What’s it like to be my cat?

An exploration of animal minds

In last week’s article we claimed that if animals like cats don’t possess language, they can’t be said to live in a world of things, hinting at a nonstandard interpretation of ‘thinghood’.

That claim was made during a study that can only deserve to be called ‘symbolic determinism’, that is, the study of the structuring effects of language and concepts on human experience.

But if symbolic determinism relates to the human experience, why would the topic of animal minds come up in the first place?

The concept of animal minds will be helpful to us because the study of the symbolic gets caught in a uniquely pernicious trap: namely, that to study language and concepts, we must inevitably use none other than language and concepts themselves.

Another way to frame this is that the study of the symbolic, by virtue of being a study whose objects are indistinguishable from its method, lacks the necessary background that would allow us to understand its objects with conceptual clarity.

A study can only exist in relation to such a background. For example, marine biologists study aquatic, not terrestrial animals; they study animals, not rocks; and so on. What demarcates marine biology, as a field of study, is this background that…