APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1

dreamed of a "universal characteristic," a universal language that could aid in clarifying thought, communication, and reasoning in all human endeavors. But Leibniz’s vision was at once more profound and utopian. All possible human thoughts were, he believed, ultimately composed out of simple conceptual elements, and the universal characteristic was itself to contain basic terms corresponding to those simple elements—"an alphabet of all human thought"—from which precise statements of thoughts could be produced by proper combination of the elements. Moreover, the basic terms of the universal characteristic were to be abstract symbols obeying a strict logico-mathematical system of rules with the power to express all the possible truths and their formal derivations from (or analyses into) a set of primitive "first truths." These derivations and analyses were to be purely syntactic in character and could in principle be carried out mechanically. It was part of Leibniz’s vision that there might be machines which could solve the most pressing difficulties in human thought, whether in esoteric or practical affairs—ranging from problems in mathematics to moral, political, and legal disputes. And indeed Leibniz himself designed one of the first mechanical computers. Though twentieth-century discoveries have reduced the scope of what is thought to be possible for computers and formal languages to accomplish, modern computer science very much falls in the lineage of Leibniz.