The Language Animal by Charles Taylor Belknap Press, £25.95 Many philosophers remain loyal to a strictly functionalist understanding of language. Ideas (which are what really count) arise in the mind and we attach words (which are really just tools) to them. The process is terribly important, since it allows us to codify reality and communicate our thoughts. It gives us, as the 18th-century French philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac put it, “dominion over our imagination”. But is this really all that is going on? Do words just happen to be useful while playing no particularly dynamic or genuinely constitutive role in the workings of a reflective consciousness? Charles Taylor, the Catholic philosopher and author of the groundbreaking A Secular Age, is not happy with such an analysis, in which language is limited to a nifty way of “encoding and communicating information”. “Speech is, of course, the expression of thought. But it isn’t simply an outer clothing for what could exist independently.” The functional job of language is but “one province in a large country”. Taylor prefers the concept of linguistic “holism” in which language is not just a convenient mechanism but an integral part of the framework of reality and how we negotiate it. Language is part of the whole process, from start to finish, and is not simply about describing: it actively shapes the very thoughts we end up expressing and, as such, is one of the fundaments of meaning. You can’t separate an idea and a word because language creates who we are – our values, emotions and identity. It can’t be divorced from our sense of self and there is something misguided about the “privileging of sober, responsible description of independent objects at the expense of everything else in human language”. Taylor moves well beyond theory, looking at the “shape, scope and uses of language”. We find out a great deal about how language is learned, semantic invention, and how words fit into the broader palette of art, ritual, gesture and symbol. Perhaps Heidegger, cited by Taylor, was right to describe language as the “house of being”.