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That “man is the symbol-bearing creature” is the one axiom which all social scientists agree upon. The implications are clear. Man as an organism has the unique capacity to utilize symbols, and builds his world of symbols. Theorists in all of the social sciences as well as philosophy have devoted vast quantities of energy, paper and apparatus to delve into the symbolic nature of the human organism. Cassirer, Mead, Sullivan, and others have attempted to delineate man and society in terms of his symbols. More recently psychologists and sociologists have produced vast amounts of literature on various aspects of language. The Whorfian hypothesis, so often quoted but so seldom analyzed, tells us that without language we could not think and also that the precise syntax of each language defines what and how we shall think.
Anthropologists of various schools have attempted to develop theories of how language began. While it is not our purpose to attempt such a task, it is clear to the authors that language can only have arisen out of the biological nature of man as an organism, with the world being defined as that which is knowable. The structure of the human organism in itself delineates the range of potential devices and symbols which he may construct; similarly the social organization of society or the family predicates how thought will be