This is my attempt to understand this beautifully opaque remark.
Wittgenstein: if a lion could speak, we could not understand him. (PI, p.223)
The remark seems to generate a paradox. Why is it paradoxical? If a creature could speak, then we could understand him. Presumably, it matters little in what language the speaker speaks, because it is possible to translate the language into our own (Lionese to English). And a language is learnable. So, if a lion could could speak, we could understand him. But this Wittgenstein denies. Why?
The claimed paradox rests on a misunderstanding. Not every sentence in a language has a clear use. Nor every word in a sentence. But does this mean that we could understand the lion if we are clear about his communicative intention? No. For the lion could only specify this to us by means of further words! They could even be translated into our own language. But this is no guarantee that they could be understood. In other words, it looks as if the meaning of words is not told by words alone, nor by the speaker’s intention.
Suppose a zoo lion says to you in English, “Life is unfair. I was born in captivity, and I shall die in captivity”. I assume that we are clear on what the lion is saying here. There are two linguistic formations. Each formation is a sentence, constructed according to the rules of syntax. Further, we can identify the individual constituents of each sentence, and specify their meaning. But something is missing. Wittgenstein’s lion, it seems to me, is not about what is said, but that it is said. We distinguish between what the lion is saying, and that he is saying it.
How on earth are we supposed to take the lion’s speech? Suppose you and I are conversing, and we overhear a conversation behind us. I ask you, “Who is speaking?” You reply, “Oh, the lion is”. The situation jars. Why? Prior experience means we don’t expect it? Is the problem experiential? Might future experience reveal a world populated with conversing lions? No. Experience cannot inform me of this. Rather, isn’t it that our instinct tells us that lions could not have any conceivable share in our world? A dog hopes his master is at the door. But can it hope that his master is at the door tomorrow? Instinctively not. If a dog could speak, we could not understand him.
Well enough. But what does “lions could not have any conceivable share in our world” mean exactly?
Wittgenstein Light: Real Refreshment 
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August 7, 2007 at 11:23 am
Dennis Duncan
I’m not sure that this is what W means with the lion comment.
I think if you start to imagine a lion saying the things a person might say in a lion’s position–“Life is unfair, I was born in captivity, etc” (bemoaning, relating)–then you are not really imagining a lion, you are imagining a person. It sounds a bit of a contraction in terms, but I think you have to imagine this talking lion without anthropomorphising it!
Remember that speaking a language is first & foremost “part of an activity, or of a life-form” (PI 23). I think what W means is if a lion had language, then the language-games which it would use would be unfamiliar to us.
July 16, 2008 at 5:06 am
Pasty Brujo » Blog Archive » Lions
[…] Lions07.16.08 | Comment? Jesus said, “Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human.” The Gospel of Thomas If a lion could speak, we could not understand him. Ludwig Wittgenstein […]
March 13, 2009 at 10:14 pm
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March 16, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Ben
I think that W is trying to say that a lion does not share the same conceptual scheme as us. That there is something to being a lion that we as humans could not understand, or perceive. Thomas Nagel goes in to some deeper discussion in this vein in his paper “What is it like to be a bat?” that helped me see this Wittgenstein line in this light.
April 4, 2009 at 3:46 am
Joe C
Ben,
Re your post 3/16/09 at 1:37pm
I am reminded of Richard Wilbur’s great poem, “Mind”
http://www.batbox.org/poetry/?p=15
April 27, 2009 at 10:53 pm
M. R.
I believe that one could understand what a lion, or for that any other creature is saying to us, but only if we can percieve the world through their eyes and completely understand their value system. A similar thing occurs with highly isolated tribes in the wilderness. In order for “civilised” man to learn their language he first has to fully understand their way of life.
May 16, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Danny
He’s saying the lion’s point of reference would be so far from our understanding that even if he spoke in perfect english we could not understand him.
Imagine if you’re a philosophy student and you attend a rocket science lecture. You would hardly understand what was being said in lecture because the lecturers reference points are so distant from yours. Now imagine how distant a Lion’s are?
May 21, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Influences on the New Wave: Thinking About Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu” « Nouvelle Vague Cinematheque
[…] with some degree of humility, to digest it with an open mind, although also mindful that like Wittgenstein’s lion, I might never fully understand it in the way it was originally intended. [to be […]
February 18, 2012 at 10:58 am
Goats With Somerset Accents « hatemailwritings
[…] truly can process thought or reason and maybe finally disprove Ludwig Wittgenstein and his theory that if a lion could speak we could not understand him. I am already thinking of questions to ask them, but I am getting fearful in case they develop […]
January 28, 2015 at 2:41 pm
I.N.
What Wittgenstein is actually implying is that even if a Lion could speak perfect English, (or any other human language,) the way the Lion perceives and understands the World itself would be so inconceivably different from our own as a species that we wouldn’t comprehend what it was trying to say. We’d also have no common grounds upon which to hold discussions.
Lion’s don’t hear, see, smell, taste, touch or even perceive time itself the same way we do and they wouldn’t understand what we’re talking about either. If Lions could talk our conversations would be confusing, disturbing, awkward & fruitless. I also imagine they would ultimately end in one of the parties being eaten. It’d be hard to relate to something when both parties can’t even agree on what basic rudimentary shapes look like or even are.
To humanize this concept you can also exchange the Lion for a person with a form of dementia:
Mentally ill person walks up to you and starts saying to you, quite urgently: “Evil dirty dirty! Spiritual daggers; you stabbed me with spiritual daggers that are like worms and coffee machine eat your soul with the devil – laughing and the dinosaurs never rainbow?”
They used English. They know what they’re saying. They know they were conveying a serious matter and their references all made perfect sense to them. To everyone else however it makes no sense whatsoever, even though the core point they’re really trying to say or ask may be quite reasonable if you knew what it was.
Back to Wittgenstein’s Lion however; While a human mentally unable to relate is confusing enough, a Lion physically cannot understand the world as we do. While we could spend a long time trying to decipher the cues in their speech to eventually understand of what subjects they may be referring to, we’d still never truly understand their context, feelings or points of reference in forming that idea or opinion in the first place.
So to sum it up: What humans perceive the World as being and what the World actually is, are two extremely different things. The difference in how humans perceive the World and how Lions perceive the World is equally as extreme.