failed to perfect his cherished project – as Wilkins also had done.

What had led Wallis to the ingenious articulatory notation that he contributed to Wilkins’s Essay was his experience of being involved in the task of teaching a profoundly Deaf⁶ boy, Alexander Popham, to speak. For a completely Deaf individual, an acoustic notation can be of no help at all, precisely because they cannot hear. If they are to be taught to speak (as distinct from learning to use a language) what can in principle help, if this is thought desirable, would be an articulatory notation, of the sort Wallis designed. Teaching language to the Deaf became a much debated and controversial topic in its own right in the late seventeenth century, and has remained so to this day.⁷ For this reason, we are including in our Virtual Reader a public lecture by Cram (2012) which has since resulted in a joint research project and a book-length treatment (Cram & Maat 2017).

The paper by Sean O’Neil printed here addresses the theme of our Virtual Reader quite directly since his subject is what he calls the ‘other Real Characters’, by which he means thinkers who are not expressly involved in a Philosophical Language scheme, but who are engaged in analysis that in effect runs fully parallel to that involved in constructing a Real Character. His three brief but carefully explained and illustrated case studies are those of algebra, music and chemistry, each of which is a free-standing area of study in its own right that is usefully illuminated by O’Neil’s clear and consistent viewpoint. A further case study that is here mentioned but not developed is that of the notation for movements in dance and fencing, which is an avenue that would reward fuller treatment.

The other paper by O’Neil to which we warmly refer our readers’ attention is one in which he traces how chemists at the turn of the nineteenth century formalised the practice of using chemical notation as a corrective for chemical nomenclature (O’Neil 2021). We particularly recommend this as a model for how the ramifications of the pursuit of a Real Character can be followed through diachronically, or longitudinally, as distinct from investigations which aim primarily to position case studies in their synchronic context. Other examples of longitudinal (or diachronic) studies of a similar sort are those by Dolezal (1985), who positions the index or lexicon appended to Wilkins’s Essay in the larger context of the history of dictionaries, and by Strasser (1988), who treats the cryptographic dimension of Real Character schemes in a similar fashion.

Kelly McCay is the author of the fourth article printed here, and it is perhaps the most radical of the four. It presents a close reading of the two most well-known seventeenth-century Philosophical Language schemes, Dalgarno’s Ars Signorum and Wilkins’s Essay. Her aim in doing so is to call into question many of the philosophical and theoretical-linguistic assumptions which underpin the secondary literature in whose turbulent wake she follows. In her discussion, her approach is refreshingly original in going against the grain of received trends; she tackles the schemes on their own technical terms, but chooses to focus on the different ways in which the relation between speech and writing can be understood. This, she argues, cannot be done without questioning assumptions which also form the foundation of modern linguistic theory whether of a Saussurean or Chomskyan kind, and which in turn challenges the framework within which historians of linguistic thought have typically approached the aims and issues of the language planners in the seventeenth century.

The complications which the author identifies are wittily implicit in the expression she has chosen for her title: viz. ‘effable characters’. This is further unpacked in an informative and entertaining way in the article by McCay (2021) which we herewith designate for inclusion in our Virtual Reader. It is an investigation of shorthand, which in the seventeenth century had gained surprisingly wide-spread use for a variety of purposes – notably that of taking down extemporary sermons – besides being held to be one of the ancillary functions that a Real Character might be able to serve. However, in order for a Real Character (in the strict contemporary sense of a ‘character’ as a system of writing) to be raised to the status of a Philosophical Language, the written symbols must be made ‘effable’, that is to say given a spoken form. But, a Philosophical Language constructed from an ‘effable shorthand’ is a contradiction in terms, as Dalgarno himself concluded and as a moment’s reflection will confirm; it is comparable to suggesting that we might improve the quality of scientific debate by speaking in ‘effable machine code’.

Interested readers may look forward to further book length contributions resulting from the recently completed doctoral research of both O’Neil (2019) and McCay (2024). In the meantime, we commend to your attention the four papers printed here for the first time, alongside the four further articles included in our Virtual Reader, as a bird’s eye view of the variety of fertile avenues for further investigation available at the crossroads for the study of Real Character and Philosophical Language schemes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Cram

David Cram is an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. By background and teaching experience he is a theoretical linguist, but his primary research interests have been in the history of ideas about language, with a special focus on the seventeenth century.

Notes

¹ In addition to these best-known schemes, there is a surprisingly large number of minor schemes and incomplete proposals. An early checklist records upwards of a hundred such schemes published in England and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Knowlson 1975, 224–232).

² For broad surveys, see Maat and Cram (2000), (2023).

³ On a more delicate distinction between those critics who held that a Philosophical Language was not an achievable project for technical reasons and those who held that the project was simply not necessary on the grounds that the desired objectives of clarity and rationality could be adequately achieved by the better (i.e. strictly ‘philosophical) use of existing languages, see Cram (1994).

⁴ De natura rerum, Lucretius and Leonard (1916): Book II, lines 703–723 and 1018–1029. The analogy is facilitated by the fact that Greek uses the same word for an indivisible physical ‘element’ and the simple alphabetical letter, viz. ‘stoicheion’, which carries over onto the usage of the standard Latin gloss for this word: ‘elementum’.

⁵ The analogy is worth pursuing, since a road roundabout is a crossroads with an ingenious system for allowing the centripetal and centrifugal flows of traffic to intermesh.

⁶ Members of the Deaf community now prefer to capitalise the word ‘Deaf’ to indicate community membership, reserving non-capitalised ‘deaf’ and ‘deafness’ to indicate hearing impairment more narrowly as an organic condition.

⁷ For a broad introduction to the topic, see the very readable book by the philosopher Jonathan Rée (1999). For a more comprehensive collection of technical treatments, see the two-volume work edited by Marschark and Spencer (2011).