ABSTRACT
Human language is insuffi cient to represent nonhuman minds. How could it be otherwise? Consider the complex diff erences merely among mammals: Could human language, for instance, be expected to have adequate resources to represent completely the experiences and mental lives of blue whales? Of dolphins? Surely not. When elephants track other elephants at a distance with infrasonic calls, does it resemble humans’ network awareness (reinforced by cell phones and the like)? Perhaps, but it is diffi cult to say. Indeed, the weakness of human language in this area is in keeping with the familiar caution against anthropomorphism, part of the need to register diff erences among animals in our thinking. But much posthumanist scholarship-Jacques Derrida is a key example-indicates that human language is also insuffi cient to represent human minds.1 From this perspective, we recognize that language is a kind of tool or system of understanding that can never perfectly reproduce our own mental activities or experiences; instead, at best language serves particular purposes in a complex world.2 This approach to language is rhetorical rather than logical; it is worldly and pragmatic, not purist or absolutist.
