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"For Rousseau, language also has the ability to construct reality. According to him, only with the knowledge of words like "love" and "posession" can these concepts come into being.
Therefore, reality as we have it is limited and dependent upon the names and words we have come up with thus far.
Rousseau points out a paradox regarding the origin of language: "For if men needed speach in order to learn to think, they had a still greater need for knowing how to think in order to discover the art of speaking". He adds to this paradox: Vocal articulation must be arrived by "unanimous consent",
but language is needed to voice consent, thus "speech appears to have been necessary to establish the use of speech."