Page 508 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Key Figures
obtained a doctorate in law and also wrote a dis- should be used in historical linguistics, and criticized sertation in philosophy, De Arte Combinatoria, what he considered to be unsound etymological
already showing some of his fascination with the idea of using mathematical methods for the design of a 'universal language' on the basis of an 'alphabet of human thought.' He did not succeed, in 1666, in obtaining a position at the University of Leipzig, whereupon, although being offered a chair in law in the nearby city of Altdorf, he left the university altogether.
For the rest of his life Leibniz was employed by members of the influential German nobility, first in Mainz, and from 1676 until his death by the dukes of Hanover. He served them as a legal and political adviser, as a diplomat, as an engineer, as a librarian, and as an historian, investigating the history of the House of Brunswick.
Next to these professional occupations he pursued his scientific interests, managing to communicate with leading European scientists through personal contacts during his diplomatic journeys and by writing letters. Relatively little of his work was published during his lifetime. The bulk of his writings consists of memor- anda, unfinished manuscripts (including all his im- portant papers on logic), and his tremendous cor- respondence. What is probably the most important source for Leibniz's philosophy of language, the New Essays on Human Understanding, appeared in print only in 1765, almost fifty years after his death in 1716. (And about 60 years after the death of Locke; thereby it somewhat missed its target, as it was a polemical writing, directed against Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.)
The lack of accessibility of Leibniz's own work con- trasts with his continuous efforts, as a librarian, archi- vist, and encyclopedist, to make the vast but chaotic body of scientific knowledge of his time more trac- table, by collecting, ordering, cataloguing, and so on. Leibniz aspired to be a science manager in quite a modern sense, writing enthusiastic (and often over- optimistic) research proposals in order to attract inter- est and raise funds for his projects. In general, he stimulated organization and institutionalization of academic life, one result of which was the foundation of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1700.
1. Historical Linguistics
Leibniz's inquiries into the origin and the development of languages were connected with his interest in the history of the peoples of Europe. For example, he established the kinship of Finnish and Hungarian, and concluded that an extended language area must have been split by intruding Slav peoples. Without coming to a definite conclusion on the tenability of a mono- genetic theory of the origin of language, he held that an original language could anyway not be found among the languages that were known. Leibniz pro- posed etymological principles, in order that they
reasoning. (For further reading see Leibniz 1981; Arens 1969; Robins 1990.)
2. Universal Language
In Leibniz's time there existed several proposals (by Mersenne, Dalgamo, Wilkins, and others) for the con- struction of an artificial 'universal language,' that could be understood by people of all tongues, and which would allow all possible knowledge to be ex- pressed unequivocally and in a systematic way. In this course Leibniz put forward his project for a Charac- teristica Universalis. Like the other proposals, its start- ing point was to be an analysis of concepts, backing up the nominal definitions of the signs of the language. What constituted an innovation was that the concepts would be coded as numbers. Reasoning could then be reduced to numerical calculation (Calculus Rati- ocinator). Leibniz must have felt that reasoning could be performed on a mechanical calculator, like the one that he had designed himself and that he proudly demonstrated to the members of the Royal Society on his trip to London in 1673. In order to attain the high- pitched objectives of the universal language project, supporting results from many disciplines were needed. In fact much of Leibniz's work on logic and grammar should be situated within the project of the Charac- teristica Universalis. Moreover, he wanted a 'universal
encyclopedia,' which was to provide the background material for the required concept analysis. Leibniz was always eager to recruit support for the immense task of designing such an encyclopedia. It never got very far. (In Leibniz 1969 one finds several writings of Leibniz on his Characteristica Universalis.)
3. PhilosophyofLanguage
For Leibniz the function of language was twofold; for communication, and as an instrument in the process of thinking. The emphasis on the second, computational, aspect is especially characteristic for Leibniz. As poin- ted out, it played a central role in the Characteristica Universalis project.
Leibniz opposed the popular opinion (for example, held by Hobbes) that the meaning of words is com- pletely arbitrary. In primitive languages there will always have been a natural correspondence between a word and its signification. Although Leibniz did not deny that conventional aspects may emerge when a language develops, he assumed that a causal link of the words with their source will always remain. As an exception to this rule Leibniz recognized, besides artificial languages, only Chinese.
According to Leibniz the structure of language, that is, its underlying logical form, mirrors the structure of the world. The concepts, being the elements of his ontology, are to be analyzed into their primitive con- stituents, and correspondingly the meaning of com-
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