Notes from "Understanding Animals"

Jiggled notes

• Animals don’t have a relationship with the world because they are fully immersed in the world.
• Language creates a distance from the world.
• Dogs live in a drawn-out now, because they orient so much by their sense of smell.
• Much of our loves are permeated by tacit, non-articulable, personal knowledge.
• Classifications will always have a degree of arbitrariness.
• General terms obscure differences.

Raw notes

• Communication between animals seems to be quite strictly bound to what is around them at the present time.
• Their communicative spaces consist of the here and now.
  • Animals have memory, sometimes an amazing memory, which in some respects goes beyond the human one.
• Philosophers have had a tendency to overestimate the significance of language.
• It is plausible to assert that a number of animals – human infants, for that matter – show clear signs of thinking, which is therefore why the thesis of language as a precondition for thinking is doubtful.
  • If were were as strict when studying the abilities of pre-linguistic children as we are when studying animals, we would not attribute much consciousness to them.
• Many animals indicate so clearly that they have a consciousness that it cannot be said there is room for reasonable doubt.
• The exact same things we take into consideration about human mental conditions can also be applied to animals.
• … [if we] recognise that the internal is visible in what is external, there is no extraordinary difficulty in ascribing different states of consciousness to animals.
• Consciousness is dependent on interaction between the brain, the body, and the body’s surroundings.
• The borders between worlds are porous, allowing us to partly enter the world of other species.
• If the behaviour is similar, it is basically not unreasonable to assume that the state of consciousness that underlies the behaviour is similar.
• Humans and animal share so many biological, behavioural, and relational properties that it would be strange if we did not share a few psychological characteristics as well.
• Phenomenal consciousness means what it is like for an organism to be precisely that organism.
• Paradoxically, animals do not have a relationship with the world because they are too fully immersed in the world.
• Language creates a distance from the world.
• Language is [therefore] the articulation of understanding – more specifically, an understanding that is already there before it is expressed linguistically.
• Dogs are not concerned by what a thing is but by what they can do with the thing.
• A dog lives first and foremost in the now, but precisely because it is so oriented by its sense of smell, it is a drawn-out now.
• For a dog the existence of things is not dependant on them having names.
• Much of our understanding is tacit knowledge, meaning knowledge that cannot be expressed in the form of statements. Our lives are permeated by this non-articulable, personal knowledge.
• Is the platypus a reptile or a mammal? … The problem arises because we attempt to classify the world in a logical way, where an belongs in one category or the other. For the platypus itself, that is probably not such a big problem. Classifications will always have a degree of arbitrariness about them.
• General terms obscure the differences.
• Is there anything at all that is uniquely human? One strong candidate is that we blush.

Added 2024-11-09.