To learn to use the #signal is to learn to apply it appropriately in the furtherance of some non-linguistically-defined purpose or task.

[Whereas] … if we want to think of a task or goal [which must exist in a field or context or process] which would help to clarify the rightness [appropriateness, accuracy] of #words … it would itself have to defined in terms like truth, descriptive adequacy, richness of evocation, or something of the sort [that is not capable of being rendered into a simple correspondence with a putatively pre-existing “chunk” of reality].

A creature is [only] operating in the #linguistic dimension when it can use & respond to #signs in terms of their truth, or descriptive rightness, or power to evoke some mood, or recreate a scene, or express some emotion, or carry some nuance of feeling … . To be a linguistic creature is to be sensitive to irreducible issues of #rightness. * * * Whether a creature is in the linguistic dimension in this sense isn’t a matter of what correlations hold between the signals it emits, its behavior, & the surroundings — the kind of things the proponents of chimp language focus on. It is a question of subjective understanding of what rightness consists in for it, qua what word is right.

Charles #Taylor - “The Importance of Herder” from Philosophical Arguments (http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jgr6/NMT/332taylor.htm) (1995), p. 84