Abstract
Humans are speaking animals;it is above all our complex language that marks us off from the rest. In our long march out from Eden, the first and crucial step is the acquisition of speech. To map our place in the universe we must understand that step.
Besides articulate sounds … it was further necessary that [man] should be able to use these sounds as signs of internal conceptions; and to make them stand as marks for the ideas within his own mind, whereby they might be made known to others, and the thoughts of men’s minds be conveyed from one to another.
John Locke
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Notes
Lancaster, Jane B. Primate Behavior and the Emergence of Human Culture. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975.
See Jerry A. Fodor and Jerrold J. Katz. The Structure of Language. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1964.
See for example Jerry Fodor. The Language of Thought. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979, pp. 59 ff.
Chomsky, Noam. Language andProblems of Knowledge. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988.
See Goldberg, B. “Mechanism and meaning.” In Carl Ginet and Sydney Shoemaker, eds, Knowledge and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 191–210.
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© 2007 John V. Canfield
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Canfield, J.V. (2007). What Language Is Not. In: Becoming Human. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288225_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288225_2
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