Published 26 April 2017

To know how animals know, ask how we do

From David Werdegar, Naperville, Illinois, US

Michael Brooks asks whether animals know things (1 April, p 37). To answer this, one has to understand how we know things.

For humans, knowledge is the conversion or abstraction of the world around us into an internal model we call language. What we know is determined by the language structure we are born into. As we are exposed to more parts of our world, we have to adapt or invent new words and relationships to comprehend the new reality.

Given how critical language is to knowing our world, how can animals conceptualise and successfully interact without it? How does a wolf pack or lion pride coordinate an attack on its prey?

I suggest that we need to redefine knowledge to encompass the mental constructs that exist and operate without language. Whatever these structures are, they allow animals to survive and thrive in their world space.


Understanding animal non-language thought processes may help explain how solutions seem to appear to us from nowhere, or how a composer can “hear” an entire sonata in their head.