Leibniz: A Very Short Introduction

Antognazza, Maria Rosa

doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198718642.001.0001

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The first have a finite description, whereas the second have an infinite one. This is a key aspect of his account of contingency [72,Chapter 5]. and, by a similar reasoning, p n (w k ) for any k < n by p n (w k+1 ) = p n (w 1 ) k + 1 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…Without stepping on the muddy terrain of the relation between language and thought (see, e.g., [88]), this question brings us back to Leibniz' quest for an alphabet of thought, the Characteristica Universalis (see e.g. [72,Chapter 2] or [50]), and the many fascinating implications derived from it. so that g(x) = 1 if x has that attribute, and g(x) = 0 if it does not.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Universality and Complexity in Natural Languages: Mechanistic and Emergent

de les Coves,

Corominas Murtra,

Sole

2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Human language is a prime example of a complex system characterized by multiple scales of description. Understanding its origins and distinctiveness has sparked investigations with very different approaches, ranging from the Universal Grammar to statistical analyses of word usage, all of which highlight, from different angles, the potential existence of universal patterns shared by all languages. Yet, a cohesive perspective remains elusive. In this paper we address this challenge. First, we provide a basic structure of universality, and define recursion as a special case thereof. We cast generative grammars of formal languages, the Universal Grammar and the Greenberg Universals in our basic structure of universality, and compare their mathematical properties. We then define universality for writing systems and show that only those using the rebus principle are universal. Finally, we examine Zipf's law for the statistics of word usage, explain its role as a complexity attractor, and explore its relation to universal writing systems as well as its similarities with universal Turing machines. Overall, we find that there are two main kinds of universality, termed {\it mechanistic} and {\it emergent}, and unveil some connections between them.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 86%