Dear Log,
«Putting it all together, I think we have a winner. Leibniz was clearly a really smart person, and the proposal to solve political and religious disagreements by translating natural language discourses into products of prime numbers was a really stupid idea. It's a good premise for historical fantasy, though -- the idea of a sort of Leibnizian underground, operating through history into modern times, is one of the fun background assumptions of Neal Stephenson's currently-unfolding historical trilogy.To advance the discussion, in a gingerly way, into more recent times, I'll mention that I first asked myself these questions about Leibniz shortly after the publication of Katz & Fodor (1963), which advanced a theory of natural-language semantic interpretation based on the decomposition of word meanings into sets of primitive semantic features, and the collection of these features into ever-larger sets by a recursive procedure operating on syntactic "deep structures".»
