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Language as Truth In David Lewis' Languages and Language1 essay, he says that language is: A social phenomenon which is part of the natural history of human beings; a sphere of human action, wherein people utter strings of vocal sounds, or inscribe strings of marks, and wherein people respond by thought or action to the sounds or marks which they observe to have been so produced... He who produces sounds or marks does so for a reason... and he who responds to the sounds or marks in a certain way also does so for a reason (562). In other words, he argues that we speak English, rather than some other language, by convention, because that is what our society has conformed to, and therefore what we conform to as well. He then goes on to say that the meaning of a sentence, when combined with factual information about the world, yields...

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