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The Origins of Language:
A Review

David Gordon

efore considering The Origins of Language,’ a preliminary question
confronts us. Wells’ book is a historical and critical account of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of the origins of language:
“aspects of the discussion from Condillac to Wundt,” in the words of its sub-
title. Why then discuss this volume in The Review of Austrian Economics?

The answer to this query lies in the value of Wells’ investigation in placing
in question an idea many Austrians, under the influence of F.A. Hayek, have
blown up out of its real but subordinate place in social explanation. Hayek
has made famous a phrase of Adam Ferguson, “the results of human action
but not of human design,” and used the notion this slogan encapsulates as a
principal tool of analysis of economic and social institutions.?

In the first volume of Hayek’s Law, Legislation and Liberty, for example, he
denies that the systematic character of law comes about because people designed
the legal system in the style of Euclid elaborating his geometric theorems from
his definitions and axioms.? Quite the contrary, law arose from decisions by
particular courts. Drawing most of his examples from British law, Hayek main-
tains that as courts modified and adapted the decisions of preceding judicial
bodies, an organized assemblage of law developed in the course of centuries. No
one planned the legal system. Like Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it “just growed.”

Of greatest significance to economists, of course, Hayek uses the notion
of unplanned order to explain the market economy. In contrast with centrally
directed socialism, the market permits people to coordinate information that
no one person possesses. Moreover, not only does the market bring informa-
tion together in an undesigned yet at the same type systematic fashion; the
key to its genesis lies in the same direction. No one planned the rise of market
capitalism. Like the common law, it too arose “as freedom slowly broaden]ed]
down . . . from precedent to precedent.”

Although Hayek presents what I have just summarized as a package, the
preceding paragraph in fact contains two distinct theories. For the first of these,

Review of G.A. Wells, The Origins of Language (Peru, Ill.: Open Court, 1987).


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246 « The Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 3

everyone sympathetic to Austrian economics must be grateful to Hayek. Follow-
ing his teacher, Mises, he showed that only in a market system can efficient
economic behavior take place. Central “planning” leads to chaos.* But it does
not follow from the fact that central planning cannot work that people who
use the market mechanism operate in a fog of ignorance. They may consciously
desire to have a market system, and their coordinated action in maintaining
it is then not an “unintended consequence of human action.” They may avoid
harmful intervention, not because they blindly follow traditional rules, but
because they understand the way the market works.

We may extend this point one further step. Not only can the market now
operate as the result of the deliberate plans of people, it may for all Hayek
has shown have originated by conscious planning. Nothing in Hayek’s analysis
of the way the market coordinates information forbids people to establish a
market system through agreement.

I do not contend that Hayek errs historically in seeing the origin of either
common law or capitalism as the outcome of an evolutionary process designed
by no one. To evaluate his thesis would be a long and complex undertaking—
one would have to assess, for example, Walter Ullmann’s contention that much
of medieval law was centralized—and in any case this is not to the point here.’
Rather, I wish only to insist that Hayek’s analysis of the market does not entail
that capitalism, or by analogy anything else, arose in the way Sir John Seely
said the British Empire was acquired: “in a fit of absence of mind.”

Here precisely lies the value of Wells’ book for economists. Hayek instances
language as a chief example of a sodal institution that displays a complex order
yet has not been invented. Wells stands squarely against this contention. He
thinks that language is an invention. If he is right, Hayek’s view of the unde-
signed nature of institutions errs in one major instance.

But in turning now to a description of Wells’ challenging thesis, I do not
intend anything as ambitious as a refutation of Hayek’s entire approach to social
evolution. Rather, by presenting Wells’ contrasting contention, I aim only to
bring to the attention of those under Hayek’s influence that alternatives to his
analysis do exist. Even if Hayek’s stress on nonconscious evolution is correct,
his position needs to be defended by argument rather than asserted as self-evident.

But how can language be a deliberate invention? As Wells points out (p.
11), the fundamental obstacle that confronts any theory of the invention of
language is a paradox succinctly stated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Words seem
to have been necessary in order to establish the use of words.” To invent a new
word is an easy task, once people already speak a language; but how can an
entire language be invented? Invention implies conscious thought, but how can
one construct a language, when thinking presupposes the use of words? Perhaps
Hayek is right after all.

Wells ably brings out the way in which several writers during the
Enlightenment—principally Condillac, Reid, and Monboddo—challenged the


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Book Reviews « 247

seemingly watertight argument just offered. The trouble comes in the last
premise of the paradox: does thinking presuppose the use of words? If it does,
language cannot be invented. But why must thinking be verbal?

As Condillac in particular noted, people can communicate by gestures as
well as words. He contended that language can then be invented if a stage of
communication by gestures preceded the use of words. A member of a group
without a verbal language might, for example, wave his arms should he see im-
mediate danger ahead. If successful in his communication, he might avert serious
danger to the entire group. Members of the group might then gradually build
up an entire repertoire of gestures for various situations, sufficient to constitute
a language. From this base, the invention of words seems much less paradox-
ical. Creation of language thus does not presuppose the prior existence of words.

But does this “solution” do anything more than press back the problem
by one step? If people can use gestures to communicate, how did gestures ac-
quire their meaning? Does not the claim that people can understand gestures
without words assume just the command of meaning it is supposed to explain?

Here exactly lies Condillac’s most original contribution, a point that Wells
maintains previous scholars have failed to stress. Condillac by no means claimed
that every gesture must be invented. Some are “natural signs” in the way that
smoke is a natural sign of fire. To revert to our previous example, to wave one’s
arms in the face of danger does not require a preceding conscious decision.
Once people see the effect of natural signs, however, they can go on to use
them deliberately. Language, given this indispensable foundation, can avoid
Rousseau’s paradox.

Once more, though, the question previously raised comes forward in a new
guise. Suppose Condillac is right. Grant, even, that there are many gestures
that serve as natural signs. It does not follow that people can use these signs
in the absence of their immediate stimulus. And surely this is necessary for
even a nonverbal language. Unless one can understand a hand-waving gesture
(e.g., when no immediate challenge looms), one has no command of language.
Even an animal can indicate danger through gestures to other members of its
herd. Where then lies the contribution of gestures to the origin of language?

I cannot think that either Condillac or Wells has offered a completely ade-
quate response to this query. But as Wells notes, the situation confronting
primitive man differs from that of ants and bees, who communicate in a quite
complex way. Human action is not rigidly bound by instinct. Thus, whether
or not the use of gestures as a language has been adequately accounted for,
at least the space for an explanation stands open. Wells conjectures that the
mental capacity required to move to the full use of a language of gestures does
not exceed that of the higher apes.

The gap in the theory just decribed can in part be handled by using an ap-
proach in another recently published book, J.N. Hattiangadi’s How Is Language
Possible? (coincidentally by the same publisher as Wells’). Hattiangadi, unlike


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248 « The Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 3

Wells, does not see gesture as the key to the mystery of language. But, seeking
like Wells the origin of language in thoughtful though nonlinguistic behavior,
he stresses play as a likely source of the development of language, in a way
that fits in with Wells’ account. Suppose, to revert once again to our favorite
example, those who have averted danger by heeding a hand waver’s signal now
pretend that danger threatens and “go through the motions” of the episode
that they have just survived. This type of play hardly demands much of people
and is in fact characteristic of virtually all children. It is exactly the “pretend”
element of play that constitutes the importance of this elementary activity for
our present purpose. Since, in our imagined case, no immediate danger is pres-
ent, but the players act as if a threat did confront them, the basis of language
learning lies near to hand.” The players can represent something that is ab-
sent in the same way that through words we refer to objects not on the scene.
Hattiangadi’s play theory of the origins of abstraction meshes in a remarkable
way with Wells’ gestural account to offer a most promising theory of the begin-
ning of language.

In urging attention to Wells and Hattiangadi, I do not mean to suggest
that all problems in this difficult area stand in sight of solution. One might
wonder whether in appealing to the ability to represent absent items, the prob-
lem has been solved by assuming it out of existence. How exactly was the ability
acquired to engage in play of the imitative sort? Even if an explanatory gap
remains, however, on the surface it strikes one as less wide than that involved
in the entire creation of a language de novo. The origin of language now ap-
pears much less intractable.

Before returning to Wells, an objection remains. to be considered. This af-
fects not Wells’ book but the way I have chosen to present its thesis. If Wells
assumes that language evolved from gestures, is he in fact opposing the Hayekian
shibboleth, the “results of human action but not of human design”? Wells does
not after all contend that people lacking language one day assembled and in-
vented words. Rather, the development of gestures and then words from natural
signs takes place in a manner akin to that of Darwinian evolution. What could
be more Hayekian?

A crucial difference in fact separates Wells’ position from Hayek’s model
of evolution. When gestures and a fortiori words are used to represent absent
objects, this process takes place consciously. This use of a sign is nugatory unless
its employer realizes what he is doing. Though he may not realize the full com-
plexity of language, he cannot use gestural or verbal language at all un-
consciously. If only at an elementary level, he must realize he is using language.
Thus, the growth of language differs from the evolutionary pattern, to which
Hayek makes constant appeal, in that the latter depends for its success only
on everyone following fixed rules. In this pattern, no conscious thought is re-
quired. One often gets the impression that for Hayek its presence stands as
an obstacle to progress.


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Book Reviews 249

But let us return at last to Wells. After reading his account of Condillac’s
views and the similar though less developed positions of Thomas Reid and
Lord Monboddo, one is likely to be brought up short by a fact difficult to
fathom. Although Condillac developed an account of language that seems very
much worth extending further, few later writers followed in the path of the
Enlightenment writers.

Why not? In part, the answer lies in the lack of anthropological data
available until recent times. Bereft of empirical information, the study of the
origins of language could hardly rise much above the purely speculative. But
this is not the principal cause of the turn away from Condillac’s model.

Wells maintains that the main nineteenth-century writers on the origins
of language regressed in their understanding from the heights attained in the
preceding century. Largely under the influence of J.G. Herder, an important
figure of German Romanticism, nineteenth-century writers tended to deny that
language could have consciously developed. Ignoring or misunderstanding Con-
dillac, Herder and his successors claimed that Rousseau’s paradox—words seem
to be required to invent words—was in its own terms irresolvable.

Instead, these writers appealed to the spirit of particular peoples that in
some rationally unspecifiable way had generated language. Like Gadamer and
our latter-day hermeneuticians, who have in fact been directly influenced by
Herder, the appeal to tradition took the place of logical analysis. Hayek’s stress
on tradition also falls within this framework.

I do not think it necessary to trace the growth of the Romantic theory
through each of the rather obscure figures Wells discusses in his valuable
historical account. Readers of this journal probably will not be interested in
the nuances of the positions held by, for example, Geiger, Steinthal, Miller,
and Wundt. (Those who are can consult Wells’ book.) But before turning from
this group, one more characteristic of their position should be noted.

One reason they rejected the rationalist account was its inability to account
for the existence of “higher languages.” Largely owing to their grammatical form,
some languages could more easily express abstract thought than others. So, at
any rate, the great liberal theorist and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt contended.
(Humboldt especially emphasized the use of inflection in the “higher” languages.)

Though pleasing to the ego (since German, not coincidentally the native
tongue of most of these writers, usually was ranked as the highest modern
language), this notion lacks any scientific basis. Because of the very strong em-
phasis on it, however, the study of the origins of language received a serious
setback from which it has not fully recovered. Those engaged in the quest for
the “highest” language were hardly likely to favor a theory that, like Condillac’s,
viewed language as a relatively easily understood development from certain
tendencies universally present among primitive people. The appeal to the essence
of a people’s spirit and the quest for the Holy Grail of the supreme language
went hand-in-hand.


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250 eo The Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 3

Rather surprisingly, though J.G. Fichte is twice mentioned (pp. 65, 110),
Wells fails adequately to stress the role of this outstanding idealist in the rise
of the trend just described. Fichte’s Speeches to the German Nation, greatly
influential as a rallying cry against Napoleon, emphasized the value of Ger-
man as a so-called Ursprache, (a primitive language largely uncorrupted by
linguistic mixture), in contrast with the other major European languages.?

It is also worthy of note that the quest for the ideal language, far from
being universally consigned to the dustheap of lost causes, remains influential
today in a certain school of philosophy. I refer of course to Heidegger and his
many followers, in short to the camp of hermeneutics. In his Introduction to
Metaphysics, Heidegger finds the Greek and German languages supreme in
their ability to declare the truth of Being.” But the mysteries of Heidegger are
best left to his hierophants and those aspiring to that dubious status. These
murky waters have nothing in common with either the values of the Enlighten-
ment or the Misesian approach to the study of society. I do not think that even
so convinced a defender of the wisdom of tradition as Hayek, though his views
have in them more than a tinge of Romantic influence, would do other than
turn aside from such odd tenets. !°

I have presented a largely sympathetic picture of Wells’ account, and it does
seem to me that his approach is more adequate than the currently most favored
schools of linguistic origins (e.g., Chomsky’s innatism). But one can hardly
disguise from readers the fact that Wells’ theory is unlikely to receive a warm
welcome from the majority of philosophers. :

Why not? The answer lies in the fact that Wells’ theory flies directly in
the face of one of the most influential works on contemporary philosophy, Lud-
wig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. (Incidentally, Wittgenstein was
Hayek’s cousin.) According to Wittgenstein, there are no “natural” signs. Any
claimed exception (e.g., our case of hand waving in the face of danger) presup-
poses the existence of a community who have through habit adopted a
“language game” in which a sign has a particular meaning. Contrary to Con-
dillac and his twentieth-century successors, language cannot exist in the absence
of conventionally accepted rules for the use of terms. Into the labyrinths of
Wittgensteinian doctrine I cannot here enter. I raise the point only to support
my guess that Wells’ theory may unfortunately not have the success it richly
deserves. If Wittgensteinian objections do succeed in overthrowing Wells’ ac-
count, the result will not be encouraging for the study of the origins of language.
As Hattiangadi has effectively noted, it is difficult within the Wittgensteinian
view to see how language can have originated at all.'!

Whether or not one is attracted to the gestural account of language origins,
however, it is difficult to deny the importance of Wells’ book. He has depicted
in clear and incisive fashion a nearly forgotten chapter of intellectual history
of major importance. Economists who find its topic remote from their im-
mediate concerns still ought to read it. In contrast to a very distinguished


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Book Reviews 251

Austrian economist, Wells powerfully argues that at least one vital human in-
stitution was the product both of human action and of human design.

Notes

1. All references to this book will be by page numbers in parentheses in the text.

2. See, for example, his Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1948). This theme is a near constant in Hayek’s work.

3. F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. I (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1973).

4. See F.A. Hayek, ed., Collectivist Economic Planning (London: George Rout-
ledge & Sons, 1935). Hayek contributed to this influential volume as well as editing it.

5. Walter Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages
(London: Methuen, 1961).

6. (Peru, Illinois: Open Court, 1987).

7. Ibid., p. 191ff.

8. Fichte’s work is conveniently available in English, with an excellent preface
by G.A. Kelly.

9. This work, first issued in 1943, appeared in a second “corrected” edition in
1952. In it, Heidegger left intact his reference to the “inner greatness” of National
Socialism.

10. Hayek’s “unintended consequences of human action” bear some affinity with
Hegel's Cunning of Reason (List der Vernunft), though it would be wrong either to
view Hayek as a Hegelian or to view Hegel as entirely within the Romantic camp.
In complete contrast with the traditionalists and their latter-day followers are the
members of the Erlangen School, who emphasize the conscious construction of
mathematical and physical concepts. See Paul Lorenzen, Constructive Philosophy
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987).

11. Hattiangadi, p. 30.