If a lion could talk we could not understand him-Ludwig Wittgenstein.

[Free Trade is managed by the invisible hand.]

This statement means that words can only be understood because of the context that goes along with them, and such an observation should obviously lead one to conclude that if Aliens landed on this planet it may be impossible to understand each other.

[Free Trade is managed by the invisible hand.]

This statement means that words can only be understood because of the context that goes along with them, and such an observation should obviously lead one to conclude that if Aliens landed on this planet it may be impossible to understand each other.

just think about how hard it would be for someone to communicate with another person 400 years ago, obviously the language barrier would not be the only problem.

[Free Trade is managed by the invisible hand.]

just think about how hard it would be for someone to communicate with another person 400 years ago, obviously the language barrier would not be the only problem.

Obviously; time travel is quite a difficult barrier to breach.

well obviously but we would have to assume that it is possible for time travel in order to douse our intellect with the implications of Wittgenstein's statement.

[Free Trade is managed by the invisible hand.]

I disagree.

with what? and before you disagree could you offer a critique?

[Free Trade is managed by the invisible hand.]

just think about how hard it would be for someone to communicate with another person 400 years ago, obviously the language barrier would not be the only problem.

Obviously; time travel is quite a difficult barrier to breach.

well obviously but we would have to assume that it is possible for time travel in order to douse our intellect with the implications of Wittgenstein's statement.

"This is dialectics.  It’s very simple dialectics.  One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, uh, with fractions - what are you going to land on - one-quarter, three-eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something? That's dialectic, physics, okay.  Dialectic logic is, there’s only love and hate.  You either love somebody or you hate em."

its a thought experiment.....

[Free Trade is managed by the invisible hand.]

I still wonder what the quote is from.

A lion can talk. A lion does talk. We can understand a little of it. Though, clearly, not much.

As in 'Grr, I'm going to bite you'?  You know they mostly bite non-Christians.

I don't think lion grammar is that complex. And they mostly just talk to each other, of course, not to other species. No more than we do. No, probably less than we do. [thinks of himself talking to cats]

The point is that we can not understand the lion because we do not understand the context that he is speaking in. Humans have never been put in a zoo, or lived the life of a lion.

[Free Trade is managed by the invisible hand.]

The point is that we can not understand the lion because we do not understand the context that he is speaking in. Humans have never been put in a zoo, or lived the life of a lion.

Yeah everybody understands that.  But we do share lots of experiences.  I for example have eaten raw meat, and I loved it.

you are claiming  that sharing a common experience is what can bond us, but one could simply claim that "isn’t it that our instinct tells us that lions could not have any conceivable share in our world?". This is because lion does not live on the same intellectual plain and humans do, and thus it may be impossible to understand the lion.

[Free Trade is managed by the invisible hand.]

Was this the early or late Wittgenstein talking? 

If it's the early Wittgenstein, we could not understand a talking lion because his formal language could not be broken down into numbered propositions and the rest of what he says he should really keep silent about.

If it's the later Wittgenstein, we could not understand a talking lion because his language-game is associated with uses and communities that are not familiar to human beings because they scare the sh**t out of us and, when we happen upon them, we run for our lives instead of listening a while.

Thats a good point and i am surprised that no one else has brought it up, and i have always found it interesting how wittgenstein would either change his mind or have a hard time setteling with one idea.