Sarah, the worlds smartest chimp,died in July 2019, just before her 60th birthday.
Drawing on my background as a philosopher, I argue that the answer is no.
There are principled limitations to our ability to understand animal thought.
Animal thought
There is little doubt that animals think.
Their behavior is too sophisticated to suppose otherwise.
But it is awfully difficult to say precisely what animals think.
Our human language seems unsuited to express their thoughts.
Sarah exemplified this puzzle.
In one famous study, she reliablychose the correct item to complete a sequence of actions.
When shown a person struggling to reach some bananas, she chose a stick rather than a key.
When shown a person stuck in a cage, she chose the key over the stick.
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But other researchers immediately objected.
They doubted that our human concepts accurately captured Sarahs perspective.
The difficulty characterizing animals thoughts does not stem from their inability to use language.
Among others, it occupied W.V.O.
Quine, arguablythe most influential philosopher of that centurys second half.
Ultimately, Quine concluded that there would always be multiple equally good translations.
As a result, we could never precisely characterize the meaning of the languages words.
But Quine also noted that radical translation was constrained by the structure of language.
Suppose a speaker of the foreign language utters the sentence: Schnee ist weiss.
Her friends smile and nod, accepting the sentence as true.
Unfortunately, that doesnt tell you very much about what the sentence means.
There are lots of truths and the sentence could refer to anyone of them.
and reject (Schnee ist nicht weiss, Schnee ist rot, etc.
), sometimes depending on the circumstances (for example, they accept Schnee!
only when snow is present).
you’re free to make an educated guess about what Schnee ist weiss means.
But now imagine a language with a structure fundamentally unlike that of any human language.
How would we translate it?
We wouldnt know what its sentences mean.
Unknown grammars
The thoughts of animals are like the sentences of an unfamiliar language.
An analogy can make this argument more concrete.
What is the correct translation of the Mona Lisa?
Paintings are composed of colors on a canvas, not from words.
But does the Mona Lisa really resist translation?
To capture her smile, well need more detail.
Breaking down Leonardo da Vincis Mona Lisa into pixels leads to reproduction, but not a translation.
But that approach confuses instructions for reproduction with a translation.
But these instructions would say something very different from the content of the page.
Likewise, the Mona Lisa depicts a smiling woman, not a collection of coloured pixels.
So the micro description doesnt yield a translation.
Approximations are possible, but precision is not.
The analogy to the Mona Lisa shouldnt be taken literally.
Their thoughts are structured too differently from our language.
