Language frees humans from stimulus-response and enables self-consciousness

Evidence

Human beings are very peculiar animals indeed. Their peculiarity stems largely, I think, from their linguistic capacity-a capacity which gives them a freedom unknown to other animal species but which at the same time causes them no end of difficulty. Language frees them from the slavery of simple reactivity, from the bondage of stimulus-response. It enables them to control and direct their action vis-a-vis an object (or situation) because it enables them to name it, to confer meaning upon it rather than merely to receive stimulus from it. Language is freedom also because it makes possible a consciousness of self among individual members of the species: a consciousness, that is, of one’s separation from the physical and biological environment. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 86

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets up language as the root mechanism that makes urban stranger-worlds possible at all.
• XREF: connects to: Physical expressiveness precedes language as the negative that generates it; Human status is socially learned like language, not animal instinct — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 62