Sorry.

onomatopoeia*

Cool.

Ah, nvm.

Hmm, I don't think you're really engaging with the argument here, which turns on grammar as a parsing of types. Talk of 'worlds' is imprecise and should be dropped I think.

OK. Grammar here is adherence to a language game - would that be about right?

. The kind of grammatical categories 'natural' to a lion would be - or would probably be (this is Wittgenstein's not-unfair-wager) - quite different from a humans. — StreetlightX

That is, the lion would do very different things with words?

And recognisably, they interacted. — Banno

Well, of course. But even with the lion (according to Wtty's thought experiment) I could interact. Sinking his teeth in my carotid still passes as interaction, so is me screaming in pain and crapping my pants.

What did these "language games" look like? — Banno

Running to one another, striking a pose, rolling the head one side to the other in a really menacing way, then running away quickly to invite chase. Couldn't tell you why the behaviourist thought they were so unique, but he stated the panther would have easily killed the dog if she had acted with him the same way she had with other panthers, and the dog would have invited the panther to attack him had he acted like a normal dog, because that would have shown him to be meek.

But why call these behaviours language games?

But why call these behaviours language games? — Banno

Don't know. Ask Witty. All games are language games, as far as I'm concerned.

Nuh.

Grammar here is adherence to a language game - would that be about right? — Banno

I don't think so. Grammar is more general than a language game. To be sure, both are governed by 'rules' (leaving aside the specificity of how a rule functions), but one can have a completely grammatically correct sentence that does not belong to a language game. This is why Witty says we can be 'bewitched by grammar': we can lay out what look like perfectly sensical (grammatically correct) sentences without them in fact making sense (the language game, the specific context regarding what we are trying to do with those words, is missing). 'Grammar' and 'language-game' are not interchangeable terms in Wittgenstein, and, I think, for good reason.

I suspect it's the lack of attention paid to the specificity of grammar that is at the root of our (maybe?) disagreement.

Nuh. — Banno

Yup.

(See, that's a language game too!)
If you can make a rule about it, then it's a game.

That is, the lion would do very different things with words? — Banno

So to this, perhaps the answer ought to be: no, but how he would go about his 'doing things with words' might - most likely - be different.

I think to make things clear I need to talk about declensions, but I'm about to hop on a short flight. Maybe later.

More about embodied thought.

What about my cat's (adowable lil') paws would make her unable to understand something like "take my hand", had she the linguistic abilities I have? No matter how different our performance of whatever task might be put before us to evaluate our ability to "take a hand", obviously, she should still be able to relate the terms to the event of a possibility.

You can think that a cat would have very little incentive to hold the hand of anything or anyone, and that might be true. But even then, the fact that they have very little incentive could be thematized, such as a : "look at me, I'm so crazy, I'm holding my master by the hand" type of thing.

A limbless man would only be too conscious of his inability to perform the associated performance of "take my hand" to be unable to understand it. I feel that a failure to relate to a term might actually be the best way to establish such a relation in the first place. A little bit like shame tends to be about the fact that we should've felt shame if we had any at all, given what we did.

...but one can have a completely grammatically correct sentence that does not belong to a language game. — StreetlightX

Interesting. I had thought that to some extent Wittgenstein is using "grammar" in a broader sense than mere rules of syntax. Hence the notion of depth grammar.

Imagine that the lion's grammar consisted of nothing but commands.

A bit more on incommensurability. See §499.

To set out a language game is not always to impose a limit. Language games can change.

You want to judge rules as correct or incorrect without reference to rules? — Banno

That's right, we look for substance, things like reality, truth, and soundness, when judging rules as correct and incorrect. The point being that rules must be grounded in something, or else they're meaningless. So if following rules is what is correct, rather than the proper grounding of rules being what is correct, then we might just follow the rules right into the abyss of meaninglessness. That's why StreetlightX says above, that we can follow rules without "making sense".

Interesting. I had thought that to some extent Wittgenstein is using "grammar" in a broader sense than mere rules of syntax. — Banno

But I agree. The choice is not between grammar as mere syntactical rules or grammar-as-language-game. The whole point of Dor and Jablonka's paper is to demonstrate that grammatical categories are reflective of semantic categories. But the crucial point is that such categories always "belong to a very constrained subset of all the categories which we can use to think, feel and conceptualize about the world". The question then obviously becomes why this set and not another? And this is how D&J link language to evolution: the answer is that the subsets we use are the ones that pass through the net of selective pressures exerted by culture, biology and so on.

But of course such pressures are simply not universal: they act differently across different times, spaces, cultures etc. Not so differently that we can't translate, say Chinese into English, but enough that such translations will never be seamless, unproblematic (certiantly not algorithmic in any plainly ridiclious sense implied by a Lorentz transformation). Those who insist that we could understand a lion talking are like Augutine: they don't pay attention to kinds, to grammar, and think everything is just a matter of semantics without grammar. To be clear, I don't think Wittgenstein's stipulation is categorical: at some point, after alot of work and effort, we would be able to understand the lion.

But the point is that the grammatical types which are marked and unmarked in lionese would be so vastly different that it would be not just another lanaguge, but another kind of language altogether. There might be grammatical markings that exist that simply have no correlate in English - or in any human language - nor could they exist, even though we might come very close to reflecting the same meaning with some clever grammatical combinatorics.

Those who insist that we could understand a lion talking are like Augutine: they don't pay attention to kinds, to grammar, and think everything is just a matter of semantics without grammar. To be clear, I don't think Wittgenstein's stipulation is categorical: at some point, after alot of work and effort, we would be able to understand the lion.

But the point is that the grammatical types which are marked and unmarked in lionese would be so vastly different that it would be not just another lanaguge, but another kind of language altogether. There might be grammatical markings that exist that simply have no correlate in English - or in any human language - nor could they exist, even though we might come very close to reflecting the same meaning with some clever grammatical combinatorics. — StreetlightX

You mean grammar types à laNordquist? Comparative, generative, mental, pedagogical, peformative, referential, theoritical, traditional, transformational, universal types? Because I really cannot at all conceive of conditions which would preclude the possibilities of these types without also precluding the possibility of language.

No matter how inventive lionese might be, as long as it provides it's fluent speaker with the basis for individuation, reference and abstraction, we should have all we need to relate directly to it. Everything else is, in other words, cultural.

I mean types as specified in the paper linked to and described in the OP.

Types refered to in the paper are 'what types of knowledge do speakers possess that determines their grammaticality judgements?'

Without much thought, these types could be the cognitive format types the memories of past validations take, or the more propositionally-conceived set of acceptable formulations in a given language.

The paper mentions some of the same types as Nordquist as well. Again, what conditions could impose themselves on lion so that lionese would not have the interrogative type as the statement of the implications of the query as well as the query? As in "Who did the girl kiss?" likely informs that the girl kissed someone?

There is also the problem that intuitively, I feel that I share a hell of a lot more with the world of a lion than I do with a countless number of entity populating this universe. I would have had much less problem with Witty's remark if he had spoken about a bacteria's language, or hell, a neutron star.

Is there a good reason to believe that a lion would resolve the basic questions of ontology assembling any differently then we do? Individuals, classes, attributes, relations, function terms, restrictions, rules, axioms, events... Which one would the lion miss? For that matter, which one a neutron star would miss?

Categories that could be grammatically marked could be literally anything. J+L provide their own examples: "Indeed, when we perceive the world, think about it, or have feelings about it, we use a very large, diverse and constantly-changing set of categories: we may, for example, categorize people on the basis of the categorical distinction between friend and foe; we may classify physical entities on the basis of their practical utility, or their price; we may categorize species as endangered or not; and so on and so forth. We usually classify events as interesting or boring; and we distinguish between events in which someone we know participated, and events in which only strangers took part." Given that grammatical categories aren't even the same for alot of human languages, the question really ought to be what good reason would there be to believe that a lion would employ broadly similar grammatical parsings as humans? It strikes me as the height of nativity to think that lions would, 'by default', as it were.

And agree of course that the further away you get from human morphology the stranger a language (to us) will be - I wrote about trying to consider kind of language a mountain would have in the OP, for instance.

Given that grammatical categories aren't even the same for alot of human languages — StreetlightX

Obviously not enough to disable relatively easy translation between languages. Are there human natural languages where, by principle, you couldn't formulate the idea of category? I guess that alone would blow my position.

the question really ought to be what good reason would there be to believe that a lion would employ broadly similar grammatical parsings as humans? — StreetlightX

Same basic nervous system. Literally the same evolutive landscape. And we've already performed (in parts) backwards the bridging to their world (by developing a relatively healthy field of feline psychological study).

J+L points toward this. Lions probably already have categories broadly pointing to 'friend' and 'foe', practical utility (prob much more limited), not price, but probably risk (which is pretty similar). And I knowmy cat can see stuff as boring or interesting, according to her wise designs.

I don't think assuming these categories to be the same for most beings, especially similar ones, is *necessarily* chauvinistic or naive. These point to phenomenal markers which are common to species which play "the same games" in this world. And despite being vastly different, me and my cat, on many points, "play the same games", according to the same rules. I put more flourish around it, and she puts more grace.

Obviously not enough to disable relatively easy translation between languages. Are there human natural languages where, by principle, you couldn't formulate the idea of category? — Akanthinos

I'm not sure I'd call translation easy, or even familiarity with single languages for that matter. It may seem so to one practised in language(s), but I think it's easy to overlook just how much work must go into achieving that mastery. Consider that it takes most humans more than a decade and a half - at least - to master (somewhat) one's 'mother tongue', and that it can takes years or months to translate 'high level' literature from one language to another. Sure, 'street talk' can be translated fairly fluidly, but even then, any translator or bilingual speaker knows just how much goes missing when moving from one language to another. And even then it's not quite fair to focus on inter-language communication, insofar as even 'intra-language' communication can present the exact same challenges.

Same basic nervous system. Literally the same evolutive landscape. And we've already performed (in parts) backwards the bridging to their world (by developing a relatively healthy field of feline psychological study).

J+L points toward this. Lions probably already have categories broadly pointing to 'friend' and 'foe', practical utility (prob much more limited), not price, but probably risk (which is pretty similar). And I knowmy cat can see stuff as boring or interesting, according to her wise designs.

I don't think assuming these categories to be the same for most beings, especially similar ones, is *necessarily* chauvinistic or naive. These point to phenomenal markers which are common to species which play "the same games" in this world. And despite being vastly different, me and my cat, on many points, "play the same games", according to the same rules. I put more flourish around it, and she puts more grace. — Akanthinos

But we're not just talking about if lions or cat 'have' or 'do not have' categories: the question is whether or not such categories would be grammatically marked. Remember that there are plenty of semantic categories that are not grammatically marked (in fact the vast, vast majority of them). The point is that the exact same phenomenal markers might give rise to different grammatical markings - what would make the difference is nothing much else than evolutionary-historical contingency.

And we don't even have to turn to inter-species communication for examples. I mentioned declension earlier, and it's worth elaborating here: declensions are interesting because they are grammatical inflexions that convey certain information about a word. Modern English doesn't have many declensions meaning that it has to rely quite heavily on word-order to convey the same information. So in English object and subject are marked by position: 'John looked at Bob' is not the same as 'Bob looked at John'. However, languages with richer declension structures will specify subject and object by a suffix or prefix. So one might say: 'John-em looked at Bob-by', which would translate to 'Bob looked at John', despite the apparent word order: the idea is that 'em' and 'by' indicate subject and object, and not word order. Thus you can have weird Latin phrases (for example) where words might be in entirely different positions but because the declensions are all there the phrase would mean the exact same thing. German is notorious for this and is partly to blame for why reading Heidegger is nails on a chalkboard.

Now, declension isn't quite the same as having or not having grammatically marked semantic categories (as we've seen, the same semantic categories may be marked by word-order instead of declension and vice versa), but it provides a concrete, non-speculative example of how one could imagine a wildly different scheme of semantic and hence grammatical categorization. In fact, English is notorious for not having the metric crap ton of gendered markings that alot of other European languages have, and this despite the fact that the English did not have so very different 'phenomenal markers' than the German or the French.

Finally, if we are to look at intra-species communication, it might be worth looking to what the enthologist Gregory Bateson had to say about communication among certain mammals, and in our felicitous case, cats: "When your cat is trying to tell you to give her food, how does she do it? She has no word for food or for milk. What she does is to make movements and sounds that are characteristically those that a kitten makes to a mother cat. If we were to translate the cat’s message into words, it would not be correct to say that she is crying “Milk!” Rather, she is saying something like “Ma-ma!” Or, perhaps still more correctly, we should say that she is asserting “Dependency! Dependency!” The cat talks in terms of patterns and contingencies of relationship, and from this talk it is up to you to take a deductive step, guessing that it is milk that the cat wants. ... What was extraordinary—the great new thing—in the evolution of human language was not the discovery of abstraction or generalization, but the discovery of how to be specific about something other than relationship." (Bateson, "Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication").

If one takes the not-too-wild leap in considering that lionese would not be too far off from cat-talk, one might imagine that the lion would speak entirely in this kind of idiolect, bearing on relationships. I made a thread quite some time ago about autistic communication which might be interesting to consider too, and how the language at stake was precisely this kind of relational language which looks very, very different from the kind we are used to. It is not clear that most anyone, for example, would 'understand' Amanda Baggs:



I won't comment on the video here - I've written too much already - but I hope you can see what I'm trying to draw from it. Read the linked thread if you're interested in more detail. I'll only say here that one can imagine a modifed line form Wittgenstein here: 'If Amanda Baggs could talk, we would not understand her".

Is there a good reason to believe that a lion would resolve the basic questions of ontology assembling any differently then we do? Individuals, classes, attributes, relations, function terms, restrictions, rules, axioms, events... Which one would the lion miss? For that matter, which one a neutron star would miss? — Akanthinos

You would think that the lion would recognize the difference between night and day for example, and this might enter into the lion's categorization as something recognizable to us. However, if this difference is completely unimportant to the lion, then the lion probably would not talk about it nor even recognize it. So I would think that such categorization is based in what is important to us, and the ability to communicate is dependent on a commonality of values. Therefore language gets structured so as to encourage such commonality, enabling itself.

An interesting question would be of the sort, can the conceptual schema of a lion be able to incorporate elements of human grammar or is that not possible. Or rather vice versa since intelligence would prohibit a lion to reach our level of communication.

I think Wittgenstein's would have made more sense if he referred to apes instead of lions.

I suspect that lions are not great talkers. But whales and dolphins are. And we do not understand them.

It's all about fish, and water temperature, and nutrient levels, and bioluminescence, and who's fucking whose blowhole. Or not. How does their grammar facilitate the stuff they want to talk about? We don't seem to have any idea.

Closer to home, see here a human language that is 2 dimensional, rather than the linear strings in which we philosophise. I wonder if this conforms to the limitations described in the op's article?

It's important to recognise a distinction between nonverbal communication using vocalisations (i.e., signals) and verbal communication using language. A vocalisation is not necessarily a phoneme (i.e., a speech sound, or symbol).

Semioticians Lotman and Sebeok think that language developed as a mental modelling system (an adaptation) in Homo habilis, and that speech is an exaptation derived from language (which emerged in Homo sapiens).

If true, nonverbal thought and communication preceeded verbal thought and communication in evolutionary terms. And if animals were to develop language, verbal communication would co-exist with advanced problem-solving powers.

I suspect that lions are not great talkers. But whales and dolphins are. And we do not understand them. — unenlightened

Actually the passage I quoted above by Bateson on communication in cats was actually from a paper precisely on the topic of communication in dolphins! Bateson's thesis is that while cats communicate in terms of patterns of relationship (the 'meow' that means 'dependency!') rather than reference ('give me milk!' - see the passage quoted in my last post), dolphins, while also communicating in terms of such patterns, do so with a digital rather than analog system. That is, the cats meow for example is relatively undifferentiated: the same meow can aim to communicate different things. The dolphin's 'click' however, is far more differenticated - although it still 'speaks' in terms of patterns, it does so digitally. Here is Bateson:

"The vocalization of dolphins may be a digital expression of (relationship) functions. It is this possibility that I especially have in mind in saying that this communication may be of an almost totally unfamiliar kind. Man, it is true, has a few words for relationship functions, words like "love," "respect," "dependency," and so on. But these words function poorly in the actual discussion of relationship between participants in the relationship" ("Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication").

So you have three different types of communication. (1) Cat: analog communication of patterns of relationships. (2) Dolphin: digital communication of patterns of relationships. (3) Human: digital communication of both patterns and references. Interestingly, Bateson insists on just how alien a mode of communication is both (1) and (2): "We therefore have no idea what it is like to be a species with even a very simple and rudimentary digital system whose primary subject matter would be relationship-functions. This system is something we terrestrial mammals cannot imagine and for which we have no empathy." - The Wittgensteinian ring here is unmissable.

So the last thing to do is to relate the above considerations to grammar. Now, the whole point of grammar, evolutionarily speaking, is to simplify communication. Grammar, as a marker of semantic categories, communicates a crap-ton of semantic content even in the absence of a specific word. If I say 'when was the...?', the grammatical structure of this sentence already points to the fact that the last word is most likely some kind of event. Grammar eliminates a whole swath of possibilities as to what the the word could be: it imposes a constraint. Languages without grammar have to communicate this information in some other way.

For analog languages, this communication must reside in the environment: it is the environmental cues, the kinds of actions I accompany my 'meows' with, that tells you the kind of thing that is trying to be communicated. Digital languages, on the other hand, have such cues built-in to the language in the form of grammar. Grammar is a way of internalizing context into language: it brings the environment 'in'. It's actually a marvel of 'technology', if you think about it. Anyway, the idea is that a cat or a lion might not even have any idea of what to do with grammar! A dolphin, having digital communication, might be at least far more understandable than a cat - and by extension a lion - which only communicates in analog terms.