language and mankind

I intend (key word) to expand on this a bit more soon, but I'll simply give a quote that is at the heart of what I've been reflecting on lately, namely the inability of scientific definitions to adequately explain the varied phenomena of human and natural activity and to actually arrive at the bottom of things. The quote is from Walker Percy's chapter, "The Delta Factor" in The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. He is trying to use mankind's innate ability to use and understand language as a starting point to help us towards a theory of man. He starts here not only because he doesn't think that people have spent enough thinking through what happens when people are actually able to communicate (it's more than the formation of sounds when air passes through your mouth, that's physics; it's more than how to put a meaningful sentence together, that's syntax; and it's more than a series of stimuli and responses, that's behavioral analysis), but because the uniqueness of man's use of language is a phenomena about which most people agree. Thus, the quote:

"Start with God and man's immortal soul and you've lost every reader except those who believe in God and man's immortal soul.

Start with B. F. Skinner and man decreed as organism who learns everything he does by operant conditioning and you've lost every reader who knows there is more to it than that and that Skinner has explained nothing. Skinner explains everything about man except for what makes him human, for example, language and his refusal to behave like an organism in an environment."

Personally, I adhere to the first group who begin with "God and man's immortal soul", but I appreciate Percy's desire to find a common ground from which to work and see if we might not come to an appreciation, if not agreement, on the unique status and nature of that species to which we belong. At least, perhaps, we can even agree on what being a human being is not: decreed organisms bound by conditions who respond according to behavioral patterns, etc. For a very interesting literary vignette that runs parallel to this see the beginning of the second chapter of Charles Dickens's Hard Times, where Thomas Gradgrind, the teacher, probes "Girl number twenty" to provide a definition of a horse. I'm grateful to Jon McCord for this wonderful reference.