How do animals have thoughts?

[Colin_P]

My dog can say the word "sausages".

Bollocks.

Does he still have his bollocks? More importantly is your woofer a 'classical liberal' like my woofer is. I don't think they can help it, where as cats are just intolerant hedonistic nazi a'oles, well my cat is. When I mean classical liberal, my dog is firm but fair, doesn't bully other dogs into thinking thoughts that they approve of but will get growly if other dogs start to take the mick. He also thinks small dogs are left wing and are out of touch with the real dog world.

 

[Drago]

He is still teste-intacta.

He's a right winger. I've taught him to salute to the command "hail to the chief".

 

[Colin_P]

Yes, you can always tell which dogs are left and right wing, more tricky to spot a classical liberal one though.

The lefty dogs eat all of their food straight away without any thought and then try and eat other dogs dinners as well. A right wing dog will graze like a cow and can take the whole day to eat their bowl. A classical liberal dog, like mine, mainly does the grazing like a cow thing but will also very politely ask you for some of your dinner and is not too offended if you sometimes say, "No, not for doggies.".

 

[MacB]

I suppose you could look at ideas we've come up with around universal communication, best starting point would probably be the SETI Institute. They may be nuts but I don't think they expect the aliens to understand English.

 

[stephec]

Dogs also understand languages. When I go to France, if I give an order to my brother's dog in English, he remains blank. Say it in French and he understands. Clever , aren't they?

Do you get another dog to act as an interpreter?

 

[MiK1138]

Not all thought is in words. .......... If you're trying to work out which bit goes where in a Sturmey Archer hub you've foolishly taken apart, you're not using words.

Well you might be using words just not very nice words

 

[MacB]

Who knows and who knows if we can ever know? The work of Thomas Nagel is worth a read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat?

He argued that we could never know what it is like to be a bat because our brains and senses work in very different ways. It's a really interesting field of philosophy. In proposing this, Nagel is attempting to refute the reductionist stance which says a complex system is nothing more than the sum of its parts).

Beyond that they can't even agree on what it's like to be human, I guess the reductionists you refer to are the ones that see mind as purely biological.

Nah, it's no good, this hurts, it's like trying to grasp infinity as a concept.

 

[Dayvo]

Anyway,i'm off down the pub. I expect some serious answers when i get back!

I wouldn't hold your breath.

 

[Dayvo]

My mate's dog understands Finnish - one of the universe's most difficult language.



Yes, I know it's about tone, expression and volume etc.

 

[Fnaar]

Dogs know things. We know that we know things. There lies the difference.
I can't lick my b0ll0cks either*, but most male dogs can**.

*I've tried
**their own, not mine.

 

[growingvegetables]

When we think of language, we think of vocalisation, ......

Just spotted this .

Rattles my cage a wee bit .

As anybody among us will recognise ... who has also had the pleasure of teaching French to a bunch of Year 8 lads, two-thirds of whom were diagnosed dyslexic . French, FFS .

Anyways - what language in UK has most speakers, after English? British Sign Language! And how many schools teach BSL to GCSE level? None. You're hard-pressed to find it in schools/units for the deaf . When you think of how useful it would be, how natural it would be for so many more people to be bilingual in vocalised English AND sign language ... ah, well! That's me cage rattled, I'll slink back in and snooze .

 

[robjh]

It's the ability to form abstract expressions that makes maths a language.

Well to an extent. The language of maths may share some structural features with natural language, eg. that a finite number of symbols with semantic associations can be recombined by the application of a finite set of rules (syntax) to form an infinite set of outcomes, yet compared to natural language the types of meaning it can convey are rather limited (although within its own field, it is capable of encoding very precise meanings).

Description is the fundamental purpose of any language;......

The fundamental purpose of any language is communication, and description is only one part of that. It is hard to see what descriptive content there is in utterances such as 'Hi', 'can you open the window?', 'all's well that ends well' or 'nice day, isn't it', and even 'I'm hungry' is usually interpreted as a request for action ('feed me!') rather than the transmission of information. Maths can do description within its own field, but cannot perform any of the speech acts that are fundamental to natural language.

 

[growingvegetables]

Maths can do description within its own field, but cannot perform any of the speech acts that are fundamental to natural language.

Umm - I saw what you did there!

 

[robjh]

Ahem. Speech acts are not necessary for natural language ...

Can you expand on that? I can't imagine one without them.

 

[robjh]

Umm - I saw what you did there!

re. natural language.
Yes. A lot of this discussion depends on how widely you draw the definition of 'language'. I would argue that natural human language is the benchmark by which we judge what is and isn't a language. Other systems may have more or fewer language-like attributes but we have to come back to this baseline to have something to judge them against.