La Mettrie and Bougeant

The important things are:

• the emphasis on the creative aspect of language use
• the fundamental distinction between human language and the purely functional and stimulus-bound animal communication

Descartes argued that there must be a “thinking substance” to account for the facts that he cites.

This proposal is countered by the claim that a more complex organization of the body can account for human abilities.

But no serious attempt is made to show how this might be possible. Descartes, Cordemoy, and others tried to show how animal behavior and human bodily functions can be explained as physical organization.

La Mettrie, for example, holds that man is simply the most complex of machines.

There should be no obstacle in principle to teaching an ape to speak. It is only “a defect in the speech organs” that stands in the way, and this can be overcome by proper training (p. 11; MaM, p. 100).

Similarly, a talking machine is not beyond imagination.

Bougeant produced one of the very few attempts to refute explicitly the Cartesian argument that human and animal language differ fundamentally 17.

But it actually reaffirms the Cartesian position.

He claims that “animals speak and understand each other just as well as we do, and sometimes better”. They:

• can be trained to respond to signals
• exhibit their “various feelings” by external signs
• can work in cooperation.

However, he recognizes that:

• “the language of animals is entirely limited to expressing limited feelings.

They have no “abstract or metaphysical ideas”:

They have only direct cognitions that are completely limited to the material objects that strike their senses.

Man is infinitely superior in his language, as in his ideas, being incapable of expressing himself without composing his speech of proper names and relative terms, which determine its sense and application. (p. 154)

Animals have only names for various “passions that they feel” (p. 155). They cannot produce “a phrase which is personalized and composite [personifiée et composée] as we do” (p. 156):

Why has nature given animals the faculty of speech?

Nature has endowed animals with knowledge only of what is useful to them or necessary for the survival of the species and of individuals. Consequently, they have:

• no abstract ideas
• no metaphysical reasoning
• no enquiry or curiosity about the objects around them
• no knowledge except how to conduct themselves, keep well, avoid whatever may harm them, and acquire goods.

In short, animal “language” remains completely within the bounds of mechanical explanation as this was conceived by Descartes and Cordemoy.

Neither La Mettrie nor Bougeant comes to grips with the problem raised by Descartes – the problem posed by the creative aspect of language use.

Human language is free from control by identifiable external stimuli or internal physiological states. And so it can serve as a general instrument of thought and self-expression rather than merely as a communicative device of report, request, or command.18

Ryle, in his critique of “Descartes’s myth”19 simply avoids the issue entirely.

He claims that the Cartesians should have been “asking by what criteria intelligent behavior is actually distinguished from non-intelligent behavior” (p. 21) rather than seeking an explanation for the former.

Properly understood, these are not mutually exclusive alternatives.

The criteria that Ryle discusses differ little, in principle, from Cordemoy’s proposed “experiments”.

Ryle is content simply to cite the fact that “intelligent behavior” has certain properties.20 But the Cartesians were concerned with the problem of accounting for such behavior without being able to provide an explanation in mechanical terms.

Modern linguistics has also failed to deal with the Cartesian observations regarding human language in any serious way.

Bloomfield, for example, observes that in a natural language “the possibilities of combination are practically infinite,” so that there is no hope of accounting for language use on the basis of repetition or listing.

But he has nothing further to say about the problem beyond the remark that the speaker utters new forms “on the analogy of similar forms which he has heard.”21

Similarly, Hockett attributes innovation completely to “analogy.”22

Similar remarks can be found in Paul, Saussure, Jespersen, and many others.