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Gettin real goddamn tired of dogs
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Unpopular Opinion
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Dogs do understand language, that's how they learn commands. Through repetitive training of the word just like a baby learns a language. They just don't have the mental capacity to understand much past that.
Idk if I'd call being able to discern a few commands by the way they sound "understanding language"; people tend to personify the ways their pets act. You couldn't take part of one command, splice it into a different one, and expect the dog to act accordingly unless you repeatedly trained that "new" command into them, for example. But that's a different argument, and depends on how we're defining "understand," and not a hill I'm willing to die on lol.
That's exactly how you learn language though, by listening to the sounds repetitively and understand the meaning. Dogs have limited mental capacity so them using logic and reasoning to understand spliced commands is not going to work. It's learning on a 3 year old level, they don't ever make it past that mental age.
My definition of understand requires reasoning. They never learn the meaning of words. They just know they'll get a treat if you make that sound and they do the thing. That's not understanding language, it's just responding to stimuli. Whether the training process is somewhat? similar to how a baby learns to talk is irrelevant. They're not people, they're not learning at a 3 year old level, they're responding how a dog responds.
Like, your comment is reading, "Dogs understand language. They just don't have the mental capacity to understand language."