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Realism,
Nominalism, Humanism, and the Renaissance
As philosophy was overrun by rationalism (the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century), and physical laws were discerned, everything became calculable and thus predictable. Working from Galileo's (1564-1641 C.E.) rediscovery of the mathematics behind mechanics, Hobbes (1588 - 1679 C.E.), in Ratio, determined that the purpose of words was to perform the calculus for the reasoning about reality. Therefore, metaphors should be avoided because of their inconsistency. Hobbes is guilty of subsuming the natural words of natural languages to an artificial symbolism - mathematics. In truth, mathematic symbolism is a subset of natural language, and not the inverse, as Hobbes assumed.
Other mathematicians, such as Descartes (1596-1650 C.E.) and John Wilkins, decided that language was actually pure mathematic symbols necessary for scientific cognition and an artificial language was necessary for social discourse. Wilkins, like many others, developed his own artificial language. Locke (1632-1704 C.E.), like other rationalists, believed that language had two forms: one to find reality (mathematics) and the other to have discourse. Locke resigned himself to the fact that language was often used inaccurately (the "civil" use, as opposed to the strict "philosophical" use for scientia).
Leibniz (1646-1716 C.E.) worked out a mathematics of language using prime numbers and multiplication rather than addition and subtraction, but soon determined that this, although easy to develop, was nearly impossible to actually use. From this difficulty, Leibniz developed the idea of "one universal grammar," which was strongly based on (but significantly different from) Grammatica Speculativa. Leibniz's theory ultimately developed along the lines of:
Universe and other monads <==> Representation <==> Human Monad
(A monad is a unit.) Leibniz notes that although some languages are representationally poor (they are not good for scientific inquiry), they may still represent the truth but in a "distorted" way (much as something viewed at a 45 angle is a distorted image of the same object viewed at a 90 angle). Leibniz's theory was picked up by Wolff (1679-1754 C.E.), who taught it in a much- diluted manner to Bopp (1791-1867 C.E.). Bopp is considered "the founder of linguistics proper" [Verburg in Hymes, 202-209].
In the early years of the eighteenth century, the practical disciplines (such as ethics, economics, sociology, medicine, etc.) resisted the domination of mathematics on every field of study. Many of the adherents to these practical philosophies did not see the world as a static place which was ultimately calculable. Rather, one could be enlightened through empirical experience and evidence. It was no longer necessary to have everything precisely predictable, but the relative certainty of highest probability - brought about through trial and error and analogy - became the rule of the day.
This spirit culminated in a twenty year debate at the Berlin Academy on the origin of human language [Hans Aarsleff, "The Tradition of Condillac: The Problem of the Origin of Language in the Eighteenth Century and the Debate in the Berlin Academy before Herder," in Hymes, 93-156]. Condillac (1715-1780 C.E.) believed that language was a function of the soul, and that calculus and algebra were merely other languages (although much more precise) [Verburg in Hymes, 209-210]. The greatest impact from the revolution against theoretical mathematics was an introduction of practicality in the study of language.
Realism,
Nominalism, Humanism, and the Renaissance
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