In the early 18th century, Leibniz outlined his " characteristica universalis ", an artificial language in which grammatical and logical structure would coincide, which would allow reasoning to be reduced to calculation.
12.
Instead, he proposed the creation of a " characteristica universalis " or " universal characteristic ", built on an alphabet of human thought in which each fundamental concept would be represented by a unique " real " character:
13.
Others, such as Jaenecke, for example, have observed that Leibniz also had other intentions for the " characteristica universalis ", and these aspects appear to be a source of the aforementioned vagueness and inconsistency in modern interpretations.
14.
A classic discussion of the " calculus ratiocinator " is Couturat ( 1901 : chpts . 3, 4 ), who maintained that the " characteristica universalis " and thus the " calculus ratiocinator " were inseparable from Leibniz's encyclopedic project ( chpt . 5 ).
15.
His " characteristica universalis ", calculus ratiocinator, and a " community of minds " intended, among other things, to bring political and religious unity to Europe can be seen as distant unwitting anticipations of artificial languages ( e . g ., Esperanto and its rivals ), symbolic logic, even the World Wide Web.
16.
Hartley Rogers saw a link between the two, defining the " calculus ratiocinator " as " an algorithm which, when applied to the symbols of any formula of the characteristica universalis, would determine whether or not that formula were true as a statement of science " ( Hartley Rogers, Jr . 1963; p . 934 ).
17.
"' History "': G�del 1944 summarized the historical background from Leibniz's in " Characteristica universalis ", through Frege and Peano to Russell : " Frege was chiefly interested in the analysis of thought and used his calculus in the first place for deriving arithmetic from pure logic ", whereas Peano " was more interested in its applications within mathematics ".
