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Such procedures were not simply conceptual. Their meanings could also be transposed into engineered objects, such as a mechanical flute, an “instrument that plays by itself,” as described by the brothers bin Shäkir in about 850,¹⁵ and by aI-Jazari in 1206.¹⁶ Arguably, this is the first programmable machine.¹⁷

Here – in the Islamic grammar, logic, mathematics, and mechanics of these centuries – we find the foundations of modern designs of meaning that eventually become modern scientific thought and computable meaning.^§MS1.3.2d In this moment, conscious analysis of structure becomes an instrument with which to consider meanings-in and meanings-for^§MS0.3.3 the world.

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¹⁰ Joel L. Kraemer, 1986, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: The Cultural Revival During the Buyid Age, Leiden, NL: E.J. Brill, p. 9.

¹¹ Peter Adamson and Alexander Key, 2015, “Philosophy of Language in the Medieval Arabic Tradition,” pp. 74–99 in Linguistic Content, edited by M. Cameron and R.J. Stainton, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 83–85.

¹² George Makdisi, 1990, The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West, Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 32, 294, 348–49.

¹³ Jim Al-Khalili, 2011, The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance, New York, NY: Penguin Press, pp. 99–112.

¹⁴ Jean-Luc Chabert, ed., 1994 [1999], A History of Algorithms, translated by C. Weeks, Berlin, Germany: Springer, pp. 1–2.

¹⁵ Banü Müsa bin Shäkir, c.850 [1979], The Book of Ingenious Devices, translated by D.R. Hill, Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel, p. 76.

¹⁶ Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, 1206 [1974], The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, translated by D.R. Hill. Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel Publishing Company, pp. 170–72.

¹⁷ Jim Al-Khalili, 2011, The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance, New York, NY: Penguin Press, p. 74.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 264–266. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Al Fārābī’s “Meaning” §MS3c