Digital infinity
The idea is that all human languages follow a simple logical principle, according to which a limited set of digits—irreducible atomic sound elements—are combined to produce an infinite range of potentially meaningful expressions.
In his Dialogo, Galileo describes with wonder the discovery of a means to communicate one's "most secret thoughts to any other person ... with no greater difficulty than the various collocations of twenty-four little characters upon a paper."
[1] 'Digital infinity' corresponds to Noam Chomsky's 'universal grammar' mechanism, conceived as a computational module inserted somehow into Homo sapiens' otherwise 'messy' (non-digital) brain.
[4] Today's digital computers are instantiations of Turing's theoretical breakthrough in conceiving the possibility of a man-made universal thinking machine—known nowadays as a 'Turing machine'.
In other words, only in the case of digital computation and communication can information be truly independent of the physical, chemical or other properties of the materials used to encode and transmit messages.
When you telephone your mother in another city, the message stays the same as it goes from your lips to her ears even as it physically changes its form, from vibrating air, to electricity in a wire, to charges in silicon, to flickering light in a fibre optic cable, to electromagnetic waves, and then back again in reverse order.
Likewise, a given programme can run on computers made of vacuum tubes, electromagnetic switches, transistors, integrated circuits, or well-trained pigeons, and it accomplishes the same things for the same reasons.
It is one of the great ideas in intellectual history, for it solves one of the puzzles that make up the 'mind-body problem', how to connect the ethereal world of meaning and intention, the stuff of our mental lives, with a physical hunk of matter like the brain.
However, it was not long before philosophers (most notably Hilary Putnam) took what seemed to be the next logical step—arguing that the human mind itself is a digital computer, or at least that certain mental "modules" are best understood that way.
Previously, linguists had thought of language as learned cultural behaviour: chaotically variable, inseparable from social life and therefore beyond the remit of natural science.
For phonologists, "digital infinity" was made possible by the human vocal apparatus conceptualised as a kind of machine consisting of a small number of binary switches.
The basic idea was that every phoneme in every natural language could in principle be reduced to its irreducible atomic components—a set of 'on' or 'off' choices ('distinctive features') allowed by the design of a digital apparatus consisting of the human tongue, soft palate, lips, larynx and so forth.
Jakobson had already persuaded a young social anthropologist—Claude Lévi-Strauss—to apply distinctive features theory to the study of kinship systems, in this way inaugurating 'structural anthropology'.
Chomsky—who got his job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology thanks to the intervention of Jakobson and his student, Morris Halle—hoped to explore the extent to which similar principles might be applied to the various sub-disciplines of linguistics, including syntax and semantics.
[7] The linguistic wars attracted young and ambitious scholars impressed by the recent emergence of computer science and its promise of scientific parsimony and unification.
