The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity

The works of the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, are inspiring for their broad learning, understanding of history, and thoughtful effort to explore difficult issues in modern life, particularly those issues involving religion and the search for meaning. I have learned a great deal from two of Taylor's earlier books, "Sources of the Self" and "A Secular Age". In 2007, Taylor received the Templeton Prize, awarded for his "exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works." In 2016, Taylor received the first Bergguen Prize for Philosophy for his contributions that have "fundamentally shaped public discussion of the nature of multiculturalism, secularism, and contemporary religious life." These are high honors indeed for a philosopher.Taylor's most recent book, "The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity" (2016) explores the nature of human language to develop themes similar to those of "Sources of the Self" and "A Secular Age." Language has been at the center of philosophy since the beginning of the 20th Century. The philosophy taught in the United States and Great Britain, which I studied in the 1960's is known as analytic philosophy which tries to use careful use of language and distinctions to clarify or resolve philosophical problems. Continental philosophy and other rivals to analytic philosophy use language in a different, hermeneutical way, focusing on the nature of interpretation. Taylor shows great familiarity with both types of contemporary philosophy. With his considerable analytical skill, his sympathies clearly are with the latter. Taylor sees this book as the first of a two-volume study, with the second volume to explore the Romantic theory of language he develops through a study of post-Romantic poetry.Just as Taylor explored differences between secular and religious views of life in "A Secular Age", in "The Language Animal" he develops two competing views on the nature of human language. He calls the first the "designative" view , which he finds derived from Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac ((HLC). He also calls this view the "enframing" theory under which language is used to point to or describe pre-linguistic objects separate from language, such as dogs and cats. In this theory, "the attempt is made to understand language within the framework of a picture of human life, behavior, purposes, or mental functioning, which is itself described and defined, without reference to language. Language is seen as arising in this framework, which can be variously conceived as we shall see,, and fulfilling some function within it, but the framework itself precedes, or at least can be characterized independently of language."The second theory of language Taylor calls "constitutive" because it emphasizes language's role in the formation of reality. Taylor finds this theory first articulated in the works of the German romantics Hamann, Herder, and Humbolt (HHH) as a response to the designative theory of language. The constitutive theory, for Taylor, "gives us a picture of language as making possible new purposes, new levels of behavior, new meanings, and hence as not explicable within a framework picture of human life conceived without language. "In his study, Taylor develops both the designative and constitutive theories in depth and shows how each leads to separate, diverging views of language and reality on a number of important issues. He describes the designative theory as "instrumental" -- using language as a tool to get things done and the constitutive theory as "expressive" -- emeshed in meaning and in ways of life. "Besides this", Taylor writes, "they even end up differing on the contours of what they are trying to explain, viz. language; as well as on the validity of atomistic versus holistic modes of explanation. They belong, in fact, to very different understandings of human life."In the opening chapters of the book, Taylor parses out the history and development of both views. He finds the designative theory suited to post-Galilean science in that it seeks to identify and describe the properties of objects independent of the mind. He finds this theory carried through, with some important modifications, in contemporary analytic philosophy with the modifications of the Hobbes-Locke-Condillac view in the work of Frege, whose work became of seminal importance to modern logic.The burden of Taylor's argument is to show the incomplete, inadequate character of the designative theory. He views the theory from a variety of perspectives and finds it inadequate to account for the origins of human language or for the differences between humans and the higher animals in communication. He agrees with the German romantics that language use is communal and holistic and shapes thought rather than merely designating a prelinguistic reality. He finds an almost mystical or "Cratylan" (after Plato's dialogue "Cratylus") quality to language use in its search for rightness or fittingness that cannot be explained by a theory which has its strongest paradigm in a scientific context. Taylor offers striking examples of what he sees as the "expressivist" character of language to shape reality in a way that goes beyond the designative theory. For example, he refers throughout to the macho young male motorcyclist who in his posture, gait, and language "expresses" who he is or who he is trying to be in a way "designation" cannot capture.In the latter chapters of his book, Taylor broadens his approach to show how the nature of language use influences the way different people and cultures see matters of ethics and morality and of fitting human behavior in ways that are not mere designations. Some of the best sections of the book involve language and the arts where Taylor's position is at its most appealing. Scientific does not constitute the only meaningful form of language use. Taylor develops his position through discussions of works such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Mann's "The Magic Mountain" and Dostoevsky's "Devils". The short of the discussion is that there is a mystery and a wholeness to human life and language use that is suggested by ethics, art, and religion that a purely scientific, designative view of language fails to cover.Taylor's book is suggestive if not always convincing in detail. At times the two basic positions become stretched and ill-defined. On one side, a more sympathetic, broader treatment of the "designative" position would be welcome. The account of the "constitutive" position contains many obscurities. On another side, Taylor is committed to a position of philosophical realism which, I think, supports the "designative" position. He claims that science and ordinary common sense study independently existing objects such as cats, dogs, and atoms that exist outside any self. The constitutive position in the German romantics and elsewhere generally is part of a more idealistic position in which reality is mind-dependent. I am not sure how Taylor squares his romanticism and support for the constitutive position with his metaphysical realism.The book is difficult, erudite and sometimes obscure. But it may be read with benefit by readers who are not professional philosophers. I have read a review of this book in the "Notre Dame Philosophical Review" an online source of academic philosophical reviews. Professor Michael Forster, a scholar of German romanticism at the University of Bonn, offered a long, detailed analysis of Taylor's book in his September 12, 2016, review. Forster concluded: "Taylor's book is a richly informative and admirable attempt to delineate "the full shape of the human linguistic capacity" (as its subtitle has it). More than that, it affords a model of what it is to be a genuine philosopher: at an age when most philosophers have either given up altogether or else fallen into dogmatically repeating views that they have long since held, Taylor continues an open-minded search for the right answers, drawing not only on the older literature from philosophy and several other disciplines that he has long since mastered but also on a wealth of newer literature from an equally wide range of sources."Taylor has written a provocative, inspiring book which reminded me of why I have had a lifelong interest in the study of philosophy. Readers with a serious interest in philosophy will enjoy this work.Robin Friedman

An up-date on Taylor's "Sources of the Self" by using resources from recent linguistic studies, French social philosophers, and the Heidegger/Dreyfus views on the embodied and social self. It is an exhaustive critique of the Anglo-American ethos of "analytic" philosophy's approach to understanding the human linguistic capacities. But it could be improved by careful editing. Sometimes it reads like a work in progress, always with an eye on the companion volume on the Romantics. These works will serve as the culmination of Taylor's life-long campaign to bring a more humane and religiously sensitive appreciation of human being.

Definitive and well articulated point of view regarding the emergence of language in humans. Takes a strong position that language is central to our understanding of the world, and not merely an adjunct to some more primitive form of understanding. Very persuasive and articulate. And thorough.

This book is so unlike the typical books on the philosophy of language and linguistics that I read (e.g., Chomsky, Pinker, Soames, McGinn). Without going into detail, suffice it to say that I am glad I read this book because it gave me a more, one might say, 'holistic' perspective on language and its preconditions. Really looking forward to his "proposed companion study."

I thought I would like this book, since I majored in Linguistics in college. It went totally over my head, so Igave it to a friend who was a professor of French who may enjoy it. I did not read very far in.

Great book

As usual, a great book by Taylor

Clear reaffirmation and update of some profound thoughts of the author.

Indispensable reading for social scientists and anyone wondering what sets people apart from other animals. By contrasting two views of language: enframing vs. constitutional Charles Taylor brings focus to language genesis, what we do as we use language or how language disconnects us from nature, but may also reconnect us in questioning the meaning of life in our secular age. The Language Animal is a scholarly work that stands on the shoulders of people like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Thomas Mann.

Fascinating and slightly subversive take on the nature of human language and its implications for maintaining the secular vision.

I have studied this book since I bought it several years ago, reading it through three times. I have written out all the most important quotations. It is an extraordinary venture that brings together the various attempts by so many others to recognize human cultural creativity, especially as found in unique human language, the most important feature in making us the complex creatures we are today. One thing we are not is ciphers or "products" of either nurture or nature, though Taylor reveals nurture as playing a more important role in the era in which everything, it seems, is being explained by genetics, the brain, and the complexity of neural functioning.I find it hard to believe that the critics of this book actually read it in detail, but then again they may have had their own axes to grind, their own positions to defend. Taylor is too much of a gentleman and scholar to be directly confrontational, but throughout there are several intellectual broadsides against the contemporary representatives of the “HLC" (Hobbes-Locke-Condillac) approach to language – the objective, empirical, science-based approach that sees human minds as products not producers. “I will call the first an ‘enframing theory’. By this I mean that the attempt is made to understand language within the framework of a picture of human life, behavior, purposes, or mental functioning, which is itself described and and defined without reference to language. Language is seen as arising within this framework” (p. 3). Some of the more famous representatives of this approach are Gottlob Frege, Jerry Fodor, Steven Pinker, and his mentor, Noam Chomsky. This objectivist approach to language remains in the ascendency, found in disciplines as diverse as evolutionary psychology, neurolinguistics, and sociobiology,Taylor comes out on the side of the “HHH" (Hamann-Herder-Humboldt) group, including Nelson Goodman, Daniel Everett, Merlin Donald, Alva Noë, Tom Wolfe, Raymond Tallis, and others who do not accept that language is merely a biologically evolved tool used to communicate already existing information. Language is instead seen as "constitutive", that is, it *changes our thinking and expands our experiencing*. It makes us into a unique animal, *The Language Animal*, that one might call, along with Terrence Deacon, the "symbolic species": “[I]t is the antitype of the enframing sort. It gives a picture of language as making possible new purposes, new levels of behavior, new meanings, and hence not as explicable within a framework picture of human life conceived without a language” (p. 4).As the doorway to cultural co-consciousness (intersubjectivity), Taylor might well have considered the likelihood of primary empathy, which he implies with his repeated use of term “communal.” He does approach it, however: “There seems to be a growing consensus among writers on human evolution that joint attention and empathy have been crucial to the development of our species” (p. 57, n.17). This suggests that our inclination toward interpersonal sharing, along with our enlarged brains, made possible the huge leap into language, which has made all the difference.Of course, the nature of consciousness, though not emphasized, turns out to be central here. The objectivist HLC group takes for granted that human consciousness is a given that arrives with our biology (exactly like they treat language). However, Taylor states that (formal) “language makes possible a new kind of consciousness” (p. 6), which can lead toward individual self-agency and, in fact, a vastly enlarged world of experience. Furthermore, citing the empirical investigations into human development of Michael Tomasello, Taylor claims that our predisposition toward "joint attention" is what made possible the “communion” of language. However, more recent work of Tomasello (*A Natural History of Human Thinking*, 2014) has admitted joint attention is found among some apes, so he now names “joint intentionality” as the specifically human trait that allows for language. This was foreseen by Taylor.Taylor anticipates this advance in Tomasello’s thinking and goes beyond it: “Tomasello is undoubtedly on to a crucial point here, but I would prefer a slightly amended formulation. To speak of ‘perceiving communicative intentions’ still partakes of the monological framework which has dominated too much psychology for too long, whereby we take the individual subject as our starting point, and ask whether and in what mode he can recognize other agents. But the crucial human difference is rather that language transmission occurs in a context of intense sharing of intentions between the bonded pair. … Indeed, we could say that much of the point of most conversations is not the information exchanged, but precisely the sharing.” (p. 56) Shared intentionality is not the result of language but logically precedes it, just as co-consciousness or intersubjectivity precedes individual conscious subjectivity.He emphasizes the point made by the constitutive group that we cannot enter the language world piecemeal but must engage within language itself as a whole. Words cannot be learned one-by-one until a language is understood. We must cross a threshold into language itself, for the part can only be understood in the context of the whole. We must cross what has been called the "symbolic threshold" by others like Walker Percy and Terrence Deacon. Only by crossing the symbolic threshold can we comprehend symbolic meaning: language is not a symbol-to-object one-to-one representation; it is a system of differences within the whole. It was Ferdinand de Saussure who wrote that “nothing is distinct before the appearance of language” and, “In language there are only differences without positive terms” (p. 135 in Taylor). Individual words only have meaning in the context of language itself as an assumed background of understanding.This leads to the most dense readings in the book, those to do with conscience and morality, a long-term focal point of Taylor’s intellection. Frankly the long chapter, “Constitution 1” was quite a slog, and I, at least, found it a stretch. It could be easily skipped if one is not so interested in connecting language with social ethics. I take the point that it matters, of course. Taylor spends some literary time establishing that the choice of specific terms is not as random as many (including Saussure) have claimed. New terms are invented based on sub-meanings and links with the already established whole of language. There is a "right word" to suit the occasion.When Taylor gets back on track in his final chapters, one can feel the crescendo coming. He, rather triumphantly, it seems to me, ties together any loose ends to close with a powerful conclusion in favour of language as the key to human nature (admittedly based in a Romantic view of nature and humanity). If I have any complaints, one might be that he hardly cited Ernst Cassirer in these pages, and that is perplexing, since so many of his arguments were previously made in Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms and its follow-ups. Be that as it may, Charles Taylor demonstrates that language is both the product and source of cultural creativity, and that puts aside the claim made so often these days that we are little more than language computers responding to an inherited program in our brains, as Pinker and Chomsky so tiresomely claim. However, aside from such minor points, I believe this to be a great book (and I don’t use the term lightly), which, if understood, should extend our self-understanding and awaken us to what might be called the human potential.

This is a highly recommendable book by the famous Canadian philosopher and Kyoto price winner Charles Taylor (read also: A Secular Age).

Taylor's argument is developed by distinguishing two theories of language one he labels HHH (from Hamaan, Herder, and Humboldt) and another HLC (Hobbes, Locke, Condilliac). Roughly HHH is a holistic view in which language creates new spaces of meaning that were not possible pre linguistically, while HLC sees language as a network of descriptive signs. Unsurprisingly, the thesis of the book is that HHH is correct and HLC is a poor but immensely influential theory of language. Taylor's presentation of his position is what one familiar with his other works would expect, erudite and far-reaching. However, the division of theories of language into these two camps seems a questionable method. An argument could be made that HLC, whatever their intentions, were not really developing a full theory of language but addressed language in the context of developing theories of epistemology in which context the descriptive function is what matters. It is not clear that this is a debate that needs to take place. There is a lot of important work done in the are of language since Herder and Locke, such as structuralism, Wittgenstein, Frege, etc. While all of these figures pop up throughout Taylor's account, it might have been a stronger book if these had been more of the focus.