If cochlear implants continue to meet with much resistance from parts of the Deaf community and beyond, this reflects constructions of speech that have been at the core of conceptions of humankind for over three centuries. Starting in the 1750s, Julien Offray de La Mettrie advocated for deaf people's potential for speech. This was also the time of the creation of schools for deaf children, which led to a surge of debate about teaching sign language versus speech. The reception of the speaking machine of Canon Mical, a now forgotten inventor, offered another context in which to question the source of the expressive power of language. By retracing debates about the mechanical nature of articulated speech, the potential limits of communication, and what really constitutes its expressive power, we can better understand how the experience of current technology develops out of conflicts first introduced at the birth of modernity.

如果人工耳蜗继续遭到部分聋人社区及其他地区的强烈抵制，这反映出三个多世纪以来一直处于人类概念核心的言语结构。从 1750 年代开始，Julien Offray de La Mettrie 就提倡聋哑人的言语潜力。这也是为聋哑儿童创建学校的时期，这引发了关于教授手语与言语的争论激增。现已被遗忘的发明家佳能·麦卡（Canon Mical）的语音机器的接受，为质疑语言表达力的来源提供了另一个背景。通过回顾关于清晰言语的机械性质、沟通的潜在限制以及其表达能力的真正构成的争论，