May 31, 2022
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.