Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

66 Scientism and Values
struction, for, although early man's bones are scarce, "the product
of his handiwork is abundant," and the tools give him confidence,
for they tell him the same story he has read from the bones.
It should be noted that Mr. Coon's scientific reconstruction constitutes
an astonishing achievement. Take, for example, a problem
that has troubled philosophers for quite some time and that lin-
. guists have wrestled with until they seem finally to have given it
up as hopeless..-the question of the origin of language. For Mr.
Coon the problem is easy. He tells us that by chirpings and roaring
animals communicate with one another. But there is, of course, a
difference between the vocabulary of the gibbons, who have "been
shown to possess. at least nine sets of sounds with specific meanings,"
and human language. The gibbons, we are told, utter simple
imperatives, "Keep away from my wife!" or "Let us go get
some fruit!" whereas human languages "include much larger vocabularies
and more complex ideas expressed in units known as
words. Not only do we speak and hear words, but we produce
them silently when we think." And then he proceeds to tell us
how human speech began:
The earliest forms of human speech must have begun when man's
brain had no more intellectual capacity than that of the gibbon,
capable only of a few commands and warnings, and limited entirely
to immediate interpersonal relations. Qualities of objects of various
classes, such as safe and dangerous, large and small; ways of referring
to other persons, such as husband and wife, father and son, in their
absence; and methods of expressing the idea that a given action had
been finished, rather than left incomplete-these mechanisms of expression
must have followed, with the eventual addition of further
abstractions.15
By avoiding the difficulties that make the problem an insoluble
one for philosophers, Mr. Coon's account is considerably simplified.
For philosophers insist that we must draw a distinction
between signs and symbols. It does not take a gibbon to give and
respond to signs. All animals do. But, so far as we can tell, man
is the only animal that employs symbols. And the difference is
radical and indispensable if we are to understand what is meant