Language and Consciousness

Abstract

In this brief extract, from The Explicit Animal (1991, 1999), Tallis considers why attempts to naturalise language won’t do. Behaviourists like B.F. Skinner have tried to see language as a form of communication that is essentially the same as that taking place between animals. Signs signify by stimulating behaviour identical to that which would be stimulated by the object itself. Tallis is critical of these kinds of conception — basically because they bypass what is essential about language, its quality of explicitness. The very notion of meaning something depends on intention, and meaning transmitted through signs makes this explicit. Linguistic signs are meant, and for us to understand them depends on us seeing that they are meant. Brief though this extract is, it sums up much that is at the heart of the way Tallis sees language and human consciousness.