Mark Hopwood
speaker
1,269 appearances
31 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2009
last heard Sep 2014
Mark Hopwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And I'm Mark Hopwood.
That's really interesting.
So just to go back on some of what you said, see we start out by saying that animals have languages and they they do different things with language.
And one of the things that animals do is just to yelp in pain or whimper with hunger.
I tread on my dog's tail, it yelps.
It's an expression of pain in some sense.
And you might think, if you weren't thinking about it very much, that that's all that animals do.
But then it seems like some of these experiments, like the experiments with the bees, have shown
No, there's this other really interesting, strange thing that animals do.
They don't just yelp in pain.
They use language to refer to the world.
And as you said, with the case of the bees, that was a very controversial claim initially.
And and so it would be very natural to ask the question, what makes you think that these bees are referring to something in the world?
Who what would make it the case that
they're they're referring to something in the world.
So there's what's really nice about the animal example is there's a sense in which the idea of reference is a kind of strange idea and it looks like a real achievement to be able to refer to something.
And so the point that you made that I love is that
We're kinda used to the idea of human language referring to things, but in some ways it's no less strange that we succeed in referring to things.
And so that's that's why we need a a theory of reference to explain how we do that.
So that's why this is important.
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