The Quest for a Perfect Language: From Wilkins to Lincos
A Genealogy of Freudenthal's Lincos
This first part of a two-part series traces the intellectual history behind Hans Freudenthal's Lincos, a constructed language designed for communication with extraterrestrial intelligences. It explores the 17th-century English philosophers who sought to create a 'philosophical language' based on 'real characters'—words that inherently describe the essence of what they denote. From John Wilkins's taxonomic system to Francis Lodwick's verb-based approach, these early projects grappled with fundamental questions about the nature of meaning and the arbitrariness of natural language. The article sets the stage for understanding how these ideas evolved into the mathematical logic that underpins Lincos.
In a philosophical language, i.e. a language based on a real character, the word denoting dogs would somehow, entirely by itself and with no need of prior knowledge, communicate to its user and listener sufficient information to understand what a dog is.