The Limits of Language: Wittgenstein’s Lion Analogy
In a philosophy lecture years ago, I heard this famous Wittgenstein quote, and it completely reshaped how I viewed language.
In his book Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “If a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand him.”
When I first came across Wittgenstein’s idea, I didn’t get it either…
The idea that a speaker of a language understands any other speaker feels like common sense. So, if a lion spoke a language we know, we should understand what they’re saying, right? But Wittgenstein’s getting at a deeper idea — language is more than just words. It’s our experiences and how we see the world.
Lions care about hunting and survival while we’re thinking about dinner plans or Netflix.
If a lion tried to express its thoughts using words, metaphors, and analogies, those thoughts would be so different from ours that we wouldn’t get it. Would we ask a lion what it thinks of rush hour traffic? Probably not — though it might have some interesting opinions on antelope.
Their world is so different from ours that even if we tried to talk about something familiar, it just wouldn’t land the same way.
