Human Culture and Socialization: Language and Thought

The Need for Culture in Human Beings

The closed world of animals contrasts with the open world of human beings. While animals are governed by instincts to solve particular problems within their habitat, humans barely retain any instincts. Humans must invent strategies to solve problems in today's world.

Humans are not born with instincts or culture, but with the ability to acquire them. This is because, during evolution, the pelvis of women became narrower, and the heads of offspring grew increasingly larger. This resulted in offspring being born at an earlier neural stage and therefore, less developed. However, in exchange for instincts at birth, humans have an ability to learn and be educated, to solve their problems with the knowledge they will acquire.

Characteristics of the Socialization Process

Human capabilities allow for uniquely human activities, but thought and language are essential. These are acquired during childhood through the community in which one lives. This is called the process of socialization. Its features are:

• Learning cultural norms, values, and acceptable behaviors: These must be learned to be part of a society.
• Internalization: Assuming that the things that have been learned are the way they are because it is normal and everyone does it that way.
• Psychological stability: By adopting the patterns of society, the individual relates to others, and this integrates them psychologically and provides stability in society.

Animal and Human Language

The faculty of human language is exclusively human. It helps people communicate with each other through articulated, intentional, and abstract signs that have been acquired through a process of socialization.

What is known as animal language is, in fact, the animals' ability to communicate among themselves through sounds and other signals. Characteristics of animal language:

• It is particular
• It is mimetic
• It is not articulated

The characteristics of human language:

• It is learned
• It is conventional
• It is abstract
• It is verbal
• It is articulated

Relations Between Language and Thought

Philosophy has always inquired about the relationship between language and thought. Some of its proposals are:

• Language determines thought: For linguists Sapir and Whorf, the lexicon affects intellectual development (the greater the lexical richness, the greater the intellectual development).
• Language depends on thought: For psychologist Piaget, language is a result of the development of intelligence.
• Thought and language have a correlation and mutual interdependence: Psychologists Vygotsky and Luria advocate that lexical and intellectual capacities emerge and evolve independently until they come into close relation, bringing intelligence and speech communication together.