Frey's stipulative definition of the terms 'want' and 'desire' seems to me to take away from his argument. He stipulates by saying that he believes in wanting as in needing. Why don't we just say that animals can need but not desire?
In popular usage want and desire are used interchangeably, so by using these terms he accomplished confusing the issue a bit. Now is it true that animals only have needs but not desires? Frey says no, because desires can only be formed if one has belief's to form them with, and belief's can only be formed with language. Though I can not back this up, I think Frey will have a hard time proving that you absolutely cannot form beliefs without language.
Maybe he thinks that the quality of a declarative statement does not arise from a thought behind the language but rather from the structure of the language itself. My intuition says that language should not be confused with though, and while language and thought are related, the mind can deal with mental objects and have beliefs without using language.
I very much like the last point in this post, about Frey's opinion that the structure of language is more important than the thought behind the language. If this is really the case, then different groups of humans think in radically different ways from one another. This is so because many different (human) languages are arranged along extremely variable lines. For someone who is only familiar with English and perhaps a bit of Spanish or French, this may not stand out as much; those three languages, while different in structure, are similar enough that if one were to replace words in Spanish or French with their English equivalents without altering the grammar, the result would sound merely like a heavy accent, but would still be understandable. However, languages from other areas are much, much less similar to the Western languages that most of the readers of this blog are likely to be familiar with. Eastern, African, and Native American languages are typically so different from English that if one were to replace their words with English equivalents the result would be virtually indecipherable. How can we say with certainty that non-human methods of communication are anything more than languages which have even less in common with human languages than human languages do with one another?
ReplyDeleteP.S. I also posted this on my blog if you'd rather read it there.