Unlock(e)ing T. H. Gallaudet's Philosophy of Language
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| Title: | Unlock(e)ing T. H. Gallaudet's Philosophy of Language |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Sayers, Edna Edith |
| Source: | Sign Language Studies. Win 2021 21(2):208-244. |
| Availability: | Gallaudet University Press. 800 Florida Avenue NE, Denison House, Washington, DC 20002-3695. Tel: 202-651-5488; Fax: 202-651-5489; Web site: http://gupress.gallaudet.edu/SLS.html |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 37 |
| Publication Date: | 2021 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Reports - Evaluative |
| Education Level: | Higher Education Postsecondary Education |
| Descriptors: | Sign Language, Deafness, Advocacy, Teaching Methods, Linguistics, Intellectual Disciplines, Language of Instruction, Educational Philosophy, Graduate Study, Undergraduate Students, Biographies, Religious Factors, Beliefs, Protestants, American Sign Language |
| Geographic Terms: | Connecticut |
| DOI: | 10.1353/sls.2020.0034 |
| ISSN: | 0302-1475 |
| Abstract: | In the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was famously advocating for sign language to be the language of instruction for deaf children in the United States, European philosophers were founding modern linguistics. Gallaudet was not able to benefit from their breakthroughs, however, because his upbringing, education, and religious beliefs all conspired to preclude any interest in European thought or, indeed, any secular thought at all. For this reason, his arguments for sign language were seen as naive and uninformed by educated people of his day and thus were easily dismissed by liberally educated oralists, who were better acquainted with new ways of understanding the human mind. The first part of the present study examines the limitations on what Gallaudet read and learned in his college courses and graduate studies, as well as how his underlying religious beliefs about language, its origin, and its purposes worked to compound these limitations. The second part of this study shows how his archaic ideas about language undermined his public efforts for sign language instruction. In short, Gallaudet argued for the right thing--sign language education--but he supported his arguments with reasoning based on assumptions few thinkers of his time could any longer accept. |
| Abstractor: | As Provided |
| Entry Date: | 2021 |
| Accession Number: | EJ1284191 |
| Database: | ERIC |
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| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwHpYAbX2j7GCuQxacCty0AIAAAA4zCB4AYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHSMIHPAgEAMIHJBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDLp9fVvmjr7EJn_kUgIBEICBmz0R3iyA5D2Ye41K0dZMSoEF0SS1jrJLwC8CApRdS4LIVytET3h_n1UKkEGqtr00EkCYDKMTXItQmeSnQM5K_GNUJewLHnDfJuW_KTEbEIOYlc0mYZuiC0q9V8aW4fcrpRee-Q4nT4j1CZ7cY18N__6XGt-jvck-y79JtoBlm-QGiXNF7p54elcSEq8bU7emh83IN4YBi6o1srNy Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0148504338;ngu01jan.21;2021Feb06.05:21;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0148504338-1">Unlock(e)ing T. H. Gallaudet's Philosophy of Language </title> <p>In the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was famously advocating for sign language to be the language of instruction for deaf children in the United States, European philosophers were founding modern linguistics. Gallaudet was not able to benefit from their breakthroughs, however, because his upbringing, education, and religious beliefs all conspired to preclude any interest in European thought or, indeed, any secular thought at all. For this reason, his arguments for sign language were seen as naive and uninformed by educated people of his day and thus were easily dismissed by liberally educated oralists, who were better acquainted with new ways of understanding the human mind. The first part of the present study examines the limitations on what Gallaudet read and learned in his college courses and graduate studies, as well as how his underlying religious beliefs about language, its origin, and its purposes worked to compound these limitations. The second part of this study shows how his archaic ideas about language undermined his public efforts for sign language instruction. In short, Gallaudet argued for the right thing—sign language education—but he supported his arguments with reasoning based on assumptions few thinkers of his time could any longer accept.</p> <p>Keywords: Gallaudet; deaf education; philosophy; sign language; religion</p> <p>When Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1787–1851) founded the American Asylum in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1816, he incidentally established the conditions that birthed American Sign Language (ASL). Of course, Laurent Clerc was essential to the success of both the school and the development of ASL, but Clerc tactically ceded the public arena to his American friend, making Gallaudet, then and today, the national face of deaf education and "the language of signs." Gallaudet's heartfelt and lifelong advocacy for sign language was indeed essential to its acceptance by the hearing educators and the donor class of buttoned-down Connecticut. But his intentions, and the worldview that motivated his work, hearkened not to any imagined future with a twenty-first-century community of signing Deaf Americans, but rather back to Gallaudet's own roots in seventeenth-century Puritan Connecticut Colony and in his education at conservative, church-run Yale College and at the retro-Calvinist Andover Theological Seminary. For Gallaudet, it was the heritage of exclusionary religious beliefs and reactionary politics that informed and fed his advocacy for the Deaf.</p> <p>To begin with, the positive claims Gallaudet made for signing are, on the face of it, simplistic. In his newspaper and magazine articles of the 1820s–1840s and in his celebrated 1844 letter to the obstreperous oralist Horace Mann, all examined below, Gallaudet claimed that sign language instruction was less time consuming and therefore could provide a broader education more efficiently—and at reduced cost. That was and is true, and the cost element was surely a winning argument with his donors. He also argued that the language of signs was a surer way to convert pupils to Christ, a claim that proved, however, not to be the case, as the only convert to Christ among Gallaudet's hundreds of pupils was Sophia Fowler, later Mrs. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. Toward the end of his life, Gallaudet's arguments centered on disciplining deaf youths, discipline being closely associated with conversion in his mind, and both easier to accomplish with a visible language—we will see an example of his discipline method below. In none of his extant publications or letters does he mention enabling deaf people to become informed citizens, responsible parents, good neighbors, or productive members of society, as the oralists would do.</p> <p>Perhaps more problematic, however, was that Gallaudet supported his claims with unexamined assumptions that his European contemporaries in the emerging field of linguistics would have deemed questionable, as potential donors in New York, Philadelphia, and, later, Boston seem to have done. As is shown below, Gallaudet assumed that the language of signs (notice the singular: there is only one) was natural, original, and specially designed by God and that it was univocal and transparent in its denotation not only of (concrete) things but also of (abstract) concepts—in other words, he regarded the underdeterminacy of oral–auditory languages as a bug, not a feature. He stated flatly that the sign language was universal among humankind, that it was forever fixed and immutable, and, finally, that these features made it in many respects superior to spoken languages.</p> <p>How did Gallaudet come to hold these beliefs about language? Were they commonplace in his era, or were they unique to him? This study will show that many, even most, of Gallaudet's peers in Connecticut regarded his rationales as self-evident, but early nineteenthcentury Connecticut was not typical of Western thought in this era. Yale-educated state residents like Gallaudet and his donors took as their starting point a model of language that was derived not from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which ultimately derived from the late-seventeenth-century thought of John Locke (1632–1704) and which was then fueling study and reflection elsewhere, but rather from the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. This model, as we shall see, assumed that language exists solely to communicate what they deemed to be factual reality about God, His will, and His creation and that it functions by deploying lexical items (little is said about grammar) to uniquely represent discrete, real entities. For example, in this model, "elephant," "breathe," and "virtue" represent discrete and existent entities, virtue being just as real, and just as unambiguous, as an elephant or the act of breathing.</p> <p>The twentieth-century British philosopher J. L. Austin characterized this language model as "for every head, the hat that goes with it." In other words, each word encodes one specific entity, just as each hat covers one specific head. The entity that is denoted, like a specific person's head, comes first: then, language gives it its very own hat. Austin's contemporary, the American philosopher Willard van Ormen Quine, wrote similarly about what he called "the Myth of Meaning": the belief that there is a core assemblage of discrete ideas (such as virtue and elephants, or, to take Quine's examples, the concepts denoted by the words "class," "attribute," and "sake") existing somehow in the real world. Of course, it was always recognized that words like "virtue" denote concepts that cannot be learned from observation of the physical world, as "elephant" and "breathe" can, but since we all understand the word "virtue," such concepts, in this model, must be uniformly and universally present in the human mind, and must exist before language (as heads preexist hats). For societies like those in Reformation Europe, which understood the world to be a carefully designed fabric, tailor-made for us (or we for it), and containing a finite number of discrete things and concepts, this model of language would, and did, seem self-evident.1</p> <p>But by Gallaudet's time—after Locke had set the standard for modern European empiricism, and after discoveries like those of Captain Cook, Joseph Banks, Newton, Harvey, and Boyle, and especially after the French Enlightenment—it was no longer so self-evident that the universe was a finite, intelligently designed, human-sized world filled with discrete, humanly perceptible items and universal concepts ready to be labeled with words. A great many facts about the world were already telling against that view of reality, and every literate person had, in theory, the opportunity to know all about new discoveries like the microbes in the human mouth and oxygen in our atmosphere, the ability to date and distinguish among authors of various books of the Bible, the methods by which geological stratification and fossils were formed, the existence of societies in which land ownership and female modesty were wholly unknown, the rudiments of the history of languages and language families, and much, much more that was earlier unknown, even unsuspected. Gallaudet's active life was concurrent with, for example, the lives of Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, who were working in some of the same fields he was: educational reform, human languages, and information about the Global South. But while the Humboldts influenced the thinking of everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Charles Darwin, Gallaudet's thought had little resonance outside Connecticut. Yes, his establishment of the signing classroom and the residential school enabled the development of ASL, and ASL is widely taught, analyzed, and respected today. But not for the rationales Gallaudet put forward. In fact, I would argue, Gallaudet's archaic worldview and outmoded arguments played directly into the hands of the oralists, whose goal of assimilation was to be accomplished by training deaf children to parrot spoken words, a method bolstered by no evidence whatsoever but which would yet prove to seem far more plausible to their contemporaries than the extravagant gestures and facial distortions of sign language. How did it happen that Gallaudet and his Connecticut contemporaries were so far behind the times as to be making sixteenth-century arguments for solutions to nineteenth-century pedagogical questions? The first part of this study provides an overview of how Gallaudet came to hold his outmoded views of language. The second part reexamines his published arguments.</p> <hd id="AN0148504338-2">Sources of Gallaudet's Philosophy of Language</hd> <p>Before beginning the survey of the sources of Gallaudet's ideas about language, one point about his personality should be mentioned as an important factor in determining what information he was exposed to. Surprisingly, despite his education, travels, and obvious intelligence, he had next to no intellectual curiosity: he had no taste for opposing ideas, took no serious interest in science (unless it happened to validate a pet theory), and was happy to content himself with abridgements and anthologized literary excerpts taken out of context. For example, as an undergraduate, he opined that new library acquisitions were of no value because students already had more books than they could read, and in his commencement address at the conferral of his Master of Arts degree, he quoted a passage from Shakespeare that would have revealed, to anyone in the audience who had ever read Troilus and Cressida, that he had no idea that this play was about what he would have called fornication. His time abroad, in London and Paris, was marked largely by complaints about the residents' ungodly customs, and he stayed resolutely shut up in his lodgings rather than venture out to rub elbows or see the sights, which even his former Yale professors were urging him to do.2</p> <p>There were bookstores in New Haven and Hartford, of course, and one could, in theory, buy books for extracurricular pursuits if one were interested in ideas and willing to risk exposure to unauthorized ones. For example, the inventor of the telegraph, Samuel Morse, as a Yale undergraduate during the years in which Gallaudet was a tutor, bought an eight-volume collection of Montaigne's essays at a New Haven bookstore, only to have his father, who would—within the decade—found the theological seminary that Gallaudet would attend, chastise him for doing so. The elder Morse deemed Montaigne's essay collections to be "wicked and bad books." Gallaudet would doubtless have said the same if he had known that a student under his tuition had done such a thing. (Young Samuel's defense was that he did not intend to read the books, only to resell them at a profit! He graduated Phi Beta Kappa.)3</p> <p>Gallaudet's native incuriosity was only reinforced and extended by Yale College and by his deeply conservative, state-established church, both of which discouraged investigation of novel ideas. In 1802, when Gallaudet began his studies at Yale, the college was still mired in the world views of the year it was founded, 1701. Under the terms of the Yale Corporation's charter, the Calvinist denomination that had been running Connecticut as a theocracy since colonial times held control of Yale's faculty and curriculum, and it allowed hiring only in-state to avoid doctrinal contamination. This church was conservative indeed, having been founded by the Puritans, a people "absolutely certain of their monopoly on religious truth," and having been recently yanked back to its sixteenth-century roots by the New England theologian Jonathan Edwards.4</p> <p>Religious truth, in turn, depended upon confidence that the language of the Bible was transparent, stable, unproblematic, univocal, a "determinate, public entity," in the words of a recent historian of the period. The mind of the first-created man, Adam, was believed to have been "congruent" with God's mind, which contained the entirety of the created world, and the original language in which God, Adam, and Eve conversed was assumed to have been "innate and implantive" in Adam. This original language, designed by God, was assumed to reflect or figure in some sense the "essence" or "signature" of every individual thing that it named. Words in this so-called Adamic language were therefore isomorphic with material reality, each structured analogously to match the thing or idea that it denoted. Early Protestants knew that language is no longer isomorphic, but believed that it, nevertheless, must maintain clear and stable denotations of universal ideas in order to continue to serve as the medium of divine revelation.5</p> <p>The universality of ideas, particularly those related to morality, had long been taken for granted, though before the Reformation, it had been thought that these universal ideas had independent existence, as "forms" (Plato) or "essences" (Aristotle). Early Protestants located the notion of universal ideas in the human mind, averring that they were innate, having been stamped on our minds "as if on hot wax." "Universal Notions, original and innate," wrote John Amos Comenius (1592–1670), the father of modern education whose theories were virtually identical with those adopted two hundred years later by Gallaudet, were "the divinely laid foundations of our reason." At Yale College at the end of the eighteenth century, the doctrine of innate ideas was still being used as a "disputation," or debate, topic for seniors.6</p> <p>These two premodern premises—(<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref1">1</reflink>) that mental ideas of both material and nonmaterial entities are universal (and presumably innate) and (<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref2">2</reflink>) that God created language to reflect or encode these universal ideas isomorphically—form a bright thread running through Gallaudet's case for sign language, notwithstanding that they had been decisively confuted long before Gallaudet's birth. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) had read reports of contacts with previously unknown societies and had concluded that no set of morals was universal: In a state of nature, Hobbes realized, right and wrong are only what each individual takes them to mean. Thus, there were no universal ideas about morality. And while Adam was said to have intuited the true name of every animal, the Adamic language was not isomorphic at all—for the simple reason that language cannot function without conventional agreements among men. Hobbes is seen today as the founder of British nominalism (the theory that abstracts exist only as words, not entities), but his contemporaries took him to be an atheist. At Gallaudet's Yale, Hobbes appeared on no curriculum, no library list. Gallaudet had certainly never heard of Hobbes beyond, perhaps, having seen his name on a list of proscribed infidel philosophers.7</p> <p>The extent to which Hobbes's philosophy was neglected in England during the decades following the 1666 edict against atheism in general, and his Leviathan in particular, can be judged by the subsequent revival of the Adamic tradition in England, the premises of which Hobbes had just "dynamited." Speculation about the identity of the original, naturally signifying language used in Eden—was it an early form of Hebrew? or Irish?—was rife, and entire books were written expounding various candidates. As late as in 1828, in Connecticut, where seventeenth-century, contra-Hobbesian philosophy was still alive and well, Noah Webster's American Dictionary stated that the original language was "Chaldee."8</p> <p>But since the "original" forms of Chaldean, Irish, Hebrew, and other candidates for the Adamic language were beyond recovery, the challenge became the creation of a new, artificial universal language that, like the original Adamic language, isomorphically represented each thing denoted. To know the name of a thing in this universal language would be to know the thing itself—or vice versa. The language projectors, as these scholars and hobbyists were called, regarded all languages spoken and written in today's fallen world to be distressingly untethered from meaning and too fragile to sustain fruitful communication. A universal language with a transparently denoting lexicon was urgently needed to provide access to Truth, to "buttress natural theology," to facilitate missionary work, and to "renew contact with divine harmony in the universe." Some scoffed, of course: Jonathan Swift, for one, found these language projects ridiculous enough. His 1726 work Gulliver's Travels describes language projectors so intent on transparent denotation that they completely discard words in favor of heavy packs of various items with which to communicate: "when they met in the Streets [they] would lay down their Loads, open their Sacks, and hold Conversation for an Hour together," he wrote of the projectors.9</p> <p>The seventeenth-century vogue for language projects proved to be a short-lived one and had virtually no lasting effects among mainstream philosophers of language. Who today, or even in Gallaudet's day, remembers John Wilkins's 1668 magnum opus with its forty Borgesian "Genus's," each with nine species (because his language had exactly nine vowels), creating an artificial, but neatly isomorphic, lexicon held together by no grammar beyond English word order? But the ideas behind these seventeenth-century boondoggles—that language should be universal and isomorphic—lived on in the one surviving, or revived, strand of language projects: the study of gesture. Beginning in 1644, John Bulwer described gesture as the "Naturall Language of the Hand, as it had the happinesse to escape the curse at the confusion of Babel: so it hath since been sanctified and made a holy language by the expressions of our Saviour's Hands." Gesture as a natural, divinely protected language was an exciting idea for everyone trying to make sense of Genesis and imagine the Adamic language, even if Bulwer's gesture lexemes were as culture-specific and historically grounded (in Roman pantomime) as Wilkins's "Genus's" and sound system. Gesture language seemed to solve all puzzles about language in one fell swoop: not only was it (thought to be) original, natural, and sanctified by Jesus Christ, but also it was regarded as universal: the hand "speakes all languages, and as an universall character of Reason, is generally understood and knowne by all Nations. ... [I]t may well be called the Tongue and general language of Humane Nature, which, without teaching, men in all regions of the habitable world do at the first sight most easily understand" [Bulwer's italics]. It was averred that gesture demonstrated the existence of universal innate ideas and the possibility of transparent denotation. Bulwer's interests soon led him into deaf education proper with his 1648 Philocophus: or the Deafe and Dumbe Mans Friend. A few years later, in 1653, the cryptographer John Wallis reported on William Holder's apparent success in teaching Alexander Popham to speak English. And George Dalgarno, whose work in shorthand and a "real character" writing system had led him into collaboration with Wilkins, moved on to gesture language in 1661, and then, in 1680, to deaf education. But we present more on Dalgarno below.10</p> <p>Then, at the end of the seventeenth century, along came John Locke. Hobbes had been too far ahead of his time, but Locke (1632–1704) had the advantage of writing for a public whose worldview was being shaken by one scientific breakthrough after another. Newton's apple (1666), Boyle's corpuscles (1661), and discoveries of similar note by Haley, Kepler, Huygens, Harvey, and Leeuwenhoek had each in its own field shown that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in the sixteenth-century theology of John Calvin. After the discovery of the moons of Jupiter and the human egg cell, it was no longer so obvious that the mind was divinely endowed with ideas of each of the finite number of things in the world, and Locke's 1690 An Essay concerning Human Understanding begins by stating outright that the "established opinion" that "innate principles" are "stamped upon the mind of man" is false. Cherished ideas like modesty or frugality, he declared, are nothing but constructs based on sensory input and created through our mental operations. In fact, he continued, the human conscience is "nothing else but our own opinion or judgment of the moral rectitude or pravity of our own actions," "derived from no better original than the superstition of a nurse." As for linguistic denotation, Locke firmly disputed that words could have any relation to what they signify. And at the end of a chapter entitled "The Imperfection of Words" in Book III of the Essay, he followed this precept where it led him:</p> <p>Though everything said in the [Bible] be infallibly true, yet the reader may be, nay, cannot choose but be, very fallible in the understanding of it. Nor is it to be wondered, that the will of God, when clothed in words, should be liable to that doubt and uncertainty which unavoidably attends that sort of conveyance.11</p> <p>Locke's work created a sensation because it destabilized (the myth of) meaning, calling into question not only human communication but our capacity to receive divine revelation. However, aside from the rare passage in which he tips his hand, like the one above on the conscience, Locke left his readers to follow his ideas on their own—into Unitarianism, deism, even atheism—or to reject them wholesale as heretical. Many readers did just that. Jonathan Edwards singled out Locke's denial of innate ideas as evidence that he was a Socinian—a Unitarian, which was, in Edwards's view, about the worst thing a person could be. But because Locke's Essay was regarded as valid in many other respects, it was most common to cherry-pick from it, to put Locke on the Yale College curriculum, but just those parts of his work that comported with received religious doctrine. Locke himself encouraged this reception, clearly wishing to avoid a headon collision with believers. In truth, he was sincerely convinced that Christian moral principles were self-evident, the next best thing to innate, so he often reads like an innatist himself. And his Essay is so long—weighing in at around a thousand pages in print today—that it was almost always read in abridgements. Eighteenth-century thinkers like David Hume and the Enlightenment philosophes more boldly extended Locke's ideas into outright skepticism about biblical inerrancy, especially regarding miracles, but Locke himself was mostly content to let his work be interpreted to suit the reader.12</p> <p>When Gallaudet was studying for his bachelor's and master's degrees at Yale College, both its curriculum and its library reflected the intellectual stagnation—and the bowdlerized Locke—upon which its students and faculty formed their worldviews. At the end of the eighteenth century, just a few years before Gallaudet's 1802 enrollment as a fifteen-year-old sophomore, the library held no book published more recently than 1733, having rejected the donation of a private library on the grounds that the donor was a Baptist. A great many of the books it did hold were donated—and authored—by Isaac Watts, the eighteenth-century hymnist. As for the Yale curriculum, it continued through the eighteenth century to be based on the thought of Peter Ramus, a sixteenth-century French Protestant academic who taught that "everything in the world represents some idea in the mind of God" and that the sole aim of education is to discover and list these ideas. Some passages from Locke's Essay, such as his elaborate catalogues of the so-called faculties of the mind, fit the Ramist curriculum. In any case, students learned about Locke largely through a simplification written by none other than their favorite hymnist Isaac Watts.13</p> <p>To illustrate how the expurgating of Locke at Yale College shaped the thought of its graduates, we can compare Gallaudet's arguments in favor of sign language with those made a generation earlier by the Boston Loyalist Francis Green, who was presumably an Anglican rather than a Calvinist and was definitely not a Yale man. Green was a thorough-going Lockean who had investigated deaf education in both Edinburgh and Paris and had become convinced of the superiority of sign language. In his 1783 treatise Vox Oculus Subjecta, Green echoed Locke in saying that language is by no means God-given and that it appears to us to be innate only because of "the seeming facility with which it is gradually acquired in childhood." Green's efforts to establish deaf education in the United States were, it is true, first on behalf of the Braidwood method, which he favored when he enrolled his son in their Edinburgh school, but Green had a change of heart after a few years and took his son to Paris, becoming a champion of de l'Épée's methods. Gallaudet would take precisely the same route from the Braidwoods to the French. The only difference between these two Americans was that one had read Locke and was using his reason, while the other was relying entirely on his faith to reinvent a wheel that, unbeknownst to him and apparently everyone else in Calvinist Connecticut, Green had already made ready to roll.14</p> <p>For extracurricular reading, Yale students could and did turn to the Scottish Common Sense philosophers, most of whom found Locke's thought contrary to the common sense they enshrined as the ultimate arbiter. For the Scots, common sense tells us that mind/body dualism is unbreachable, meaning that information acquired by means of our sensory organs could not possibly affect our minds, which are stocked with ideas by design. Common sense likewise tells us, they averred, that human mental processes and ideas are uniform and universal, and that, while ideas may not actually be innate, the mind is enabled, by design, to "intuit" God's moral principles, this last a more plausible update of the older doctrine of innate ideas "stamped" on the mind. Common Sense philosophy was widely adopted in the United States, not only among reactionaries like those running Connecticut, but even by their New England opposite numbers, the Transcendentalists. The Common Sense philosophers were apparently not formally taught in Gallaudet's undergraduate years but were certainly widely available: Gallaudet had fond memories of having "Dugaldized" with a classmate, that is, read and discussed Dugald Stewart, a Common Sense philosopher he would later meet in Edinburgh.15</p> <p>Common Sense philosophy was the perfect solution for students at Calvinist colleges like Yale and Princeton at this fraught moment, when scientific discoveries were urgently suggesting a much different model of the created world than the one depicted in Genesis and when the colleges feared that their students would question the need for divine revelation at all. Common Sense philosophy reassured undergraduates that whatever secrets of nature may be discovered by science, God and ultimate Truth were still to be discovered through common sense, as designed by God for the human mind. In fact, Common Sense philosophy squelched any tendencies toward any intellectual inquiry whatever.16</p> <p>What ideas about language would Gallaudet have picked up from his extracurricular reading of the Scots? The founder of Common Sense, Thomas Reid (1717–1796), realized that the doctrine of innate ideas had been conclusively debunked and deployed an increasingly common workaround to arrive at its functional equivalent. Cavalierly taking the Indo-European languages, with which he had some working knowledge, to be a representative sample of human language in general, he concluded that all languages had a common syntax, grammar, and catalogue of lexemes: all languages had words meaning "virtue" and "contract," he declared. From this mistaken premise, Reid deduced that the human mind was itself universally uniform in its "mental operations," and this supposed uniformity produced the universal set of ideas that he believed to exist. Thus, Reid and his followers were able to agree with Locke that there were no innate ideas, but at the same time, to maintain mind–body duality and the universality of ideas.17</p> <p>Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) hewed closely to Reid on language as on other topics, but he had also read more widely in the Enlightenment philosophes and had taken in their (Lockean) observations about language. Citing Condillac and Rousseau, for example, Stewart observed that the divine-origin theory of language was inconsistent with the evidence, which pointed instead to language origins in "natural and external objects." Stewart was also unique in the Common Sense school in defending Locke to some extent, and perhaps, it was this marriage of Common Sense with acceptance of the more obviously valid empiricism of Locke that accounts for Stewart's popularity in the United States. In any case, seemingly everyone across the political, religious, and regional spectra, from Yale President Timothy Dwight through John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, admired Stewart as one of the world's greatest thinkers. And it was Stewart who devoted the greatest share of his writing to language.18</p> <p>Stewart saw gesture or "natural signs" as instinctive communication systems used by animals, by children, and across human cultures, observing, slyly, that (Scottish?) adults had to work quite a bit to recover their instincts. Based on observations made during his visit to the deaf school in Paris (during de l'Épée's days), he regarded the conventional signed languages of the deaf and of "savage tribes," by which he meant the Plains Indians, to be abbreviations of these instinctive natural signs. Stewart became especially interested in the deafblind Scottish boy James Mitchell (b. 1795) and published an account of him in 1812, which included his translation of some passages from de l'Épée's Course of Instruction for the Deaf and Dumb.19</p> <p>While largely positive in his portrayal of James Mitchell and his struggles, Stewart's account tends markedly toward the clinical, referring to James's situation repeatedly as providing "data for philosophical speculation" [Stewart's italics] or "for some important conclusions concerning the capacities of the Human Mind," attitudes that, as we will see, Gallaudet would also adopt in his earliest years in deaf education. When, in 1815, Gallaudet became interested in the deafblind and impoverished West Hartford girl Julia Brace, then eight years old, we can assume, though there is no direct evidence, that his interest was prompted by Stewart's "Some Account of James Mitchell": it is clear that Gallaudet saw Julia as an opportunity to acquire "data for philosophical speculation." On the other hand, if Gallaudet had actually read Stewart's entire account for himself, he would have known that the Scot viewed speech training of the deaf as nothing but an exercise to "astonish the vulgar by the sudden conversion of a dumb child into a speaking automaton," and an art ranking "only a little higher than the art of training starlings and parrots." Considering Gallaudet's profound admiration for Stewart's ideas, why would he, having read this argument, remain so convinced of the Braidwood method? Perhaps, he read only an excerpt or summary, or maybe he simply did not grasp that Stewart was deriding Braidwood. In any case, what he learned from his several visits to the Braces' humble home provided his pretext to introduce himself to Stewart when he arrived in Edinburgh.20</p> <p>Stewart was not the only philosopher Gallaudet met in Edinburgh while trying to negotiate training from the Braidwoods: he also audited the lectures of Thomas Brown on the philosophy of the mind. Brown was not a Common Sense philosopher, although he is often lumped with them, but rather a follower of Condillac—in fact, such a close follower that some readers believed Brown was plagiarizing the Frenchman. (Gallaudet, not having any familiarity with Condillac, did not realize that there was any dependence.) He attended Brown's lectures faithfully while he was in the city, but he does not seem to have actually learned anything from them, or from the book by George Dalgarno, which Dugald Stewart lent him at around the same time.21</p> <p>Dalgarno (1616–1687), mentioned above in connection with the language projectors, was an Aberdeen man who taught school in Oxford and there collaborated on a language project with John Wilkins. Dalgarno's interest in universal language began with his conceptual system of shorthand, and, while he had no personal experience with signing deaf people, his 1680 work, Didascalocophus: or, the deaf and dumb mans tutor, shows that he had studied the work of Kenelm Digby (1664), Juan Pablo Bonet (1620), and John Bulwer, from whose Philocophus: or, the Deafe and Dumbe Mans Friend he took his book's title. For Dalgarno, all linguistic signs, whether spoken, written (either in a phonemic script or a nonphonemic script like shorthand), or gestural, were "equally arbitrary": "there is nothing either natural, or symbolical, in the one of the other," he wrote in Didascalocophus, the word "symbolical" here meaning ideogrammatic or isomorphic. Dalgarno hoped that a universal language could "civilis[e] barbarous Nations, Propagat[e] the Gospel, and encreas[e] Traffique and Commerce," but he never argued that gestural language was universal.22</p> <p>Dalgarno's work was regarded as definitive by Leibnitz but largely forgotten in England until its rediscovery by Dugald Stewart, whose admiration would prompt an Edinburgh edition of Dalgarno's complete Works in 1834. In 1815, however, the book that Stewart lent Gallaudet would have been a rare first edition. There is no evidence that Gallaudet read it, however; there is no mention of Dalgarno's thought in any of his extant work or letters, and Gallaudet certainly never entertained Dalgarno's view that gestural language was a conventional linguistic system like any other.23</p> <p>Finally, what would Gallaudet have learned about current language theories from the Abbé Sicard, Clerc's own teacher who was continuing and expanding on de l'Épée's methods at the Paris school? Sicard did not speak English, and Gallaudet's conversational French, we know from his half of written conversations with Clerc or Massieu scribbled on a restaurant's paper tablecloth, was only survival level—and, interestingly, retained strict English word order and English idiomatic constructions. It is hard to imagine, therefore, that Gallaudet and Sicard could have discussed philosophy very fruitfully. But what did Sicard know, especially about Enlightenment philosophy of language?24</p> <p>Sicard, like Gallaudet, had been clerically trained yet never ordained, and, in addition, had Jansenist leanings, meaning that he held basically Calvinist doctrines on original sin, election (predestination), and the transparency of biblical texts. Doctrinally, then, he and Gallaudet were two peas in a pod. Unlike Gallaudet at Yale and Andover, however, Sicard and his predecessor at the Paris school were also immersed in the writings of Condillac during their training at Port Royal. Condillac's sensationalism (the theory that all knowledge is derived from sensory perception) and nominalism had a profound influence on their pedagogical principles, and Condillac himself repaid the favor by visiting the school. However, Port Royal Jansenism encouraged both de l'Épée and Sicard to believe, pace Condillac, that languages conveyed universal ideas and, indeed, divine truths. Thus, when de l'Épée turned his attention to "developing" the natural signed language used by Deaf Parisians, he believed that the iconic, sensationalist gestures, apparently provided to the deaf by nature, could be shaped by human ingenuity into a universal language that would convey universal ideas and divine truths. Thus began methodical signs to denote French abstract nouns.</p> <p>We should note here that there is some confusion in what was meant by an abstract idea or an abstract noun. Often, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers on the topic use the word "abstract" for something more like generics, such as "furniture" or "mammal," for which there are countless sensational examples though the genus itself exists only nominally. This is true of both Locke and Stewart, who habitually seem to mean "generic" when they use the word "abstract." But de l'Épée was creating methodical signs to convey true abstracts, words, and notions for which there is no material, "sensational" iteration, like trust or crime. To do this, a series of several simpler, "sensible" ideas were rolled into one (very complicated) sign sequence to be deconstructed by the receiver through her or his use of reasoning and analysis. Thus, the Paris school's methodical signs for abstract ideas worked by analogy, a point that de l'Épée and Sicard were very clear about. Gallaudet, however, seems never to have truly grasped the analogical nature of the Frenchmen's invention and always treated methodical signs as though they were straightforwardly isomorphic.25</p> <p>Methodical signs were of vital importance for Gallaudet: the sign language they "enhanced" was, for him, both natural (i.e. part of the Creator's design) and capable of conveying the ideas he regarded as universal among humans, including abstract ideas that could not be acquired through sensory perception. He was well aware that the challenge of representing abstract nouns with a lexicon that (to use Peircian terms) was strictly iconic and indexical was a particular sticking point for the general public. The French Enlightenment had regarded language as necessary for the formation of abstract ideas in the first place—Diderot remarked that "In talking to a deaf-mute it is found to be almost impossible ... to make him grasp any abstract idea." For Gallaudet, however, abstract ideas still existed independently of language as eternal entities, and he seemed to think, like some eighteenth-century English grammarians, that because abstracts denote eternal ideas, their use puts one closer to God. Dugald Stewart and other Common Sense philosophers had taken a middle ground by positing that the faculty of abstraction was innate, an element of God's design, but both Gallaudet and the American public were still quite unclear on this point when Gallaudet's ideas about language first appeared in print.26</p> <hd id="AN0148504338-3">Gallaudet's Philosophy of Language</hd> <p>Gallaudet's earliest publications on sign language were his contributions to a debate on oral versus manual education conducted in the pages of The Christian Observer, a London-based monthly, in 1818 and 1819. The Observer was the organ of the British Clapham Sect, Calvinist Anglicans who counted Zachary Macaulay and Hannah More among their number, but it was also published in Boston, in some volumes with identical content. Macaulay, with whom Gallaudet had formed a deep friendship during his stay in London, had been the Observer's editor until 1816, and perhaps because of his friendship with the young Gallaudet, the journal took a special interest in deaf education that continued under Macaulay's successor.27</p> <p>The debate on deaf education began in August 1818, when a British reader signing himself "B." sent the editor a lengthy extract of an unsigned tract by "a friend" in favor of sign language education. Both B. and B.'s friend must, at this date and in this context, be men rather than women, but there are no further clues as to their identities. B.'s friend, then, begins his argument by noting that we need language to convey "words denoting objects of sense, and still more emphatically with regard to terms of generalization or abstraction, and those which express the emotions of the heart, the purposes of the will, or the operations of the mind." To teach these words to deaf children, the tract continues, one must begin by teaching them that "they have within them something which feels and thinks; that this something is called the soul," something that "will never die" and which, after the death of the body, "will be happy or miserable." We should note here that while, in this period, the word "soul" often denoted nothing more than "mind" (and in fact, this tract itself uses "soul" and "mind" as though they were synonyms), in this passage, B.'s friend clearly refers to the Christian soul, which he believes to be immortal and subject to judgment. Instruction must begin with the soul, because "the soul stands as it were in the centre of this mighty amphitheatre of existences": "the visible creation" and "all moral, religious, and intellectual agency." Once children understand that they have souls, the teacher need only supply the correct English word to each "physical, moral, or intellectual" object that it comprises. While the tract writer, B.'s friend, does not say that the ideas of moral or intellectual objects are innate, it is clear that he believes them to preexist the names by which we refer to them and to be uniformly present in all human beings.</p> <p>Moving along to how this pedagogical procedure works in deaf education, B.'s friend explains that sign language "is abundantly more significant than any other, in as much as it denotes that change which takes place in our bodies and countenances by the movements of the soul; and so far as intellectual processes bear any analogy to the motions of matter, it shadows forth this analogy in very striking and significant emblems." Here, it is important to note that with the word "analogy," he is referring to the ability of sign language to signify not iconically but (again, in Peircian terms) indexically, by using posture and facial expression to point to an emotion, a moral precept, or any other mental construct. These intellectual processes thus being readily conveyed by their physical fingerposts, so to speak, in facial expression and posture, the teacher has only to label each signed concept with a written English word, "and my work would be done," claims the friend.</p> <p>An anonymous letter published in December responded critically to B.'s friend, asserting that deaf children were already aware of having "'something within them that feels and thinks,' &amp;c," whether one called it the "soul" or the "animus" or anything else. His arguments for articulation include points such as providing the national language as "the mother tongue" and ensuring that children associate mouth movements with alphabetic characters. He does not mention any objection to B.'s friend's assumption of preexisting, universal ideas.</p> <p>Gallaudet responded to the correspondence of both B. and the anonymous oral critic some months later. Signing himself "G." he begins by stating his approval of B.'s friend's notion that sign language "is abundantly more significant than any other" in that it "shadows forth this analogy" between the signifier and the signified "in very striking and significant emblems." For his first illustration, he takes the sign for "hat," a material object readily observed through sensory perception: "if I utter the word 'hat,' or write it, there is no analogy between either the spoken or written sign and the object; but if I describe in the native language of the deaf and dumb, this object by appropriate signs, my meaning is at once understood." With this example, assuming that his sign for "hat" is essentially what it is today in ASL, Gallaudet is using the word "analogy" for his mime of putting on a man's brimmed hat, and it is the (iconic) resemblance of the mime with the physical act that makes for transparent referentiality.</p> <p>His second illustration, however, leaves the realm of material objects like hats and physical actions like putting one on your head, and it is here that we realize he is assuming that abstract ideas (<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref3">1</reflink>) exist independently of language acquisition and (<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref4">2</reflink>) are universally uniform. To teach the concept referenced by the word "power," he writes, he has only to sign a "huge rock" and a "mighty man ... hurling it on his antagonist," and "he [his pupil] comprehends me." Gallaudet does not explain how he indicates that the mimed action meant "power" in the abstract rather than, say, "hurl a boulder at somebody." In other words, he omits to explain how the pupil was to understand that a mental construct is being signified by means of a concrete example. As a third illustration, Gallaudet demonstrates teaching the word "evil" by miming the emotion of anger and asking the pupil if he thought he had earned his teacher's approbation when the teacher made that facial expression. "His [the pupil's] conscience furnishes the reply," and all the teacher need do is furnish the word "evil." But this lesson requires even more high-level reasoning on the part of the pupil acquiring a first language than did miming of "power": while "power" requires the leap from concrete example to abstract mental construct, the miming of "evil" conveys not a concrete example of this abstract idea but rather only the (indexical) angry reaction of a teacher to some unstated concrete example of an evil action. The words "power" and "evil" could be successfully taught this way only if the abstract ideas of power and evil were preexisting in the mind of the deaf pupil, latent and waiting to be triggered by an iconic or indexical sign. That this is in fact Gallaudet's assumption is made explicit in his remark that the meaning of a frown is supplied by the (innate) conscience and also in the flat assertion a bit later in his letter that language, whether spoken or signed, "is predicated entirely on the supposition that the thing signified is previously known." Like B.'s friend, Gallaudet does not state how the thing signified came to be previously known, whether it was stamped upon the mind innately or was figured out by (alinguistically) applying mental operations to acquired sensory data.</p> <p>In his second letter, appearing a few months later, Gallaudet turns from the arguments of B.'s friend to those of the oralist critic. Taking issue with the oralist's assertion that children are already aware that they have "something within them that feels and thinks," he states that "it has never once been a part of this thinking and feeling, to be conscious that they possess within them a spiritual and immortal principle ... which will exist for ever beyond the grave." As he goes on to explain, he never met a deaf person who knew that he had a "soul which will never die," thus suggesting that the soul is not one of those previously known ideas patiently awaiting a label but rather a notion that is linguistically conveyed to us in divine revelation. Gallaudet will continue this theme in 1821, in the speech he gave at the dedication of the school's spacious new campus on Asylum Avenue, and in 1824, in a sermon on deaf education delivered in Portland, Maine (and probably many other places), in which he admits that his "experience of more than seven years of familiar acquaintance" had convinced him that deaf people, if they are to have any "hopes with regard to our eternal destiny," require linguistically delivered instruction. The ineluctably linguistic nature of divine revelation thus becomes a major component of the argument for sign language education.28</p> <p>This letter continues, asserting that "the notice of the hidden workings of this soul prepares [deaf pupils] to learn that wonderful medium by which its various operations may be denoted," that is, language, and that "their own native language of signs" is, in fact, their "mother tongue." Methodical signs are explained as a kind of a bridge between that mother tongue, which "has its appropriate style and structure" (by which he appears to mean largely word order) and what "is to them a foreign language," i.e. English. This letter also contains Gallaudet's first published statement of a premise that he will elaborate on later: language is learned "by the help of objects actually presented before [the child], or by pictures, or by his own language of signs."29</p> <p>In 1826, Gallaudet felt well enough informed by his nine years in the classroom and his five years of marriage to a former pupil to compose a lengthy essay on "The Philosophy of Language," bringing sign language to bear on the question of what language is and how it works. This piece appeared unsigned in the United States Literary Gazette, a semimonthly periodical publishing works by Longfellow, Bryant, and the like since 1824, and was reprinted in substantially the same form a few months later in the London edition of the Christian Observer, this time under Gallaudet's name and credentials. The piece appeared a third time in 1830 in the American Annals of Education (AAE), upon request of the editor, who "found it peculiarly appropriate to the present time."30</p> <p>In the covering letter printed in the Observer, Gallaudet asserts that sign language is a useful means by which to learn an unwritten language from heathen speakers, a topic he promises to address in a later issue, and also by which little children can learn their mother tongue. This is so because "knowledge of things should precede the knowledge of those merely arbitrary marks." Again, language, he implies, is an encoding system designating objects and mental constructs that preexist it. Exactly how sign language assists in this encoding effort, he explains in the essay proper, which begins with the premise that the purpose of language is to express one's "thoughts, feelings, or state of mind, in order to excite the conception of them in another." This definition, "to excite the conception of" rather than "to convey," assumes that the person addressed is already familiar with those same thoughts and feelings, which one need merely to "excite" for communication to occur. Language "is either symbolical or arbitrary," Gallaudet continues. "In the first case, it excites, by the mere power of resemblance, or analogy, the ideas which it is intended to communicate." When a language is arbitrary, however, it "derives its significancy either from a previous agreement ... or from an actual explanation at the time [which] can be made only by the presence of the object which the sign is intended to denote, or by another symbolical sign immediately expressive of the object by its resemblance or analogy to it." English is an arbitrary language; the utility of sign language, being a symbolical language, is to provide "another symbolical sign" for a missing object. We are in Swiftian territory, but equipped with an iconic and indexical language rather than a peddler's pack full of objects. We note the assumption here that ideas are universally uniform.31</p> <p>As examples, Gallaudet explains that the word "hat" can be learned by (<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref5">1</reflink>) seeing an actual hat, (<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref6">2</reflink>) seeing a picture of a hat, (<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref7">3</reflink>) seeing a hat mimed, or (<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref8">4</reflink>) hearing an English definition using only words that were already acquired by methods 1–3. The words "naughty" and "good" are likewise acquired through presence of a sort, for Gallaudet asserts that being "conscious of its own wrong feelings" or "of having conducted himself well" are just as present to the language learner as a hat, though seen through "the eye of the mind that notices them" or through "that mysterious expression of the eye, that countless variation of the lineaments and features of the human countenance, that palpable beaming forth of the soul" of the person who has called the child "naughty" or "good." Moving to more complex ideas, "the pious grandmother" tells "her little fondling" that God "sees you, he feeds you, he protects you, he is above that blue sky, and he governs all things." Pointing "to the visible concave of the heavens" solves the residence question; the remainder of the definition is acquired by the presence in the memory of these words having been previously used to describe "certain actions of [the child's] earthly parent," who presumably feeds and protects the child. Thus, the spoken (arbitrary) explanation works, but only because of "the aid of observation, on the one hand, and of consciousness, on the other."32</p> <p>There follows a lengthy example of how to teach the word "immaterial" to a child, then how to teach it to a blind child, in both cases through the modes of sensory perception that can be used. An extraordinary passage on the acquisition of "grammatical structure" then makes this astonishing assertion:</p> <p>A child may, at different times, learn the import of the words, "I, go, and door;" and yet the phrase "I go to the door," would be unintelligible to him, unless accompanied with the action itself of going to the door.—"If you touch the candle I will punish you." With the exception of the word, "if," the child might know the import of all the words in this phrase; but the phrase itself would be unintelligible, unless accompanied with the attempt of the child to touch the candle, and the forbidding and threatening look and action of the parent; and it is this combination of visible circumstances, under this peculiar form, which enables the child to have any conception, though probably, as yet, a very imperfect one, of the import of the word "if" ...</p> <p>One concludes that it was perhaps fortunate for the Asylum's pupils that instruction in grammar was not routinely given or there would have been a lot of burned fingers and rapped knuckles. The essay then turns to divine revelation and the fact that God could not have made his revelation "but in the language of man." Childhood language acquisition must, therefore, be deliberately and carefully guided; the child must not be permitted to acquire language "by chance"; any errors will "mould" the "affections, and desires, and purposes" and he will find it "a mighty task to subdue the waywardness of his heart."33</p> <p>By the time he was working on this essay, Gallaudet's thinking on language had been further stimulated by his interest in the so-called Heathen School, established by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in nearby Cornwall. The need for missionaries to be trained in the languages of their target populations was something that many of his classmates at Andover had been working on a decade previously, but it was not until he visited the ABCFM School himself in 1819 and conversed with the Hawai'ian, Tahitian, Malay, and Native American pupils there "by mere signs" that he became obsessed with the problem—and with his own novel solution, sign language. He claimed that these pupils understood his signed questions "about a future state" (one's life after death), "their souls and the Supreme Being," but of course, since these young people were converts to Evangelical Calvinism and knew that Gallaudet was a clerically trained teacher of the deaf, these would hardly have been cold-call questions for them. In any case, his experience at the ABCFM School suggested to him that sign language was a silver bullet for the foreign missionary, and he subsequently corresponded with Hiram Bingham at his mission in Hawai'i about how this would work.34</p> <p>Gallaudet presented his thoughts on this question in an 1826 article, "The Language of Signs Auxiliary to the Christian Missionary," published in the London Christian Observer in October and framed as a complement to the previous work published in the August and September issues. He begins not with the ABCFM School, but with a visit to the Asylum in 1818, by a "Chinese young man ... so ignorant of the English language that he could not express in it his most common wants." Gallaudet is exaggerating: the Chinese youths who visited the school and the Gallaudet family home from time to time were converts brought to the United States by New England missionaries for fundraising. Like the boys and young men at the ABCFM School, these youths were Christians and had at least survival-level English. It is not surprising, then, to read that Clerc learned "many interesting facts" about this youth's childhood, family, and life in both China and the United States, and—this is a key topic—about "his notions concerning God and a future state," that is, life after death. What these youths' "notions concerning God" might have been do not appear in this account, but they would certainly have conformed to orthodox Calvinism. In any case, Gallaudet was deeply impressed by this demonstration.35</p> <p>It was a year later, Gallaudet continues, that he first visited the ABCFM School, "where upwards of twenty heathen youths" were being educated. Gallaudet conversed with some of them in sign language and reports that his experience was similar to that of Clerc's with the Chinese youth: he learned their family backgrounds, some words in their native languages, and "their early religious knowledge," "whether [their] countrymen worshipped idols, and sacrificed human victims," and the like. Again, Gallaudet exaggerates the boys' foreignness—they could hardly have been "heathens" at this point. Clearly, they knew how to frame their childhood religious beliefs in terms comprehensible (and suitably horrifying) to Connecticut Calvinists. So, both these experiments amounted to testing hearing people of color on how well they could understand the emerging sign language of the Hartford school. It is not surprising that they understood it better than a typical white Hartford resident who had been trained since childhood to repress extravagant gesture and facial expression.36</p> <p>Gallaudet, however, takes these experiences as evidence of the universality of sign language, reporting that "[o]n the testimony of several of the South-Sea islanders, it appeared, that not a few of the signs employed in the instruction of the deaf and dumb, are precisely the same which their countrymen use." This was not surprising, he says, because—and here is his explicit statement on sign language as isomorphic and human ideas as universal—"the Author of nature ... laid the foundation in the very constitution of our species, and in the structure and processes of the visible creation, for a universal expression of the same ideas, on a vast variety of subjects, by similar signs."37</p> <p>The bulk of the essay is then taken up by a relatively straightforward explanation of how all ideas are visible, either literally visible or visible through the facial expression and posture of the person engaged mentally with them. He asserts "that it is only by the eye that it is possible to acquire a purely oral language," but then, backing off a bit, says that it is difficult to acquire an oral language "by merely hearing it used among the people who speak it" because it takes too long. Finally, he explains how sign language can be used to simultaneously compile a large number of dual-language dictionaries: one would bring together a group of "pupils from different heathen countries; and while the English language was taught all its members by means of signs and gestures, by the same means each would be enabled, without any confusion or embarrassment, to express the corresponding words and phrases in his own tongue." Of course, Gallaudet's dictionary project would be possible only if ideas were universally uniform and if language encoded ideas univocally. It never occurred to Gallaudet that different human societies might have different ideas about, say, modesty or private property, or words that, for instance, cover a narrower or broader range of reference. If that were the case—which it is—then his plan is clearly unworkable.38</p> <p>A three-part essay on "The Language of Infancy" appeared in the AAE in 1831 and 1832. In this period, the word "infant" referred to children under the age of ten years or so, before they left their mothers' care for serious schooling, but even so, "infant" language acquisition was a genuinely new topic that Locke and other philosophers of language treated only glancingly, their sparse comments revealing total unfamiliarity with any actual child. Gallaudet, in contrast, was a real hands-on father, using his own children, in Skinnerian fashion, as laboratory experiments, teaching them himself to read by the whole-word method and running his own home school, with a hired teacher under his direction.39</p> <p>"The Language of Infancy" does not directly address sign language as used in deaf education, but it very clearly shows what Gallaudet was assuming about sign language and childhood learning. He begins by referencing his "Philosophy of Language" essay, reprinted in AAE in 1830, quoting himself on the purpose of language being to "excite" the conception of ideas in another and on the necessity for "the actual presence of objects, or ... their expression by symbolical signs" when spoken or written words of an arbitrary language are acquired. His breakthrough in this essay was his recognition of the infant's first "language" as "symbolical," that is, a language much like sign language with its expressions of countenance, its positions of the body, or its movements of the hands and "limbs," but with the addition of "inarticulate sounds." And he calls attention to this feature: "The symbolical signs which an infant first uses to express its wants, are almost wholly, if not entirely, involuntary" [emphasis in original], meaning that this language is "natural," an integral element of the human being as created by God. He continues,</p> <p>The Author of our being has made a wonderful provision of this language of infancy. He has furnished the human countenance with one elaborate set of various and diversified muscles, for no other purpose than to give it expression, and in such a multitude of forms, as to correspond, with an exactness like that of the impressed wax to the seal, to all the changes of feeling and of thought.</p> <p>His "impressed wax" could have come directly from the seventeenth century.40</p> <p>Gallaudet develops the notion that the "machinery" of facial expression is, in adults, "subject to the will" and is so for a reason: God expects it to be "cultivated and improved." In childhood, the "muscles of expression" are "pliable" and "involuntarily" obey "the emotions of the heart, and the operations of the mind," but adults are given control over their "internal feelings," which they can adjust by means of the facial expression. This reasoning allows him to claim that children will grow up to be generous and noble if they are taught to maintain generous and noble facial expressions. But what is interesting here is Gallaudet's attempt to bridge the mind/body dualism with "that mysterious part of our system, which forms the connexion between the mind and the body," that is, "the eye, the features, the gestures, and attitudes, corresponding with and directing the internal movements of the soul, this half spiritual and half corporeal machinery" [Gallaudet's italics]. It is as though the recognition of a natural, innate, "symbolical" language shows the way toward bridging mind/body dualism.41</p> <p>The essay then takes an unexpected turn into science, or pseudoscience, with the introduction of one Charles Bell's research on anatomy of expression. Bell, whom Gallaudet identifies as a "very distinguished surgeon," had conducted a series of experiments on monkeys and dogs in which he cut their "nerve of expression," which he alternatively calls the "nerve of respiration," or "part of the general system of the respiratory nerves," and observes how it paralyzed one side of their faces. In these experiments, Gallaudet enthusiastically reports, Bell had discovered that the "respiratory organs are the source of all expression" and that a system of nerves in the face and neck were the "sole agents in expression." These "organs of the breast," Bell found, were connected to the heart by "an extensive apparatus of muscles and nerves" that both develop the emotions and their outward signs in the face. He gives as an example the quivering of the lips and nostrils in grief "because these are organs of respiration, organs which have their muscles united to the sensibility of the heart." Thus, it was obvious to Gallaudet, and presumably to Bell, that "the organs of the body, which move in sympathy with the mind," owing to that "half spiritual and half corporeal machinery" he had earlier explained, "produce the same uniformity among men in their internal feelings and emotions, or passions, as there is in their ideas of external nature, through the uniform operations of the organs of sense." Our feelings, like our understanding of the material world, are uniform because we all have the same "extensive apparatus of muscles and nerves" connecting the heart to the lungs. And somehow, Gallaudet believed that this conclusion was demonstrated by the "wonderful uniformity of the language of natural signs, which prevails among the uneducated deaf and dumb, not only with regard to external, material objects, but, also, with regard to the internal operations and emotions of the mind." This is circular reasoning, of course, but for Gallaudet, it all added up to evidence of God's design, newly accessible to our understanding because of the cultivation of sign language. All these references to the heart as the seat of emotion and a part of the respiratory system suggest that neither Gallaudet nor Charles Bell was quite aware of William Harvey's 1628 discoveries concerning the heart's role in circulating blood.42</p> <p>During the next few years, as Gallaudet became involved in other reform movements, he returned to the philosophy of language and mental processes only peripherally, as it touched other topics, although he did give a lecture on deaf education in Cincinnati in 1835, when he was passing through on his way to buy land in Missouri for a secret society he had founded to stop the encroachment of Roman Catholicism, which he called L.U.P.O. (standing for "Look Upward, Press Onward"). Here, according to a newspaper report of the lecture, Gallaudet divides sign language into two classes, the natural and the conventional. The natural signs, in which category he included verb tenses and prepositions, "depended upon the human constitution... and consequently were nearly the same all over the world," he is reported to have said, while conventional signs seem to comprise only names. As for abstract ideas, Gallaudet relies on his theory that all states of mind produce "a corresponding action in the muscular system" and then jumps to a demonstration of what is actually a methodical sign, asserting that the deaf person "at once analyses the idea, and thus gets a thorough knowledge of its elements." We do not have Gallaudet's own copy of this lecture, so it is impossible to say just how confused the reporter was, but the report certainly is jumbled: is it the sympathy between the facial nerve and the state of mind that provides for abstracts, or is it analysis of the component ideas by analogy? The one example given in the newspaper report is, "When e.g. the mute wishes to express virtue, he rapidly gives you the sign of power, mind, overcome evil, i.e. the power of the mind to overcome evil." If Gallaudet indeed translated this string of four(?) signs into this English definition of virtue, he did not explain where "the mute" was supposed to find the grammar to assemble it: "power" (or, if he was still using the sign he had earlier shown, "strong man hurls boulder at someone"), "mind," "overcome," and "evil" in that order might, for all a deaf child knew, mean "Evil overcomes the mind when a strong man hurls a boulder at somebody." This Cincinnati lecture is also notable for expanding on Gallaudet's previous statement about never having met a deaf person who knew that she had a soul. Here, he adds that he never met a deaf person "who had the least notion of a God." The reporter's paraphrase, however, prompted a correction from Gallaudet, clarifying that no deaf person he knew ever originated these ideas.43</p> <p>Other published works during the 1830s include an argument, in an 1838 article in Mother's Magazine, that "the Spirit of God" used the mother's face as a "means of grace, to renew and save the soul" and in an 1839 article in the AAE, "On Attention," a (folk) etymology of the word "attention" to show the connection between the mind and the body: paying attention to something involves "a certain tension ... in the muscles of the forehead and countenance." Recalling his earlier arguments that "the body reacts to the mind," he claims that this muscular tension actually induces attention.</p> <p>Also in 1839, Gallaudet visited the captives in the Amistad case, who were then incarcerated in Hartford—not in order to help them but rather "endeavoring to make up a vocabulary of the language." The captives already had at least one Mende interpreter working for them, but Gallaudet's interest was, as he had outlined two decades earlier, the process of compiling a dictionary by means of sign language. Meeting with the captives without their interpreter, and oblivious to the fact that they were Muslims, he attempted "to ascertain whether they had any distinct idea of a Supreme Being, as the judge and rewarder or punisher of human actions." The result, however, was that the "negroes" suspected Gallaudet of "being an emissary of their Spanish masters, and that he was seeking to entrap them into some confession," and it was left to the interpreter, Ferry, to sort this out. The only record we have of the meeting is a report in a New York newspaper. Gallaudet was surely too displeased by the result of his experiment to want to publicize it further, and, indeed, he never mentioned it elsewhere.</p> <p>His famous 1844 letter to Horace Mann, responding to the latter's published account of his visit to a Prussian deaf school, makes only one argument: that teaching "articulation" takes up so much time that the deaf child never learns anything else. It would be interesting to know why Gallaudet, writing to Mann, chose not to marshal his evidence concerning "symbolical" languages, their role in making ideas and objects "present" for the child who is learning an "arbitrary" language, the first and natural language of infants, and the like. He does mention that without "this language of natural signs, the teacher ... cannot give them instructive illustrations, by practical examples, of the full meaning of very many words," but his theories about presence, resemblance, analogy, and facial nerves are absent.44</p> <p>It is not until he was asked to contribute to the maiden issue of the American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb (as the AAD was then called) in 1847 that Gallaudet turned his full attention to sign language again. He begins with a lovely description of a deaf toddler "struggling to make his wants and wishes known, and to convey his thoughts and emotions to those around him, by those various expressions of countenance, and descriptive signs and gestures, which his own spontaneous feelings lead him to employ." Correctly pointing out that the deaf child is the teacher and his parents are his pupils, he calls the gift of sign language the "great principle of compensation," provided by "the God of nature," who has also provided "especially the mother" and the deaf child's siblings the ability to readily understand it. "It is not an arbitrary, conventional language. It is, in the main, picture-like and symbolical, corresponding, in these respects, to the ideas and objects which it is used to denote." Asserting the isomorphic feature without examples, he continues by praising its universality, although he hedges a bit on that point, referring to the "remarkable similarity" of home signs among Asylum pupils, and to the signs of the Plains Indians as being "almost identically the same" with those used at the Asylum.45</p> <p>Taking up his thread again, in the next number, he returns to the theme of signing as both natural and God-given. "Why has the Creator furnished us with such an elaborate and wonderful apparatus of nerves and muscles, to subserve the purposes of this visual language; with such an eye and countenance, as variable in their expressions as are all the internal workings of the soul and graphically indicative of them" if we are not to use them, he asks. "Most happily for the deaf and dumb, the God of nature has laid a necessity upon them to employ, as soon as they have wants and desires to express, this visual language." Proceeding to rationales for using sign language in deaf education, he alludes to the need for language to access divine revelation: "divine law," "the covenant of grace," and "the retributions of the future world." Then, neatly segueing into a more practical, here-and-now rationale, he explains that learning about God's will "render[s] the management of such schools [for the deaf] comparatively easy and delightful:" "a wholesome government and discipline may be exercised over [pupils] through a moral influence." Here again, Gallaudet points out that articulation training is too time consuming and leaves the pupils unmanageable in the process: "the moral influence of the government and discipline of the institution over the objects of its care is thus secured and rendered permanently efficient through the medium of the language of signs." Several pages of dilation on the use of sign language to control deaf children are then followed by some remarks on the lack of isomorphism in spoken languages, as well as on the superiority of isomorphic over conventional languages, "in accordance with the mysterious laws of the union of mind and body." The last paragraph returns to the first paragraph of the essay, as Gallaudet reiterates that the deaf are "the originators of this language."</p> <p>Gallaudet was getting old. Later, in 1848, he returned to the subject of disciplining deaf children by relating a story about a pupil whose mother "had treated him with a degree of indulgence alike excessive and unwise": in short, the boy was unmanageable (and it was his mother's fault). Gallaudet finally yanks the child out of church, takes him to his study at the Asylum, ties him to a chair, and proceeds to pray for him in sign language, continuing until the boy is reduced to tears. Gallaudet's last published piece on sign language describes games of charades based on scenes from Roman and U.S. history and the Bible, and other games in which words are spelled with facial expressions, so that "a" is given with an awed expression, "b" with a bold expression, "c" with a curious expression, "d" with a despairing expression, and so forth. This game is possible because of "the language of the human face divine, for which the Author of our being has made such ample provision in the elaborate and wonderful machinery of nerves and muscles." It's a sad finale, but one that accurately summarizes the motives that drove Gallaudet's support for sign language all along: its origin in the "Author of our being."46</p> <p>It is not within the scope of the present study to speculate on exactly how Gallaudet's claims for sign language may have contributed to its nearly century-long suppression in American deaf education, but rather merely to show why they were widely perceived as irrelevant outside of the small world of Connecticut Calvinists. Asserting the (clearly mistaken) notions of the universality, uniformity, and prelinguistic existence of abstract ideas to be encoded in a universal, isomorphic language did not give sign language supporters much to go on when arguing against public intellectuals like the oralists Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe. Asserting that the string "strong-man boulder throws" transparently means "power," or, conversely, that the sentence "I go to the door" is hopelessly opaque without the benefit of mime, would increasingly have been seen as preposterous. Talk about the innate conscience, the mind as hot wax, or the need to save the immortal souls of deaf children from eternal damnation did not get a lot of traction among the largely secular educational reformers later in the century. And talk of the mother's face as instrumental in forming a child's character or of the heart being an organ of both emotions and respiration would have seemed mere prescientific superstition to the educators who set the agenda for wholesale conversion of deaf schools to speech and lipreading. Gallaudet's (and the Yale curriculum's) working assumptions were already atavistic in the 1810s; by the time of the Milan conference in 1880, they were useless. It would not be until more than a century after Gallaudet's death that advocates of sign language would produce a whole new set of claims for ASL, claims that were a better fit for their times than Gallaudet's were for his.</p> <p>As for Gallaudet, one could say that he was right for all the wrong reasons, and that his wrong reasons all but sank the Deaf community by the end of the nineteenth century. It was indeed his early advocacy that enabled sign language to create today's Deaf community of informed citizens, responsible parents, good neighbors, and productive members of society. And indeed, his pre-Lockean assumptions about language nearly doomed ASL and the community it created and served. Had Gallaudet's enterprise not been revived on firmer principles in the mid-twentieth century, ASL might well have gone the way of phrenology, phlogiston, and a geocentric universe. Unlocking Gallaudet's "un-Locke'd" worldview shows us a man whose legacy of generous and truly charitable advocacy for deaf children turns out to have been based on principles that are now all but incomprehensible to us. Today, we have become less shocked at the discovery of what seem to us to be morally condemnable thoughts, motivations, and actions of our heroes. Yet, no historical figure is without deficiencies of some sort. No one should demand a statue of Gallaudet be removed because he neglected to read the complete works of John Locke. Happily, ASL survived, and happily, it accomplished far more for Deaf people than Gallaudet ever envisaged.</p> <ref id="AN0148504338-4"> <title> Footnotes </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref1" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Austin and Quine (along with Wittgenstein on this same topic) are handily paraphrased by Sandra Laugier, <emph>Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy</emph>, trans. Daniela Ginsburg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 16, 46, 50, and passim.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref2" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Yale hired its first science professor, Benjamin Silliman, during Gallaudet's undergraduate years, too late for him to have taken a course, and when Silliman brought a chunk of the Weston meteorite to Yale, Gallaudet apparently never went to see it: Edna Edith Sayers, <emph>Life and Times of T. H. Gallaudet</emph> (Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2018), 45. His undergraduate essays are in this "Disputations" notebook in the Gallaudet Papers in the Library of Congress. On his quotation from Shakespeare, see Sayers, 45–46. On his disapproval of Europe, see Sayers, 83–84, 106–8.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref7" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> On Morse's purchase of Montaigne's essays, see Charles E. Cunningham, <emph>Timothy Dwight, 1752–1817: A Biography</emph> (New York: Macmillan,, 1942), 268.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" idref="ref8" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext> Quotation from Barbara J. Shapiro, <emph>John Wilkins, 1614-1672: An Intellectual</emph> Biography (University of California Press, 1969), 67.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib5" type="bt">5</bibl> <bibtext> On the centrality of language for the Puritans, see Nigel Smith, <emph>Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660</emph> (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 268. Quotation from Hannah Dawson, <emph>Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy</emph> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 129. On the Adamic language, see Nigel Smith, <emph>Perfection Proclaimed</emph>, 279–80; Rhodri Lewis, <emph>Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke</emph> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 111. See also James H. Stam, <emph>Inquires into the Origin of Language: The Fate of a Question</emph> (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 72.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib6" type="bt">6</bibl> <bibtext> On Comenius's pedagogy and the Puritans, see Umberto Eco, <emph>The Search for the Perfect Language</emph>, trans. James Fentress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 214; James Knowlson, <emph>Universal Language Schemes in England and France, 1600–1800</emph> (Toronto: University Press of Toronto, 1975), 35, and Paul Cornelius, <emph>Languages in the Seventeenthand Early Eighteenth-Century Imaginary Voyages</emph> (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1965), 33–34. Quotation from Johann Amos Comenius, <emph>The Way of Light</emph>, trans. E. T. Campagnac (Liverpool University Press, 1938), 24. On the Yale disputation topics, Ezra Stiles, <emph>The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D.D. LL.D</emph>. ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New York: Scribner's, 1901), vol. 3, 285, and Edmund S. Morgan, <emph>The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795</emph> (Yale University Press, 1962), 395–98.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib7" type="bt">7</bibl> <bibtext> For Hobbes's views of language, see especially <emph>Leviathan</emph> I:4; Dawson, <emph>Locke, Language</emph>, and Lewis, <emph>Language, Mind and Nature</emph>, both <emph>passim</emph>; also Terence Ball, "Hobbes' Linguistic Turn," <emph>Polity</emph> 17, no. 4 (1985): 739–60.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib8" type="bt">8</bibl> <bibtext> On Hobbes "dynamiting" the language projectors' assumptions, see Robert E. Stillman, <emph>The New Philosophy and Unniversal Languages in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins</emph> (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995), 17. One example of the many treatises identifying the original language is Rowland Jones's <emph>The Origin of Language and Nations</emph>, 1764, which posited Welsh as the language of Eden.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib9" type="bt">9</bibl> <bibtext> On the rationales for an artificial universal language, see Murray Cohen, <emph>Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England, 1640–1785</emph> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 2; Lewis, <emph>Language, Mind and Nature</emph>, 104; Dawson, <emph>Locke, Language</emph>, 16; Comenius, <emph>Way of Light</emph>, 178–85; Knowlson, <emph>Universal Language Schemes</emph>, 8; quotations from Knowlson, 15. Jonathan Swift, <emph>Gulliver's Travels: Voyage to Laputa</emph>, ch. 5.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> John Wilkins, <emph>An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language</emph> (London, 1668; facsimile edition The Scolar Press, 1968); see also Dawson, <emph>Locke, Language</emph>, 106, and Steven Pinker, <emph>Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language</emph>. (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 10. John Bulwer, <emph>Chirologia: or, the Naturall Language of the Hand</emph> (London, 1644), 3, 7. A contemporary account associating deaf education with the language projectors is given by Robert Plot, <emph>Natural History of Oxford-shire, Being an Essay towards the Natural History of England</emph>, 2nd ed. (London: Lichfield, 1705), 286–91.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> On universal languages being predicated on belief in universal ideas, see Dawson, <emph>Locke, Language</emph>, 134–35, and Knowlson, <emph>Universal Language Schemes</emph>, 17. Locke, <emph>An Essay Concerning Human Understanding</emph>, quotations from Book I, ch. 1, sec. 1; ch. 2, sec. 8 and 22; Book III, ch, 9, sec. 23.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> On Jonathan Edwards's view of Locke, see M. A. Stewart, <emph>English Philosophy in the Age of Locke</emph> (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 111, 142, 166, and passim. On Locke sounding like an innatist, see Dawson, <emph>Locke, Language</emph>, 245; on abridgments of his work, see Hans Aarsleff, <emph>From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History</emph> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 123.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> On the Yale library holdings, see <emph>A Catalogue of the Library of Yale-College in New-Haven</emph> (New London, CT: Green); Cunningham, <emph>Timothy Dwight</emph>, 248–49; and Morgan, <emph>The Gentle Puritan</emph>, 317. For the problems of ascertaining the curriculum, Morgan, 385–86n32; for the Ramus-based curriculum, Morgan, 48–51. On Watts's simplification, see Morgan, 48–51.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> [Francis Green], <emph>"Vox Oculus Subjecta"; A Dissertation on the Most Curious and Important Art of Imparting Speech and the Knowledge of Language, to the Naturally Deaf (Consequently) Dumb</emph> (London: Benjamin White, 1783), 45, 47–48, and 51.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> On "Dugaldizing." THG to Ralph Emerson, Jan. 11, 1816, transcribed in Herman Humphrey, <emph>The Life and Labors of the Rev. T. H. Gallaudet, LL.D</emph>. (New York: Robert Carter and Bros. 1857), 45–48.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> On the Common Sense school in the United States, see Samuel Fleischacker, "The Impact on America: Scottish Philosophy and the American Founding," in <emph>The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish</emph> Enlightenment, ed. Alexander Broadie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 316–37; Henry F. May, <emph>The Enlightenment in America</emph> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 346–47; and John R. Fitzmier, <emph>New England Moral Legislator: Timothy Dwight, 1752–1817</emph> (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 84–86. On the introduction of Common Sense into the Princeton curriculum, see Winthrop D. Jordan, <emph>White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812</emph> (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 441.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> On Reid's views, see Alexander Broadie, "The Human Mind and Its Powers," in <emph>Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment</emph>, ed. Alexander Broadie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 70–71, 78, 91, and Hans Aarsleff, <emph>The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860</emph> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 101.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> On Stewart's defense of Locke, see Aarsleff, <emph>From Locke to Saussure</emph>, 120–21. On Stewart's status in the United States, see May, <emph>Enlightenment</emph>, 346. Dugald Stewart, <emph>Dissertation: Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy</emph>, pt. 2, sec. 6, in <emph>The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart</emph>, vol. 1, p. 363.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Stewart, <emph>Elements</emph> vol. 3, ch. 1 in <emph>Collected Works</emph> vol. 4, 6–19. On Stewart's visit to the Paris school, Sophia Rosenfeld, <emph>A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France</emph> (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 100. Stewart's "Some Account of James Mitchell" is an appendix to <emph>Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind</emph>: in <emph>Collected Works</emph>, vol. 4.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Stewart, "Some Account," 334, 335, 332, and 337. For more on Gallaudet's interactions with the Braces, see Sayers, <emph>Life and Times</emph>, 77–78, 90, 95–96, 114, 120, 134.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> On Brown and Condillac, see Elie Halevy, <emph>A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century</emph>, vol. 1, <emph>England in 1815</emph>, trans. E. I. Watkin and D. A. Barker (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949), 541–42. For more on Gallaudet's attendance at Brown's lectures, see Sayers, <emph>Life and Times</emph>, 96–98. The loan of the Dalgarno book is mentioned in a December 1815 letter that Gallaudet wrote to Ward Woodbridge, excerpted (variously) in Humphrey, <emph>Life and Labors</emph>, 50–51 and Edward Miner Gallaudet, <emph>The Life of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Founder of Deaf-Mute Instruction in America</emph> (New York: Henry Holt, 1888), 82–84.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> On Dalgarno, see the editorial comment of David Cram and Jaap Matt in their edition of <emph>George Dalgarno on Universal Language</emph> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 68–69. Dalgarno is quoted from his <emph>Didascalocophus</emph> (Oxford: The Theater, 1680), 1, 2, 18, and as quoted in Knowlson, <emph>Universal Language Schemes</emph>, 11.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> On Leibnitz's use of Dalgarno's work, see Eco, <emph>Search for the Perfect Language</emph>, 229. On both Leibnitz and Stewart and the subsequent reissue of Dalgarno's writing, see the preface to <emph>The Works of George Dalgarno of Aberdeen</emph> (Edinburgh, 1834), vi.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Gallaudet saved the tablecloth, and it is now in the Gallaudet Papers, Library of Congress.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> On Locke and "abstract general ideas," see Mary M. Slaughter, <emph>Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century</emph> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 202. There is no extant evidence in Gallaudet's papers to suggest that he saw methodical signs as functioning analogically. Instead, as with his discussions of signs for power and virtue examined in the section "Gallaudet's Philosophy as Language," he appears to have seen methodical signs as isomorphic, either indexically or illustratively.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Diderot's quotation from his "Letter on the Deaf and Dumb" of 1751, in <emph>Diderot's Early Philosophical Works</emph>, ed. and trans. Margaret Jourdain (Chicago: Open Court, 1916), 177. Gérando, for instance, believed that abstracts were impossible without language, see Knowlson, <emph>Universal Language Schemes</emph>, 179. One eighteenthcentury grammarian, James Harris, is discussed in Olivia Smith, <emph>The Politics of Language 1791–1819</emph> (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 25. Stewart seems to consider an innate mental faculty for abstraction in "On the Tendency." 17.2,</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> The issues of the <emph>Christian Observer</emph> in which the deaf education debate appeared are as follows: B.'s letter and the enclosed tract by "a friend" appear in 1818 August, 514–17; the response by the oralist critic was published in 1818 December, 787–90; Gallaudet's first letter appeared in 1819 October, 646–50; his second letter in 1819 December, 784–87.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> <emph>Christian Observer</emph>, December 1819, 784. "A Discourse delivered at the Dedication of the American Asylum for the Education of Deaf and Dumb Persons, May 22, 1821 (Hartford: Hudson, 1821); "Sermon on the Duty and Advantages of Affording Instruction to the Deaf and Dumb" (Portland: A. Shirley, 1824), quotation from 12.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Quotations from 784, 785, 786.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> The <emph>United States Literary Gazette</emph> printed this essay in four installments: 1826 April 1, 23–27; April 15, 61–63; May 15, 146–51; and June 1, 183–86. The London <emph>Christian Observer</emph> printed the same essay in two parts: "On Some of the Elementary Principles of Language," 1826 August, 464–70; "Remarks on Oral Language and the Language of Signs," 1826 September, 525–33. Finally, <emph>The American Annals of Education</emph> reprinted the original essay as two separate essays, both entitled "The Philosophy of Language," in 1830 September, 70–77, and December, 156–60; quotation from p. 70.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Quotations from "On Some of the Elementary Principles of Language," <emph>Christian Observer</emph>, 1826 August, 464–65.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Quotations 466, 467, 468.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Quotations from "Remarks on the Oral Language and the Language of Signs," <emph>Christian Observer</emph>, 1826 September, 528, 529, 530, 532.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> For more on interest in foreign missions among Andover students, see Sayers, <emph>Life and Times</emph>, 57–58; on the ABCFM School and Gallaudet's involvement, 185–87, quotations from 185.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> "The Language of Signs Auxiliary to the Christian Missionary," <emph>Christian Observer</emph>, 1926 October, 592–99. Quotation from p. 592.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Quotations from 592, 593.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Quotations from p. 593.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Quotations from 596, 597, 598.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> "The Language of Infancy," <emph>American Annals of Education</emph>, 1831 March, 99–102; 1831 July, 321–23; 1832 April, 185–90.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Quotations from 100, 101.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Quotations from 101, 321, 322, 323.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Quotations from 187, 188, 189.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> From a newspaper clipping pasted into a scrapbook, some pages of which are now held by the Gallaudet University Archives, Deaf Biography Vertical File.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> "The Mother's Face," <emph>Mothers' Magazine</emph> 6, no. 2 (1838 February): 30–31. "On Attention," <emph>American Annals of Education</emph> (1839 April): 173–76, quotation from p. 173. "An Incident," <emph>New York Commercial Advertiser</emph>, September 16, 1839. T. H. Gallaudet to Horace Mann, 1844 May 13, reprinted in the <emph>American School for the Deaf, Fifty-First Annual Report</emph>, 1867, 64–66.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> "On the Natural Language of Signs; and Its Value and Uses in the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb," <emph>American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb</emph> 1, no.1 (1847 October): 55–61, and 1, no. 2 (1848 January): 79–93.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> "Recollections of the Deaf and Dumb to Illustrate the Principles of Family and School Discipline," <emph>American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb</emph> 2, no.1 (1848 October), 54–59. "Reminiscences of Deaf-Mute Instruction," <emph>American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb</emph> 2, no. 2 (1849 January), 190–96.</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <aug> <p>By Edna Edith Sayers(bio)</p> <p>Reported by Author</p> </aug> |
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| Items | – Name: Title Label: Title Group: Ti Data: Unlock(e)ing T. H. Gallaudet's Philosophy of Language – Name: Language Label: Language Group: Lang Data: English – Name: Author Label: Authors Group: Au Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Sayers%2C+Edna+Edith%22">Sayers, Edna Edith</searchLink> – Name: TitleSource Label: Source Group: Src Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Sign+Language+Studies%22"><i>Sign Language Studies</i></searchLink>. Win 2021 21(2):208-244. – Name: Avail Label: Availability Group: Avail Data: Gallaudet University Press. 800 Florida Avenue NE, Denison House, Washington, DC 20002-3695. Tel: 202-651-5488; Fax: 202-651-5489; Web site: http://gupress.gallaudet.edu/SLS.html – Name: PeerReviewed Label: Peer Reviewed Group: SrcInfo Data: Y – Name: Pages Label: Page Count Group: Src Data: 37 – Name: DatePubCY Label: Publication Date Group: Date Data: 2021 – Name: TypeDocument Label: Document Type Group: TypDoc Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Evaluative – Name: Audience Label: Education Level Group: Audnce Data: <searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Higher+Education%22">Higher Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Postsecondary+Education%22">Postsecondary Education</searchLink> – Name: Subject Label: Descriptors Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Sign+Language%22">Sign Language</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Deafness%22">Deafness</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Advocacy%22">Advocacy</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Teaching+Methods%22">Teaching Methods</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Linguistics%22">Linguistics</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Intellectual+Disciplines%22">Intellectual Disciplines</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Language+of+Instruction%22">Language of Instruction</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+Philosophy%22">Educational Philosophy</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Graduate+Study%22">Graduate Study</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Undergraduate+Students%22">Undergraduate Students</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Biographies%22">Biographies</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Religious+Factors%22">Religious Factors</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Beliefs%22">Beliefs</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Protestants%22">Protestants</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22American+Sign+Language%22">American Sign Language</searchLink> – Name: Subject Label: Geographic Terms Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Connecticut%22">Connecticut</searchLink> – Name: DOI Label: DOI Group: ID Data: 10.1353/sls.2020.0034 – Name: ISSN Label: ISSN Group: ISSN Data: 0302-1475 – Name: Abstract Label: Abstract Group: Ab Data: In the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was famously advocating for sign language to be the language of instruction for deaf children in the United States, European philosophers were founding modern linguistics. Gallaudet was not able to benefit from their breakthroughs, however, because his upbringing, education, and religious beliefs all conspired to preclude any interest in European thought or, indeed, any secular thought at all. For this reason, his arguments for sign language were seen as naive and uninformed by educated people of his day and thus were easily dismissed by liberally educated oralists, who were better acquainted with new ways of understanding the human mind. The first part of the present study examines the limitations on what Gallaudet read and learned in his college courses and graduate studies, as well as how his underlying religious beliefs about language, its origin, and its purposes worked to compound these limitations. The second part of this study shows how his archaic ideas about language undermined his public efforts for sign language instruction. In short, Gallaudet argued for the right thing--sign language education--but he supported his arguments with reasoning based on assumptions few thinkers of his time could any longer accept. – Name: AbstractInfo Label: Abstractor Group: Ab Data: As Provided – Name: DateEntry Label: Entry Date Group: Date Data: 2021 – Name: AN Label: Accession Number Group: ID Data: EJ1284191 |
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| RecordInfo | BibRecord: BibEntity: Identifiers: – Type: doi Value: 10.1353/sls.2020.0034 Languages: – Text: English PhysicalDescription: Pagination: PageCount: 37 StartPage: 208 Subjects: – SubjectFull: Sign Language Type: general – SubjectFull: Deafness Type: general – SubjectFull: Advocacy Type: general – SubjectFull: Teaching Methods Type: general – SubjectFull: Linguistics Type: general – SubjectFull: Intellectual Disciplines Type: general – SubjectFull: Language of Instruction Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational Philosophy Type: general – SubjectFull: Graduate Study Type: general – SubjectFull: Undergraduate Students Type: general – SubjectFull: Biographies Type: general – SubjectFull: Religious Factors Type: general – SubjectFull: Beliefs Type: general – SubjectFull: Protestants Type: general – SubjectFull: American Sign Language Type: general – SubjectFull: Connecticut Type: general Titles: – TitleFull: Unlock(e)ing T. H. Gallaudet's Philosophy of Language Type: main BibRelationships: HasContributorRelationships: – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Sayers, Edna Edith IsPartOfRelationships: – BibEntity: Dates: – D: 01 M: 01 Type: published Y: 2021 Identifiers: – Type: issn-print Value: 0302-1475 Numbering: – Type: volume Value: 21 – Type: issue Value: 2 Titles: – TitleFull: Sign Language Studies Type: main |
| ResultId | 1 |
