Made me think about John Wilkins' "philosophical language" which I first heard about in Neal Stephenson's book Quicksilver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Ess

Made me think about John Wilkins' "philosophical language" which I first heard about in Neal Stephenson's book Quicksilver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_Towards_a_Real_Character,_and_a_Philosophical_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_Towards_a_Real_Charac... I'm sure there have been countless similar attempts at categorizing knowledge one of the more successful ones being the dewey decimal system I have my doubts about whether the thing the OP alleges we have "failed" at is even possible at all