If a lion could talk about what matters to it, we probably could understand it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein said “If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand him.” (Philosophical Investigations, Part 2)
But lions already speak, and we do understand them: When one roars at us, we generally know exactly what it means.
If a lion could say more than that, presumably (= I dunno) it would be about the biological needs we share with all living creatures for evolutionary reasons: hunger, threat, opportunity, reproduction, and — only in higher species — “Hey, look at that, not me!” (= sociality).
But that rests on a pyramid version of language in which the foundation consists of a vocabulary born of biological necessity. That well might be the case (= I dunno), but by now our language’s evolutionary vocabulary is no longer bound to its evolutionary value.
If a lion could speak, it would speak about what matters to it, for that seems (= I dunno) essential to language. If so, we might be able to understand it … or at least understand it better than what clouds, rust, and the surface of a pond would say if they could speak.
I dunno.
Categories: philosophy dw
I think I disagree with you, David, but I haven’t been able to concentrate well enough to articulate why.
Maybe I’m no so confident as you that ‘When one roars at us, we generally know exactly what it means,’ nor ‘it would speak about what matters to it, for that seems (= I dunno) essential to language.’ I suppose that would be no surprise to you, since I’m notoriously sceptical about knowing exactly what things mean, or things that are essential to other things. I’ll think more about this when I have two neurons to rub together (without one of them fraying and snapping).
This reminds of the joke that if we could understand birdsong, it’d be pretty crude, all about mating and threatening: http://portsherry.com/comic/birdsong/
What level of “understand” do we mean? Is it along the lines of “can anyone ever really understand another person?” versus “can we make a deal to exchange goods for services?”. How intelligent are we presuming is the lion?
I’d say lions are close enough to humans in terms of very basic make-up (i.e land-dwelling predator large mammals) that we could indeed understand it on at least a rudimentary level. It’d break down on sensory differences, but then, there’s color-blind people too.
Felines are actually quite communicative. But they mostly do it with their very mobile ears and tail, not in vocalization, so humans don’t read it easily. But some people can read feline body language, and I think that’s quite close to “understand” “speaking”. It’s even possible to “speak” back a few basic items which can be done by human face and vocal chords.
Thus as much as we can determine empirically, we would be able to understand a lion who could talk. Though without assuming lion super-intelligence, it wouldn’t be a very complicated conversation.