c CUNYB/Clarke December, :
The Quarrel and Final Rift with Regius Montaigne relied on this claim about animal languages to support an
argument in favour of animal souls in theApology for Raymond Sebond.
‘From similar effects we should conclude that there are similar faculties.
Consequently, we should admit that animals employ the same method and
the same reasoning as ourselves when we do anything.’In other words,
if it is necessary to attribute a soul to human beings in order to explain
their linguistic behaviour, we must attribute the same kind of mind or soul
to animals who use language in a comparable manner.
Charron appealed to the same kind of argument. He conceded that
wedo not understand animal language. However, we do not understand
most human languages either, but we could hardly deny that other nations
use genuine languages simply because we fail to understand them. In the
case of other human languages, the reality of mutual incomprehension is
undeniable. The same thing is true of animals and human beings.Just as we speak by gestures and by moving our eyes, our head, our hands, and our
shoulders (by which those who are mute become wise), animals do the same, as we
observe in those which have no voice but nonetheless engage in mutual exchanges; and
just as animals understand us to some extent, we likewise understand them....We
speak to them, and they speak to us, and if we do not understand each other perfectly,
who is responsible for that? They could easily judge, by the same reasoning by which
wejudge them, that we are animals. However, they also reproach us that humans do
not understand each other. We do not understand the Basques, the Bretons...Descartes tells Newcastle, however, that he ‘cannot share the opinion
of Montaigne and others who attribute understanding or thought to
animals’.He returns to the argument he used in theDiscourse,which
relies on the distinctive character of human language.
He concedes that animals may excel us in many respects. There-
fore, ‘none of our external actions, apart from spoken words or other
signs...could convince those who examine them that our body is any-
thing more than a machine that moves itself, and that there is also within
it a soul that has thoughts’ (iv.). Descartes specifies the kind of ‘spoken
wordsorother signs’ that characterize human language. They may be the
kind of signs used by mute people, but they have to be relevant to the con-
text in which they are used and cannot be like the talk of parrots when they
utter the same limited sounds no matter what is said to them. Descartes
assumes that the use of signs by animals is limited to occasions on which
they express their ‘passions’, such as a need to eat or to avoid pain, and
that any extension of this limited usage is achieved only by training them