ABSTRACT
Helen Keller's discovery of word-meaning plausibly depicts the sudden emergence of a human consciousness. Helen's recollections of overt manifestations of emotion in a vacuum of emotional experience cast in high-profile the way each new name she learned brought objects to life in her mind. Helen Keller's experience of language-acquisition also symbolises the radical distinction Vygotsky drew between elementary and higher mental functions. True languages, unlike systems of animal communication, provide innumerable ways of confirming interpretations of the meaning of a particular utterance at some level of dialogue. Language, like money, is essentially transactional both in its uses and its origins. The language game/form of life metaphor captures the dynamic of dialogic accommodation between alien ideas; there can be no ultimate, veridical descriptions of modes of thought or social institutions. In the most highly articulated uses of language there will be dissonances necessitating reciprocal clarification; appeals to meanings accumulated by tacit adaptations of usage.
