Language as Emerging from Instinctive Behaviour[Note 1. From a letter by Rush Rhees to Norman Malcolm ...][Note 2. Edited by D. E. Phillips, University of Wales Swansea ...]

Critique of Norman Malcolm’s ‘Wittgenstein: The Relation of Language to Instinctive Behaviour’. Rhees points out the danger of thinking of instinctive reactions as the foundations of language. The reactions are primitive, Rhees argues, in relation to primitive means of communication, ie, in relation to people who already speak a language. What we need to emphasise is the way in which primitive reactions are taken up in our ways of thinking and forms of life. That cannot be reduced to something ‘instinctive’.