All rounders

We humans are rich in a wide variety of capacities which no other species has. We don’t just have language. We can do experiments, write and play music, draw or paint a likeness, throw or kick a ball at a target or hit it with a stick or a bat, carry out successive operations with numbers, and more. Despite attempts by circus masters and entertainers, non-humans do not seem to be capable of any of these things. Some individual animals have learnt what may seem like the first steps to some of these skills. This can then be put on show, to be admired or unfairly mocked. But non-human levels in these skills would never be mistaken for human skills. What about language? Some people believe that their dogs understand everything they say, but only the rarest of dogs, specially trained over a long period, learn to understand some word combinations, such as “Put the ball in the bowl” or “Get the paper from the door”. This is compositionality, but of a very elementary sort. And the nature of this supposedly human-type understanding is plainly quite different from that of small humans who learn very early that there are special classes of words, like what and where, and elements of the sound structure which are understood in relation to some position in the structure other than where they are pronounced. By the proposal here, the essentials of this understanding normally develop between the ages of one and three. This is commonly known as ‘Universal Grammar’ – what human beings share – although see Modesty and Caution and Contending views for a variety of quite different perspectives.

It may be that all the singularly human capacities other than language are themselves contingent on language. It is significant, in this regard, that it is language which develops first.