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Strangely enough, the first recorded human attack on the problems of AI came from the fortune tellers . If their systems for generating predictions had overlooked certain classes of human events, then obviously those systems could never even accidentally predict them!
Beginning before 1000 BCE, astrologers were already exploring an especially rich (though arbitrary) system of planetary relationships with three orthogonal dimensions (planet, sign, and house), trying to map them onto human experiences. The I Ching, slightly later, explored the 64 precise permutations of a six-bit binary system, as well as the eight three-bit half-words they contained. I Ching portal
The Kabalah and Tarot (43k, 1 gif) offered simpler systems around 1000 AD, tied more directly to particular human meanings like virtue and vice.
Orthogonality is a critical concept in software design. The name implies a set of dimensions that are at right angles to each other, so that any point can be defined in terms of one-value-for-each-dimension. A vivid example of this arrived with the 1984 debut of MacPaint, where one could easily vary the following orthogonal dimensions for each graphic object: shape, size, position, fill-pattern, border-thickness, and border-pattern.
y
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| / * P = (x, y, z)
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|/__________xThe beauty of orthogonality in software design is that it allows an extremely broad range of objects to be defined with a minimal set of parameters. Consequently, one need only remember these few commands to master all the objects so created. ("An ounce of orthogonality is worth a ton of 'added-features' tinsel.") And the programming-code required to implement them is also minimized! So the dream of an orthogonal analysis of all natural and social phenomena, is an enticing one...
Aristotle made a much more grounded assault on the range of human meanings around 300 BCE. Aquinas later extended Aristotle's analysis to include Christian ethics. The Middle Ages brought Raymond Lull playing mystical combinatorial games, leading eventually to Leibniz's (1646- 1716) dream of a purely rational culture, where all concepts will have been encoded as mathematical formulae, and philosophical disputes will be met with the cry, Calculemus... "Let us calculate!" Leibniz page
In modern times, the most disciplined attempt to codify philosophy is probably the "Syntopicon" from Mortimer Adler's Great Books series. Here's a brief glance at Adler's scheme, in light of AI and modern science. Adler's own Great Ideas links page
Giambattista Vico in his "New Science" (1725, pars 161-162) was likely the first to anticipate a universal dictionary of concepts , realized in 1852 with the thousand categories (22k) of Peter Mark Roget's Thesaurus. [full text] The Dewey Decimal System (1876) [background] and Library of Congress Classification are two later evolutions, but all of these are plagued by redundancies and ambiguities. Two net-specific proposals are Yahoo and the Usenet hierarchy itself (here, just the groups that have FAQs). (The Usenet hierarchy can usually be examined on Unix systems via: /usr/lib/news/active or /usr/lib/news/newsgroups.)
Fritz Lehmann is collecting a master-list of indexing schemes, or "concept systems", that currently numbers over 150 entries, many extremely obscure. ;^/
A.I. views hierarchies as networks of 'nodes' connected by 'isA links.' In computer memory, any clump of data can be a node, and any pointer to such a clump can be a link. 'IsA' is the particular relationship between a more-specialized and a less-specialized form of the same thing: "hunger isA motive" translates as: "Motive is a general class that includes hunger as one specialized form." (Another common sort of link is 'partOf'.)
While hierarchical thinking comes naturally to most people, the implementing of hierarchies in computer memory allows one to extend the hierarchy-structure in ways that are less intuitively obvious. It's cheap and easy, for example, to allow a single element to be 'multiply indexed' at more than one location in the hierarchy... but even this minor tweak comes only slowly to human thinking-habits.