Unlock(e)ing T. H. Gallaudet's Philosophy of Language

Abstract:In the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was famously advocating for sign language to be the language of instruction for deaf children in the United States, European philosophers were founding modern linguistics. Gallaudet was not able to benefit from their breakthroughs, however, because his upbringing, education, and religious beliefs all conspired to preclude any interest in European thought or, indeed, any secular thought at all. For this reason, his arguments for sign language were seen as naive and uninformed by educated people of his day and thus were easily dismissed by liberally educated oralists, who were better acquainted with new ways of understanding the human mind. The first part of the present study examines the limitations on what Gallaudet read and learned in his college courses and graduate studies, as well as how his underlying religious beliefs about language, its origin, and its purposes worked to compound these limitations. The second part of this study shows how his archaic ideas about language undermined his public efforts for sign language instruction. In short, Gallaudet argued for the right thing—sign language education—but he supported his arguments with reasoning based on assumptions few thinkers of his time could any longer accept.