The Dream of Perfect Language

The dream is older than Wittgenstein. Leibniz, in the seventeenth century, imagined a universal symbolic language in which every concept would be represented by a unique character and every valid inference reduced to calculation. Let us calculate, he proposed, as though human disagreement were a technical problem awaiting the right notation. Frege's Begriffsschrift, Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, and the Tractatus each pursued the dream with increasing rigor. Each failed where the dream itself failed — in the gap between formal structure and the richness of ordinary meaning — and each failure produced the machinery of modern computing as its consolation prize.