Animal souls, Part I

Here’s a postscript, in two parts, to my recent critique in Public Discourse of David Bentley Hart’s case for there being animals in heaven.  In this first part, I discuss in more detail than I did in the original article Donald Davidson’s arguments for denying that animals can think or reason in the strict sense.  (This material was originally supposed to appear in the Public Discourse article, but the article was overlong and it had to be removed.)  In the second part, I will address some of the response to the Public Discourse article.  Needless to say, those who haven’t yet read the Public Discourse article are urged to do so before reading what follows, since what I have to say here presupposes what I said there.

For the Thomist, it is because human beings are rational animals that our souls can survive the deaths of our bodies, since (as the Thomist argues) rational or intellectual powers are essentially incorporeal.  Non-rational animals lack these incorporeal powers, so that there is nothing in them that can survive the deaths of their bodies.  That is why there is not, and cannot be, any afterlife for non-human animals.

The telltale mark of the difference between a rational animal and a non-rational animal is language.  Here some distinctions need to be made, because the term “language” is often used indiscriminately to refer to very different sorts of phenomena.  Karl Popper distinguished four functions of language: the expressive function, which involves the outward expression of an inner state; the signaling function, which adds to the expressive function the generation of a reaction in others; the descriptive function, which involves the statement of a complete thought of the sort that might be expressed in a declarative sentence; and the argumentative function, which involves the statement of an inference from one thought to another.  Some non-human animals are capable of the first two functions, and in that sense might be said to have “language.”  But the latter two functions involve the grasp of concepts, and human beings alone posses language of the sort which expresses concepts, thoughts, and arguments.

You don’t have to be a Thomist to see this.  Donald Davidson presented an influential set of arguments to the effect that thought and language go hand in hand, so that no creature which lacks language (in the relevant sense of “language”) can be said to think or reason in the strict sense.  (See Davidson’s essays “Thought and Talk” and “Rational Animals.”)   Hence, suppose a dog hears someone jangling some keys outside the door and starts wagging its tail and jumping about excitedly.  A natural way to describe what is going on is to say that the dog thinks that its master is home.  If what this amounts to is (say) merely that the sound of the keys jangling triggers in the dog’s consciousness a visual image of the master walking in the door, which in turn generates a feeling of excitement, then the Thomist (and, presumably, Davidson) are happy to agree.  But what the dog does not have is a thought in the sense in which a human being might have the thought that the master is home.  That is to say, the dog does not have the concept “master” or the concept “home,” and thus lacks any mental state with the conceptual content of the thought that “The master is home.”

Davidson puts forward a number of considerations in support of this judgment.  (What follows is my own way of stating Davidson’s points -- perhaps he would not agree with every aspect of my formulations.)  Consider first that for the dog to have a thought in the sense of an internal state with conceptual content, there must be some specific content that the thought has.  For example, it will be a thought with the content that the master is home -- as opposed, say, to a thought with the content that the man who is the father of the children who live in this house is home, or a thought with the content that the man who goes to work for eight hours every weekday is home.  Now if the dog had language, there would be a way to make sense of his thought’s having the first content rather than the others.  The dog might utter the sentence “The master is home” but not the sentences corresponding to the other thought contents, or it might assent to the sentence “The master is home” but not to the others (if, for example, it knew that the man in question is his master, but did not know either that this man is the father of the children or that he goes to work when he is away from the house).  In the absence of such a linguistic criterion, though, it is hard to see how there could be a fact of the matter about which specific content the dog’s thought has.  And thus it is hard to see how it really could have a thought with a specific conceptual content.

A second consideration is this.  Crucial to having the capacity for thought is having the capacity for believing something -- for taking it to be true that the world is this way rather than that.  There are other kinds of thoughts, such as desires and intentions, but they presuppose belief.  For example, you can intend to have pizza for dinner only if you believe that there is, or at least could be, such a thing as pizza.  Now, to have a belief, in Davidson’s view, entails having the concept of belief.  For you cannot believe that it is raining outside without also believing that it is not the case that it is not raining outside.  That is to say, to believe that it is raining outside entails believing that the belief that it not raining outside is false.  But to know the difference between true belief and false belief presupposes having the concept of believing something.

Now, Davidson argues further that to have the concept of believing something entails having language.  For, again, to have the concept of believing something is to have the concept of a state which could represent the world either truly or falsely.  That entails being able to distinguish between a content of a belief which represents things correctly and a content which represents them falsely.  For instance, what makes the belief that the earth is spherical a true belief and the belief that the earth is flat a false belief is that the content of the former represents things accurately and the content of the latter represents things falsely.  But to be able to grasp the difference between these contents is just to grasp the difference between, on the one hand, the statement we might express linguistically in a sentence like “The earth is spherical” and, on the other, the statement we might express in a sentence like “The earth is flat.”

Now, if to be capable of thought entails having beliefs, and if having beliefs entails having the concept of believing something, then to be capable of thought entails having the concept of believing something.  And if having the concept of believing something entails having language, then being capable of thought entails having language.  In that case, Davidson concludes, any creature that lacks language also lacks the capacity for thought. 

Of course, it is sometimes claimed that some apes have been taught to use language as well as very young children can use it.  But as linguist Noam Chomsky has noted, “that's about like saying that Olympic high jumpers fly better than young birds who've just come out of the egg -- or than most chickens.  These are not serious comparisons.”  From a Thomistic point of view, what matters in determining whether a creature possesses language is not whether we can get it to mimic certain superficial aspects of language under artificial circumstances, but rather how it naturally tends to act when left to its own devices.  And in their natural state, no animals other than human beings ever get beyond what Popper calls the expressive and signaling functions of language.  But even if there were real evidence of ape language, that would not prove that thought doesn’t require language.  Rather, it would show only that there are more kinds of thinking (and thus language-using) creatures than we thought.

In any event, dogs, cats, and the other domesticated animals Hart and others would evidently like to think go to heaven certainly don’t have language.  And it would be ridiculous to suggest that they have it but (like the dog in the comic book panel above) have been determined to hide the fact from us.  Agere sequitur esse (“action follows being” or “activity follows existence”) is a basic principle of Scholastic metaphysics.  The way a thing acts or behaves reflects what it is.  If dogs, cats, and the like had language in the third and fourth of Popper’s senses, then at some time, somewhere, evidence of this would show up in the way they behave.  Since it never has, we must conclude that they lack language in the relevant sense.

But if Davidson is right (and I think he is) then it follows that these animals lack rationality.  And if they lack rationality, they lack anything that might survive the deaths of their bodies.  In which case there is no afterlife for dogs, cats, and the other non-human animals to which we sometimes become sentimentally attached.