James Dougal Fleming is right, it is best to have a copy of John Wilkins’s An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) alongside any discussion of that text. It need not be the versions available online, as Fleming suggests: bound print facsimiles (over 400 pages) are available for no more than $60. No matter its intent, Wilkins’s essay offers us a contemporaneous explanatory dictionary of thousands of ordinary early modern English words and phrases along with a look at the state of knowledge and information of the time from the perspective of the co-founder of the Royal Society. Fleming’s book opens up a welcome discussion of Wilkins’s real character, which has not been fully studied or described in the almost 350 years of the book’s existence. What is a real character? Quite simply it is a writing system that would by its design directly reveal the extralinguistic reality of any thing or notion without linguistic mediation.
Fleming studies the current and past state of information technology within the broader question, “What is information?”; an early history of shorthand writing, which he claims leads directly to Wilkins’s character; binary codes; universal and philosophical languages; communication studies; phenomenology; and a detailed analysis of the history and production of John Wilkins’s real character. The discussions that involve seventeenth-century ideas are somewhat hampered by a lack of nuance, and by an incomplete understanding of book production, especially related to Wilkins’s role as the main force behind the society’s relation to publishers and printers (for example, the society did not publish the Essay as Fleming claims).
Chapter 5 offers the most significant contribution to the scholarship on Wilkins’s Essay in its carefully presented and argued explication of the real character. Here Fleming completes his hypothesis that the real character bears analogy to what he calls the mathematical theory of communication information; in other words, phenomenon, knowledge, and information become through the mathematical-like encoding of the real character “a mirror of the universe.” It is a “cognitive sign system,” “counter-oral,” and “anti-dialogic” (221). Fleming makes an interesting claim that the real character of Wilkins is “synoptic,” a complex of radicals (primary irreducible concepts) and particles (grammatical and semantic functions or operators) that must be “taken, as they are, together” (219). Fleming correctly points out the limitations of previous scholarship on the universal character of Wilkins; for him the character is “a transformative communications product grounded in the seventeenth-century real character movement” (6). It is odd then that Fleming neglects the linguistic-historical scholarship, a shortcoming in his work that weakens its reliability for those who are new to Wilkins scholarship.
The ontology, as Fleming calls the philosophical dictionary, is the outcome of the philological analyses that Wilkins and his circle performed in the making of the system. Fleming does insist, and rightfully so, that a study of Wilkins’s scholarship puts before us the shortcomings of our own intellectual prejudices: Is a database a crypto-ontology? Do databases mirror a metaphysic that brings with them the problems associated with language, thought, and culture?
A nontrivial shortcoming in Fleming’s work follows from his putting aside the important linguistic scholarship of the past forty or more years and from neglecting the comprehensive assistance of Wilkins’s friend and collaborator, William Lloyd, one of the most highly regarded philologers of the day. Wilkins may have started working on a real character and philosophical language, but when he and Lloyd began work on their Philosophical Tables and Alphabetical Dictionary, they became immersed in sorting lexical items (words and phrases) according to semantic and topical relations among them. The tables are more anti-ontology or thesaurus-like in their insistent English-centric and linguistically informed way. Rather than an ontology, for the most part they constructed an onomasiological lexicon that included a rather truncated and nonscientific natural history. Just as Wilkins and Lloyd needed to fulfill the society’s commission, a useful dictionary project needs to culminate in a printed text.
The value of the book resides in Fleming’s focus on the real character, information technology, and characters as signs and devices. The infoskeptic in Fleming compels him to ask if the “pragmatic and pitiless forces” of information and big data will meet the fate of its seventeenth-century avatar (272), Wilkins’s Essay, that is, as a failed market technology that would keep us circling the static track of all the data that’s fit to utter.
