I was living with my parents on a sort of farm when a lion showed up. I ran into the house and found a .22 rifle which I loaded. Not much of a defense, but something. The lion disappeared, and then reappeared, jumping into the house through a window. As he did so, he turned into a sort of Island of Dr. Moreau type lion, walking on two feet and speaking English.
“You speak well for a lion,” I said, which is probably not the smartest thing to say to a talking lion.
“Thanks,” he smirked, clearly amused by my obvious lack of savoir faire.
After that things got fuzzy. I guess the whole thing was a riff on one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s more gnomic apothegms, “Even if a lion could talk we could not understand him,” the dream allowing me to deal Ludwig a double-down refutation—lions can talk and we can understand them!
Afterwords
What, exactly, did Wittgenstein mean with his lion crack? I guess he meant that a leonine Weltanschauung would differ in essence from ours and thus their speech would not be understandable, implying that human language cannot be reduced to a pure logic that could be comprehended by non-humans, and the same for lionspeak. Does this mean that terrestrial math could not be understood by non-terrestrials? Or maybe it means that human speech cannot be reduced to math. A lot of Wittgenstein’s late musings seemed to revolve around the idea that language was a game with arbitrary rules, with rules that aren’t really separable from the game. We watch the game and then figure out what the rules are. But how do we know what a rule is? By observing non-random behavior and deducing a rule from it? Why do soccer players always kick the ball? Because they aren’t allowed to pick it up? How do we know what a game is? How do we know when a game starts and when it stops? When behavior starts being influenced by arbitrary rules and when it stops being influenced by them? What is the opposite of a game? Reality? And how do we define that?
My own response to Wittgenstein, prior to my dream, at least, is that lions can’t talk, so it’s useless to speculate about how they would talk if they could and that lions can’t talk because lions can’t talk—they lack the physical apparatus necessary to produce speech. Parrots can talk because parrots can talk. Lions are social animals, but they aren’t that social. Sophisticated oral communication isn’t a priority with them, and so they haven’t got it. Wittgenstein, who didn’t care for anything Darwinian (too empirical), probably wouldn’t care for this.
Can apes talk? A lot of the research has been snickered at, for good reason, but The First Word, an often (though not always) interesting book by Christine Kenneally, isn’t all negative. Apes can talk, a little, she says, but only in captivity. Why? Because humans will listen, and apes won’t.
