Dogs Have No Proper Verbal Communication Like Human Beings Analysis

I’m working on a philosophy writing question and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.

IN P1 s.25 Wittgenstein writes, ‘It is sometimes said that animals do not talk because they lack the mental capacity. And this means: “they do not think and that is why they do not talk.” Consider this passage by William James:

Man is known… as ‘the talking animal’; and language is assuredly a capital distinction between man and brute. But it may readily be shown how this distinction merely flows from those we have pointed out, easy dissociation of a representation into its ingredients, and association by similarity.

Language is a system of signs, different from the things signified, but able to suggest them.

No doubt brutes have a number of such signs. When a dog yelps in front of a door, and his master, understanding his desire, opens it, the dog may, after a certain number of repetitions, get to repeat in cold blood a yelp which was at first the involuntary interjectional expression of strong emotion. The same dog may be taught to ‘beg’ for food, and afterwards come to do so deliberately when hungry. The dog also learns to understand the signs of men, and the word ‘rat’ uttered to a terrier suggests exciting thoughts of the rat hunt. If the dog had the varied impulse to vocal utterance which some other animals have, he would probably repeat the word ‘rat’ whenever he spontaneously happened to think of a rat-hunt-he no doubt does hare it as an auditory image, just as a parrot calls out different words spontaneously from its repertory, and having learned the name of a given dog will utter it on the sight of a different dog. In each of these separate cases the particular sign may be consciously noticed by the animal, as distinct from the particular thing signified, and will thus, so far as it goes, be a true manifestation of language. But when we come to man we find a great difference. He has a deliberate intention to apply a sign to everything. The linguistic impulse is with him generalized and systematic. For things hitherto unnoticed or unfelt, he desires a sign before he has one. Even though the dog should possess his ‘yelp’ for this thing, his ‘beg’ for that, and his auditory image ‘rat’ for a third thing, the matter with him rests there. If a fourth thing interests him for which no sign happens already to have been learned, he remains tranquility without it and goes no further. But the man postulates it, its absence irritates him, and he ends by inventing it. This GENERAL PURPOSE constitutes, I take it, the peculiarity of human speech, and explains its prodigious development.

How, then, does the general purpose arise? It arises as soon as the notion of a sign as such, apart from any particular import, is born; and this notion is born by dissociation from the outstanding portions of a number of concrete cases of signification. The ‘yelp’ the ‘beg’ the ‘rat’ differ as to their several imports and natures. They agree only insofar as they have the same use – to be signs, to stand for something more important than themselves. The dog who this similarity could strike would have grasped the sign per se as such,and would probably thereupon become a general sign-marker, or speaker in the human sense. But how can the similarity strike him? Not without the juxtaposition of the similars (in virtue of the law of use – not till then can this thought hash through his mind: “Why. yelp and beg, in spite of all their unlikeness, are yet alike in this: that they are actions, signs, which lead to important boons. Other boons, any boons, may then be got by other signs!” This reflection made the gulf is passed. Animals probably never make it, because the bond of similarity is not delicate enough. Each sign is drowned in its import, and never awakens other signs and other imports in juxtaposition. The rat-hunt idea is too absorbingly interesting in itself to be interrupted by anything so uncontiguous to it as the idea of the ‘beg for food’ or of ‘the door-open yelp’ nor in their turn do these awaken the rat-hunt idea.

In the human child, however, these ruptures of contiguous association are very soon made; far off cases of sign-using arise when we make a sign now; and soon language is launched. The child in each case makes the discovery for himself. No one can help him except by furninghing with the conditions. But as he is constituted , the conditions will sooner or later shoot together into the result. [Principles of Psychology (1890). I am quote from pp. 255-257 of the two volume Dover Press edition. All emphases are in the original. James’ Principal of Psychology was a widely read and used textbook in psychology from its publication in 1890 into the early decades of the 20th century. Wittgenstein owned a copy and refers to James by name four times in P1.]

1. Does James explain why animals do not talk (at any rate, as we do..) by saying that they do not think? What “thinking” do humans engage in (and dogs don’t) that explains the “prodigious development” of human language? (Answer in one page.)
2. Explicate the remainder of P1 s.25.