If your pet could talk, what would be the first thing it says?
If a cat could speak, we couldn’t understand her.
…why not?
Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote in Philosophical Investigations that “If a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand him.”
What It Means
- Shared Life: The inability to understand a speaking lion stems from the principle that language is intrinsically linked to a shared ‘form of life,’ encompassing common practices, reactions, and social criteria for word usage.
- Beyond Words: Words only have meaning because of our shared human habits, feelings, and culture.
- Foreign World: A lion lives by different instincts, fears, and needs, making its mental world too foreign for our language to capture.
Leave a Reply