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, scientific, and metaphysical concepts - wikipedia

- Universal language of science

Leibniz thus hoped to create a language usable within the framework of a universal logical calculation or calculus ratiocinator.

- Diagrammatic reasoning

The characteristica universalis is a recurring concept in the writings of Leibniz. When writing in French, he sometimes employed the phrase **spécieuse générale** to the same effect. The concept is sometimes paired with his notion of a calculus ratiocinator and with his plans for an encyclopaedia as a compendium of all human knowledge.

These four elements make up the four corners of a diamond (see picture). Opposing pairs of these are joined by a bar labeled "contraries" (earth-air, fire-water).

At the four corners of the superimposed square are the four qualities defining the elements. Each adjacent pair of these is joined by a bar labeled "possible combination"; the diagonals joining them are labeled "impossible combination".

Starting from the top, fire is formed from the combination of dryness and heat; air from wetness and heat; water from coldness and wetness; earth from coldness and dryness.

This diagram is reproduced in several texts including ''Saemtliche Schriften und Briefe'' (''Saemtliche Schriften und Briefe'', Reihe VI, Band 1: 166, Loemker 1969: 83, 366, Karl Popp and Erwin Stein 2000: 33).

# More recent projects

A wide variety of List of constructed languages have emerged over the past 150 years which may be seen as supporting some of Leibniz's intuitions - wikipedia

- Raymond F. Piper (1957; 432–433) claimed that O.L. Reiser's ''Unified Symbolism for World Understanding in Science'' (1955), an expansion of his ''A Philosophy for World Unification'' (1946), was inspired by Leibniz's ''characteristica universalis'', and believed necessary for world understanding and unbiased communications so that "war may eventually be eliminated and that a worldwide organism of peaceful human beings may gradually be established" (Piper Ibid.). - The study of Boolean algebra (structure)|Boolean algebras and group theory in the 19th century proved correct Leibniz's intuition that abstract algebra|algebraic methods could be used to reason about qualitative and non-numerical phenomena. Specifically, the members of the universal set of a Boolean algebra (structure)|Boolean algebra or Group (mathematics)|group need not be numbers. Moreover, a fair bit of philosophy and theoretical science can be formalized as axiomatic theories embodying first-order logic and set theory. Note also how model theory has been employed to formalize and reason about such emphatically nonnumerical subjects as semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. But these approaches have yet to result in any pictogram|pictographic notations. - Fearnley-Sander (1986) went one step further, defining Leibniz's ''characteristica'' as a combination of the algebra of logic (which Fearnley-Sander defined as the ''calculus ratiocinator'') and the algebra of geometry (defined as the ''characteristica geometrica''). Fearnley-Sander suggested that this combination had "come to pass" with the rise of universal algebra. Some people other than Fearnley-Sander working in the area of "universal algebra", the study of the mathematical and logical properties of algebraic structures generally, do not believe that universal algebra has anything to do with the ''characteristica''. - Palko, Gy Bulcsu (1986) considered structured analysis for analyzing and designing hierarchic systems by using an iconic language, and suggested that such was an application of the universal characteristics Leibniz's project to the language of structured analysis and the formalization of an iconic control system. - Kluge (1980) argued that Gottlob Frege|Frege's landmark ''Begriffsschrift'' was consciously inspired by the ''characteristica universalis''. - Even though Charles Sanders Peirce, a founder of semiotics, believed that all reasoning was diagrammatic, the relation, if any, of the ''characteristica'' to his existential graphs and to semiotics has yet to be explored in the English literature. - Several aspects of logical positivism, specifically: - * The first-order theories of Rudolf Carnap's ''Aufbau'' (1928, English translation 1967) and of its successor, Goodman (1977), are Leibnizian in their sweep and ambition, although Leibniz would have taken strenuous exception to Carnap's resolute Vienna Circle|hostility to all metaphysics. - * The Unified Science|unification of science movement of the 1930s, led by Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and Charles W. Morris, and later by Edward Haskell et al., bears comparison with the ''characteristica''. - * Otto Neurath's Isotype (pictograms)|isotype pictogram system, and "international picture language". - The following attempts to recast parts of theoretical science as axiomatic first-order theories can be viewed as attempts to develop parts of the ''characteristica'': - *''Special relativity'', by Hans Reichenbach, Rudolf Carnap, and others during the 1920s (Carnap 1958: 197–212); - * ''Biology'', by Joseph Woodger (1937), also during the 1930s (Carnap 1958: 213–20): - * ''Mechanics'', by Suppes (1957: 291–305) and others during the 1950s. - The objectives of the 'Symbolator' or 'idea-computer' (Goppold 1994) resemble in some respects a less ambitious version of the ''characteristica universalis''. - Connections with the Jewish Kabbalah|Cabbala, and the Baháʼí Faith and auxiliary language|International auxiliary language policy of the Baháʼí Faith have also been made. - The characteristic has also been claimed as an ancestor of the pictographic Energy Systems Language and associated Emergy Synthesis of Howard T. Odum|Odum's ''systems ecology|Systems Ecology'' (Cevolatti and Maud, 2004). The Energy Systems Language combines lines and points with "a kind of pictures" manipulated by means of digital computers and software packages like EXTEND (Odum, Odum, and Peterson 1995), and Valyi's Emergy Simulator. It was designed to provide a general systems language affording quantitative accounting and mathematical simulation of qualitative energy relationships between ecological entities: "that science in which are treated the forms or formulas of things in general, that is, quality in general". A general algebra known as the Emergy|emergy algebra emerged from the repeated use of this language in modelling and simulating the energy flow (ecology)|energetic principles of ecological relations. In particular it afforded the discovery and demonstration of the maximum power principle, suggested as the fourth law of thermodynamics. If this ancestral claim is granted, then simulation software like EXTEND and Valyi's Emergy Simulator can be seen as combining the ''characteristica'' and the ''calculus ratiocinator'', if and only if the digital computer is interpreted as a physical embodiment of the ''calculus ratiocinator''. - The work of Mario Bunge on the border of physics and metaphysics seems grounded in metaphysical presuppositions similar to those of Leibniz's ''characteristica'' (Radnitzky 1981: 246). - Jacob Linzbach's Transcendent Algebra, a pasigraphy designed to allow the "calculation of truth" through manipulation of given facts following basic principles much like those used in mathematics, was inspired by Leibniz's ''characteristica''. - Lojban (and its older version Loglan) are both artificial languages derived from predicate logic, and intended for use in human communication. - Charles K. Bliss's Blissymbols or Blissymbolics, presently used as an 'alternative and augmentative language' for disabled people but originally intended as an International 'Auxlang', is said to be in the mold of the ''characteristica'' (Bliss 1978). - Emoji, while still in their relative infancy, could be considered to be an early stage in the organic development of a universal logographic language. - Ithkuil is a constructed language created by John Quijada, designed to express deeper levels of human cognition briefly yet overtly and clearly, particularly with regard to human categorization. - The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), with a history going back to the 1920s, was founded under its current name in 1947 as a non-governmental organization with general consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Its membership consists of the national standards bodies of 164 of the UN Member States. Based on the work of its over 250 technical committees, the ISO has issued over 20,000 standards for scientific terminology, names and abbreviations, weights and measures, and safety-related and other pictographs. - The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose, developmental modeling language in the field of software engineering that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. - Bennett, John G.; Bortoft, Henri; and Pledge, Kenneth: "Towards an Objectively Complete Language: An Essay in Objective Description as Applied to Scientific Procedure," ''Systematics: The Journal of the Institute for the Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences'', Vol. 3, No. 3, (December 1965), pp.185–229. - The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language.