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It is regrettable to conclude about a book that, although its topic is worthwhile, covering issues that need to be made more available for debate, its presentation is so problematic that its reading cannot be recommended.
De Gramont's thesis (an exposition which would allegedly compel us to rewrite most psychoanalysis, linguistic philosophy, cognitive psychology, and social theory), may be summarized as follows. Whereas all previous theories 'we have constructed to explain how we establish representations' have failed 'to consider the role of language', recent developments in infancy research and in linguistics now offer us 'an independent measure of how the mind represents its reality' involving 'independent observations that all might agree to' such that 'our understanding of how we represent our reality need no longer depend upon theories that are limited to being metaphors of the mind which presume what they should explain' (pp. 45–6).
Specifically, the observation of human newborns by Daniel Stern and others is alleged to demonstrate that 'infants do not in fact represent their reality, in the sense of reflecting what's "out there"' but they 'construct a reality' on the basis of their 'innate ability to tune into the invariant properties of events' which they are able to do 'amodally' or across 'perceptual modalities' (pp. 46–7). Thus, according to de Gramont, it has been shown that infants 'are biologically equipped with a system for representing a reality from the start of interaction' which he takes to imply that 'meaning is a biological given' (p. 2). Humans bring multimodal, preverbal, nonverbal or 'felt meanings' to 'language', which is described as unimodal and 'parasitic' on these meanings.
'Language' acts as a categorical 'filing system', the function of which 'is not to construct meaning, but to communicate meanings which already exist' (p. 3). Language supposedly 'captures' these meanings (in some partial or distorted form), and by so doing it has a