G.A. Wells

Origin of Language: Aspects of the Discussion from Condillac to Wundt G.A. Wells First edition

from back cover: Does the use of language by humans point to a mysterious and unbridgeable chasm between man and best? Is human language a human invention? How could language possibly have been invented, since the inventor would have had to use language in order to explain the invention to others?

Writers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment-especially Condillac, Thomas Reid, and Monboddo-developed a naturalistic conjectural account of teh invention of language. But Herder and his successors, from Humboldt to Wundt, were determined to reject any theory which characterized language as an invention. Ninetheenth-and twentieth-century thinking has generally followed Herder, and it has become fashionable to scoff at the naivety of the Enlightened writers.

In this short but tightly-packed work, G. A. Wells gives a lucid account of the arguments of Condillac, Reid, and Mnboddo, showing that their theories, often carelessly misrepresented, are much more persuasive than has been supposed.