In 1974 I met Marshall McLuhan for the first time and shared with him my hypothesis that modern science developed in Europe partially due to the notion of universal law, which derives from their tradition of monotheism and codified law. Upon hearing my theory he immediately pointed out that the use of the phonetic alphabet was also unique to the West and that it influenced the development of abstract science and deductive logic. We (McLuhan and Logan 1977) combined our ideas and developed the hypothesis that the phonetic alphabet, codified law, monotheism, abstract science, and deductive logic formed a group of five self-supporting ideas that emerged in the West for the very first time between 2000 and 500 BC in the narrow geographic zone between the Tigris-Euphrates river system and the Aegean Sea.

The alphabet operates as a writing system by breaking down words into their basic phonemic elements and then representing those phonemic elements with meaningless visual signs. The use of the phonetic alphabet therefore requires analysis, coding, and decoding. It is the most abstract writing system ever developed and can represent any language with twenty to thirty signs. It also permits a perfect ordering or classification of all the words of a language. The phonetic alphabet was an invention of the Seirites, a Semitic people who mined copper, traded with the ancient Egyptians, and occupied the southern part of the Sinai desert almost four thousand years ago. All other phonetic alphabets are derived from this first alphabet and they all stimulate abstraction, analysis, classification, coding, and decoding all of which are essential for codified law, monotheism, abstract science and deductive logic. Please consult The Alphabet Effect (Logan 1986) for more details.

The alphabet effect taught me that a writing system can influence conceptual thinking in a fundamental way. My study of language and science revealed that there is no tradition of science without a tradition of both writing and mathematics, and that there has been no tradition of abstract science without the use of a phonetic alphabetic. It is obvious that the literacy of letters and numbers and conceptualization are linked in a very profound manner.