Yesterday my post omitted a key "not" where it read: From: Donal McEvoy donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx >But we can also imagine another creature whose "form of life" allows it to >understand the "language of chess" as we understand it yet this creature >cannot understand our "language of morals" - for perhaps within that >creature's "form of life" there is no role or scope for moral choice, moral >evaluation etc., and this is lacking to the extent that our "language of >morals" would be incomprehensible to them i.e. they just would understand it >when one human said "All humans must be treated with respect and not like they >are simply a disposable piece of machinery", or the role of some such claim >within our "form of life".> Probably some (at least in some possible world) cognitively put the "not" in for me (I might have done the same for them): but emphatically here it is as it should have been:- i.e. they just would NOT understand it when one human said "All humans must be treated with respect and not like they are simply a disposable piece of machinery" etc. Taking DR's advice to "carry on":- A further example of how specific aspects of a "form of life" might allow access to/understanding of one language game but not another: imagine a bee-type creature with a bee-type form of life. We grant this bee-type creature the cognitive capacity to grasp language at the level at which a bee can, for example, understand the 'directions' expressed in the dance of the bee (which is an expression of "bee language"). This cognitive capacity would mean it has access to/understanding of the signalling function of language - it could therefore perhaps (in principle?) understand what was going on in another language that used the signalling function e.g. the language of semaphore flags, suitably restricted to a signalling function, would not in principle be incomprehensible to this bee-type creature because of "form of life" differences, albeit it might be incomprehensible because of cognitive deficiency. But if we grant this bee-type creature sufficient cognitive capacity to consciously understand its own bee-type language, we might also grant it could understand a "language game" such as one of semaphore signals where these give directions. We might debate whether the bee-type creature also would have the grasp of the descriptive function or use of language, depending on whether we assigned some descriptive function to its own "bee-type language". We can understand this bee-type language (in principle) because our own language has many forms of language that also deploy the signalling function of language, and their presence within our "form of life" means we can understand them within the bee's form of life - they are not incomprehensible to us because our "form of life" is sufficiently like the bee-type creature's in respects necessary for understanding the specific language in question. But it does not follow that what is (in principle?) shared access to/understanding of these specific languages [bee-type language and semaphore] means that all language is open to such understanding all the creatures, no matter their kind of language or "form of life". In particular, the bee-type creature may have nothing in its "form of life" that corresponds to arguing and therefore to the argumentative function of language, and it may have nothing that corresponds to ethical claims and to the 'language-game' of making and discussing ethical claims. And so, because of the key difference in its "form of life" here, and irrespective of cognitive capacity, the bee-type creature would find our arguing and our "language of morals" incomprehensible - it might at best think we were engaged in some strange or weird form of signalling, as this is what it does understand within its "form of life" and specific bee-type language.