claims are made for the crucial effect of language, an allegedly social product, on thought. It is remembered, one hopes, that this causality works both ways; but it takes the thought-experiment to remind us which of the two is essential: one can easily conceive, as Ibn Tufayl does, a man filled with thoughts, but never blessed by the “social gift” of language. It is thought that creates language; not language, thought. Likewise, one is logically and ontologically prior to many: no group has an idea or composes a refrain to the exclusion of its members. By the same token, it was man who
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