Abstract
Wittgenstein’s philosophy offers valuable resources to develop a philosophical approach to animal life, an approach that is largely precluded by the dualistic framework that is traditional to Western thought. Rather than opposing language to life, Wittgenstein highlights that language consists of activities and is tied to life. He thus offers a non-dualistic approach to both language and life that may allow us to identify and conceptualise meaning in animal behaviour. Here, I apply Wittgensteinian concepts of rule-following and language games to the case of chimpanzee reconciliation as described by Frans de Waal. I show that these concepts are relevant and may shed light on these analyses. They highlight meaning in these behaviours, even as it is very different from meaning as we know it from human language. Wittgensteinian concepts applied to animal life allow us to go beyond the objection of anthropomorphism. They represent fruitful heuristic tools for ethology and analytic tools for a philosophy of animal life.
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Notes
- 1.
Contrary to what some influential interpretations pretend, as they see in the importance that Wittgenstein confers to language a reiteration of the traditional view that the logos constitutes a radical distinction from animals (Leahy 2005).
- 2.
Statistically, reconciliation occurred “after 47% of conflicts among adult males, after only 18% of those among adult females, with reconciliation between the sexes falling in between” (de Waal 1989, 48).
- 3.
Crary develops a line of thought that is similar to the one pursued here in her analysis of dogs’ mental capacities. She shows that a dog that is faced with a new situation (e.g. an electric toy) is able to display “doings-appropriate-when”. The dog’s fearless reaction in front of a new electric toy demonstrates that it uses a form of categorisation. Such categorisations remain primitive compared to our concepts, since they lack justification. They are nevertheless a genuine form of mental activity (Crary 2016, 111 ff).
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Le Goff, A. (2022). Animal Investigations. In: Aldrin Salskov, S., Beran, O., Hämäläinen, N. (eds) Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein. Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_6
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