Tejiendo comunicación en contra de la guerra y las seguridades “ajenas”

can be discovered, and it is part of the business of the philosopher of common

sense to discover them. He will have discovered the foundations in nature and in human nature of many of the truths of common sense.

Language, says Reid, is commonly supposed to be something that men have entirely invented. By nature they are as dumb as brutes, but they are more intelligent, and have taught themselves to speak by contriving artificial signs to express their thoughts and purposes and having these signs established by

compact. This account of the origin of language is too marvellous for Reid, There is one very obvious explanation of the origin of language and it is philosophically interesting because it "tends to lay open some of the first principles of human '

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nature". The word ‘'language* may be extended to include "all those signs which mankind use in order to communicate to others their thoughts and intentions, their purposes and desires. And such signs may be conceived to be of two kinds: First,

such as have no meaning but what is affixed to them by compact or agreement among , those who use them - these are artificial signs; Secondly, such as, previous to all compact or agreement, have a meaning which every man understands by the principles of his nature. Language, so far as it consists of artificial signs, may be called artificial! so far as it consists of natural signs, I call it I. Inaui.ry. Cb.Iy, Seoill, ppll7-118.

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natural I think it is demonstrable,” Reid continues, "that, if mankind had not a natural language, they could never have invented an artificial one by theirS reason and ingenuity. For all artificial language supposes some compact or ■ agreement to affix a certain meaning to certain signs; therefore, there must be compacts or agreements before the use of artificial signs; but there can be no

compact or agreement without signs, nor without language; and, therefore, there must be a natural language before any artificial language can be invented,

The primordial language is not a dead language. Its vocabulary is still vrhatg it was; gesture, modulation of the voice and varying facial expression. These are natural signs, significant apart from convention. They do not have to be Jj given a meaning; nature has already given them a meaning, We do not have to learn it; nature has already taught us. Babies are frightened by grim and menacing faces. Everyone who has watched children will have noticed that they

can very easily distinguish between what is said to them playfully and what in

earnest. They go by the natural signs, the tone of voice, the half-smile, when

these contradict the 'artificial* signs. If we want any further evidence that

"I there is a wordless language and an intuitive understanding of it, there is the !

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fact that men who have no conventional language in common can communicate with

one another. ^

Everybody will admit, Reid remarks, that there is a wordless language of

J gesture, intonation and facial expression; the question is whether its interpret- '

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ation has to be learnt. How could it be learnt?

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"When we see the sign, and see the thing signified always conjoined with it, experience may be the instructor, and teach us how that sign is to be interpreted,

?! But how shall experience instruct us when we see the sign only, when the thing

signified is invisible? Mow, this is the case here: the thoughts and passions -, of the mind, as well as the mind itself, are invisible, and therefore their

flMnaulrv. o'h.lV. Sec.II. p p.II7-II8.

k - J t ' k i k k i ' ...'k. ' f k ' V t , . .1V . » . - i " ' s'.'ii.-j;''A, ■ ‘ ■...-..i.. i s. - a ' ' .. ' ...'k'.. ■■■ ■ -s. ,k.s. J.i-;

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connection with any sensible sign cannot be first discovered by experience; therçW I.

must be some earlier source of this knowledge#”

Reid's statement of the case for a natural language prior to all conventionalkig languages and still contemporaneous with them could survive empirical criticism# He was indeed very much impressed by classical references to the range of comaunij ation that was possible without the use of words# There was the dispute between Cicero and Roscius over whether an orator could convey anything by words which an actor could not convey in dumb-show# There was the Roman pantomime, with

Lucian's story of the king on the Euxine who wanted to borrow a pantomimist fromyt

Nero so that he could dispense with an army of interpreters in negotiations with.:/'#

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his neighbours# Reid thirties, however, that the proto-language of mankind must have been very circumscribed, sufficient merely for the barest necessities of

communication, but sufficient, therefore, for the establishment of a conventional r! language# He did think that its vocabulary was and is everywhere the same, and everywhere intelligible without having to be learnt. In fact the expressive signb] of men's feelings and intentions are hardly more universal than the universal

grammar, on which iteid leans so heavily, in conventional languages. But their want of universality would not destroy Reid's theoiy. His theory requires no more than that the members of a group should have been able to understand one another without speech, inorder to be able to proceed to the invention of speechi

the

And Reid is not committed to view that the connections which nature has establish between feelings and their physical manifestations are too rigid to be capable of f' modification by discipline, natural signs being replaced by conventional signs whose interpretation has to be learnt. The Japanese smile would not refute him, | It is enough that there are some natural signs which are immediately intelligible! I, Intellectual Powers, VI, Ch,V, pp,449-490#

2# Intellectual Powers, VI, Gh,V, p#450#

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A behaviour!stic interpretation of the signs of what is passing in the mind, an interpretation of them as means by which we go from the overt to the overt and never from the overt to the covert, would be more troublesome to Reid than any empirical criticism of his theory* Reid's whole philosophy requires the principle/ that transitions can be made from sensible signs to the altogether different things which they signify - transitions which go beyond experience if 'experience* is

confined for epistemological security to sensations and other states of our ovjn / consciousness, but which in their directness form part of what is ordinarily called

' experience * • We experience and do not infer a man's anger from the marks of it 3; on his face. Physical objects are themselves objects of experience and their

existence does not have to be deduced from objects of experience. And the struct­ ure of experience is similar in both cases, Reid considers, and in neither does experience have a phenomenal termination.

The natural signs in the native language of manlcind belong to one class of natural signs. There are for Reid three classes of natural signs. In all three classes the connection between the sign and what it signifies is established by nature - it is this that distinguishes a natural sign from a conventional sign. The signs of the first class are not understood intuitively; they might mean any­ thing, as far as we are concerned, until we find out what they do mean. They are in themselves like words in an unfamiliar language. High streaky clouds are a sign of wind, and the blueness of hills a sign of their distance. We have discov- :;

ered this by experience and would never have Icnotm it othervrise. This class of natural signs is the "foundation of true philosophy", which is nothing but the discovery by observation and experiment of the matter of fact connections establish­ ed by nature, their reduction to general laws and the deduction of the consequences of these laws. Philosophy has traditionally been described as a search for causes. "What we commonly call natural causes might, with more propriety, be called

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natural signs, and what we call effects, the things signified. The causes have no proper efficiency or causality, as far as we know; and all we can certainly affirm is, that nature hath established a constant conjunction between them and the things called their effects; and hath given to mankind a disposition to observe those

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connections, to confide in their continuance."

In the second class of natural signs the sign itself explains itself. The signs of this class make up the natural language of mankind. They are also, and 1

I for this reason, the foundation of the fine arts. In the expressiveness of the | arts we hear again the primordial language which we can all understand and to which^

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