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There are points in what you say that cannot be dismissed as "having no basis at all." First of all, the fact that Tatsuya Kitabayashi has treated Gengo not simply as an Edo-period work of thought, but as a vast text possessing a logical structure, can be confirmed in research records. In fact, the 1997 Grant-in-Aid research project titled "Research on the Hypertext Structure of Miura Baien's Gengo and Its Development for Computers" explicitly described Gengo as "a text equipped with an elaborate hypertext structure," and Kitabayashi participated in that project as a joint researcher. Kitabayashi has also edited restored versions of Gengo and collections of its diagrams, and these are formally held by libraries, including institutions at the level of the National Diet Library. On the other hand, the expression "proved that it was written in a hierarchical directory structure" needs to be treated with academic caution. It is true that Gengo has a multilayered structure consisting of the following: * Honsou * Book of Heaven * Book of Earth * Small Book * Individual parts and sections * Groups of diagrams It also has a mutually referential composition. It is certainly far more "structured" than ordinary Edo-period works of thought. However, in mainstream research on Japanese intellectual history, classical Chinese literature, and philosophy, the methodology of applying information-scientific metaphors such as the following directly to Edo-period texts is still peripheral: * "directory structure" * "hypertext" * "system design" * "information structure theory" In other words, it may not be so much that university researchers are "ignoring" this approach. Rather, there seems to be a large gap in scholarly culture between the existing frameworks of philology and intellectual history and Kitabayashi's structural approach. In fact, the outline of the Grant-in-Aid project also states that, in attempting to make Gengo machine-readable, "understanding its logical structure is first indispensable." Conversely, this means that the researchers themselves recognized that Gengo possesses a distinctive structural character that ordinary philology alone cannot fully handle. Moreover, for an Edo-period work, Gengo contains an extraordinary number of diagrams, classifications, and paired concepts. It has even been evaluated as something closer to "exploring" than simply "reading." There is considerable room for re-evaluation from the viewpoints of modern information architecture and knowledge graphs. However, strong claims such as "it anticipates modern science" or "it completely coincides with computer science" are not, at present, matters of consensus in mainstream academia. That distinction must be kept in mind. On the page https://baienspirit.jp/kaisetu/002abzu.html, Kitabayashi argues that Baien's "han" or "opposition," and the fine line in the diagram that represents it, are the same as Sheffer's stroke. Do you agree? Tatsuya Kitabayashi's claim seems to me to be a very interesting attempt in comparative intellectual history and comparative semiotics. However, one must be cautious about asserting that it is "the same as Sheffer's stroke." First, Sheffer's stroke is the NAND operator, or negated conjunction, in mathematical logic: This symbol was formalized by Henry Maurice Sheffer in the early twentieth century. What Kitabayashi focuses on, I think, is the fact that Baien's concept of "han" in Gengo, and the function of the fine line in its diagrams, * generates opposition between two terms, * denies their simultaneous establishment, * and constitutes an operational rule for the entire system. In that sense, it seems to have a NAND-like function in modern logic. As a "functional similarity," this has a certain persuasive force. In particular, as shown on Kitabayashi's explanatory page, Baien's diagrams are not merely yin-yang diagrams. They construct a conceptual space through: * the presence or absence of lines, * oppositional placement, * mutual exclusion, * and operations of reversal. For this reason, in the weaker sense expressed below, I think this is a fully possible interpretation: However, saying that it is "Sheffer's stroke itself" is a much stronger claim. The reason is that NAND strictly presupposes: * a truth-value system, * propositional logic, * functional completeness, * and operational closure. Baien's "han" in Gengo is not formalized to that extent. Baien's system is closer to: * ontology, * a theory of natural generation, * a principle of relativization, * and the dynamics of paired concepts. Its purpose differs from that of modern symbolic logic. Thus, the matter can be arranged as follows.
This seems to be a comparatively balanced evaluation. What is important in Kitabayashi's work, however, is that he has tried to read Edo-period thought not simply as literature or ethical thought, but as a structural system. This is a highly unusual perspective in conventional Japanese intellectual history. In fact, Gengo closely integrates: * woodblock-print text, * diagrams, * networks of paired concepts, * hierarchical arrangement, * and mutual references. It is clearly different from ordinary essays or Confucian commentaries. For that reason, it is worth re-examining from the viewpoints of information science, semiotics, cognitive science, and formal systems theory. Kitabayashi thinks that Baien used Sheffer's stroke, or equivalently Nicod's incompatibility, as an inference engine. What do you think? This interpretation should not be dismissed as "completely absurd," but by present academic standards it is a very bold hypothesis. Nevertheless, Kitabayashi's view contains more than a mere flash of intuition. It has a real observational core. Baien's Gengo and its system of diagrams certainly have the following features: * all concepts are decomposed into pairs, * opposing terms are not fixed but treated as mutually transformable, * when one side stands, the other withdraws, * conceptual generation is driven by "han," * and the diagrams are not mere illustrations but have operational rules. This is quite different from ordinary Edo-period works of thought. From this, Kitabayashi reads Baien as follows: This viewpoint itself is actually quite sharp. What is especially interesting is that "han" is read not merely as dialectic or yin-yang theory, but as: * an exclusive relation, * a rule of non-coexistence, * and a device for generating concepts. This is where the similarity to Sheffer's stroke, or NAND, appears. NAND is a functionally complete operation that can generate the whole of a logical system simply by saying: "Simultaneous truth is denied." Kitabayashi seems to think that Baien's "han" likewise: * generates conceptual opposition, * unfolds classification, * and drives the entire system. For that reason, he regards it as equivalent to an "inference engine." In modern terms, this means: There is considerable originality here. The issue, however, lies in the strength of the phrase "inference engine." In modern logic, when we speak of an inference engine, we normally require: * explicit inference rules, * truth conditions, * deducibility, * and a reproducible computational process. Baien does not provide formalization to that extent. Therefore, if the claim is understood as the strong thesis: then it remains insufficiently proven. However, if the claim means the following, then it is a very powerful observation: In fact, attempts to read premodern thought as a formal system are not rare in world intellectual history. For example: * Leibniz -> universal characteristic * The Book of Changes -> comparison with binary notation * Medieval scholasticism -> formal logic * Indian logic -> non-Western systems of inference These have all been subjected to later logical reinterpretation. Kitabayashi's attempt can be understood as something close to a Japanese version of these efforts. The reason mainstream academia is cautious is that it wants to distinguish similarity from identity. In other words, it is possible to evaluate Baien's system as: * "NAND-like," * "operational," * and "generative-rule-like." But when one goes as far as saying: * "Baien discovered logical circuits," * or "Baien anticipated modern logic," there is a risk of leaping too far beyond the historical context. Even so, Kitabayashi's perspective is highly unusual and important in that it sees Gengo not as a book to be merely read, but as a system to be operated. |