ABSTRACT
Man is a "symbolic animal" because his capacity to symbolize, to endow his own gestures with meanings shared with others, is part of his adaptation to his environmental situation, whatever the labyrnthine, sometimes maladaptive lengths, to which this capacity maybe carried. Some writers in their very definition of culture specify "socially learned by means of symbolic transmission," which makes culture in effect secondary to symbol-making as a marker of the distinctively human. To characterize man as the symbolic animal is to single out a uniquely human cognitive capacity that underlies and is presupposed by all the cognitive attributes in addition to shaping fundamentally from an early age human. George Herbert Mead is conventionally named by sociologists as the father of the "school" of "symbolic interactionism" seen as founded by Herbert Blumer who substituted "symbolic interaction" for Mead's "symbolic communication."
