1
|
|
2
|
- A Priori Philosophical Languages
- From Leibniz to the Encyclopédie
|
3
|
- Goal: make a written language that can exactly represent something in
the world
- Library of Congress System = a priori
|
4
|
- Binary Qualities: able to identify anything in the universe
- Single Articulation: little changes make a slight conceptual change
- Primitives: small atoms of meaning; build everything on the primitives,
like a chemical formula
- Tree Structure: like levels of classification in the animal kingdom
|
5
|
- Linguistic Peace: all thoughts would be the same
- Is there Choice or Agency???
|
6
|
- Based on existing languages and adapted
|
7
|
|
8
|
- The goal of both types of philosophic language is to overturn human
language. If we had a common
language, we would be able to discourse in peace. It would keep us from arguing.
|
9
|
- Denis Diderot: (rationalist); wanted to systemize all human
knowledge. Multiple texts – one
point on a text refers to another point on a different text; this way
different concepts can be related.
(See pages 173-4 of the text.)
|
10
|
- A Priori Languages
- “They are universal systems; they are comprehensible to speakers of
different natural languages and are perfect in the sense that they
permit neither error nor ambiguity.
They are a priori, in that they are based not on the rules which
govern the surface structures of natural languages, but rather, ideally,
on a presumed deep grammar common to all natural languages. They are, finally, philosophical because
they presume that this deep grammar, based on the laws of logic, is the
grammar of thought of human beings and machines alike” (SFPL 311).
|
11
|
- Identified a system of primitives.
- Elaborated an ideal grammar.
- Formulated a series of rules governing pronunciation.
- Elaboration of a lexicon which a speaker could use to formulate true
propositions.
|
12
|
- “The greatest remedy for the mind consists in the possibility of
discovering a small set of thoughts from which an infinity of other
thoughts might issue in order, in the same way as from a small set of
numbers [the integers from 1 to 10] all the other numbers may be
derived” (SFPL 275).
|
13
|
- “There is not an atom, indeed there is no such thing as a body so small
that it cannot be subdivided . . . It follows that there is contained in
every particle of the universe a world of infinite creatures. . . There
can be no determined number of things, because no number could satisfy
the need for an infinity of impressions” (SFPL 277).
|
14
|
- Misinterpretation of Book of Changes
- “Those binary digits 1 and 0 are totally blind symbols which (through a
syntactical manipulation) permits discoveries even before the strings
into which they are formed are assigned meanings” (SFPL 286).
- Anticipation of Boolean Algebra and Machine Language.
|
15
|
- Finite Set of Primitives
- Finite Set of Rules (for combining)
- Produce an Infinite # of Propositions
|
16
|
- Can a system that produces an infinite # of propositions produce all
possible propositions?
|
17
|
- Integers
- Fractions
- Irrational Numbers
- Imaginary Numbers
- Each set includes an infinite # of propositions, but does not include
all propositions.
|