ABSTRACT

In the early modern period, reflection on language is undertaken not so much as a worthy endeavor in its own right but as a means of diagnosing the errors of one's competitors. This chapter discusses why reflection on language occupies the privileged place it does in so many of their works. It considers the possibility of language in nonhuman animals, partly to discover just what the moderns think counts as a language. The chapter explores how the philosophers think human languages actually work. The role of language, is to turn isolated minds into a community of mutually intelligible beings. The reflections on languages and animal, reveal the key background assumption of most modern thinking about language: words are signs, established by convention, whose primary purpose is to allow others to discern our thoughts. Thomas Hobbes makes the radical suggestion that language use might be in some way constitutive of reasoning itself.