Taxonomy and the Undoing of Language: Dialogic Form in the Universal Languages of the Seventeenth Century

Universal languages were invented as part of the larger effort by seventeenth-century science to set down exact written descriptions of nature and natural phenomena. As philosophical systems, they posited a direct correspondence between the taxonomy of natural order and the logic of syntactical representation. Historically, however, they turned out to be unsuccessful models for generating discourse. They are types of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls "unitary language," and a unitary language can represent meaning only with reference to the "heteroglossia" Bakhtin finds characteristic of natural language. The universal languages were attempts, using the resources of Aristotelian taxonomy, to override the heteroglossia, efforts to obliterate language in favor of their own unitary taxonomy. However, scientists of the period argued the existence and causes of natural phenomena, and the universal languages proved impractical for their communicative needs.