The Language Animal: the full shape of the human linguistic capacity
Charles Taylor
Set against the grand traditional questions of philosophy about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, a philosophical enquiry into the human capacity for language may not initially seem the most exciting of topics. But in fact language has long been recognised as something of profound – even sacred – significance. In the Creation story in Genesis, it is the Word of God, the utterance “Let there be light!”, that brings the cosmos into existence. And at the start of the fourth gospel, God is identified with Logos, the Word. So in the Judaeo-Christian world view, our human capacity for language can be seen as indicating that we humans in a certain sense participate in the divine.
This exalted view of language is strongly resisted by the “naturalistic” outlook that increasingly dominates contemporary philosophy. A common tendency here has been to take a deflationary or reductionist view of human language, regarding it as a mere extension or elaboration of animal utterance. We know, for example, that the blackbird responds to the presence of a cat in the garden by uttering a “warning signal”; so the naturalistic view is that human language, though much more complex than the squawks of birds, must ultimately be explicable in terms of essentially the same kind of stimulus-response process.
