Can Dogs Hope? - Beginnings

'Can Dogs Hope?' is the first of a small number of interrelated projects that I'm going to be pursuing here. My interest in this question was sparked off a number of years ago by the reading of two texts. The first was Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. The second was Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism.

At the beginning of Part II of the Investigations Wittgenstein asks the following:

One can imagine an animal angry, frightened, unhappy, happy, startled. But hopeful? And why not?

A dog believes his master is at the door. But can he also believe his master will come the day after tomorrow?--And what can he not do here?--How do I do it?--How am I supposed to answer this?

Can only those hope who can talk? ... That is to say, the phenomena of hope are modes of this complicated form of life.(1)

What is Wittgenstein saying about hope? Wittgenstein suggests that hope requires language, putting it out of reach of dogs and other animals. And it seems at least part of this relates to the temporal nature of hope - what is emphasised here is how it typically concerns events in the future (i.e. it's future-orientated).

So a reading of Wittgenstein would suggest no. However, two problems became apparent to me, at different points. The first is that, on reading the work of psychologist Martin Seligman, it seems there is good experimental evidence that dogs can be optimistic, and neatly disentangling optimism from hopefulness is no easy task. The second, which came much later, is that the idea of hope as being future-orientated isn't as straight forward as it first appears, and that at the very least this needs disentangling.

These two problems will form the subject of my next two posts on this topic.

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(1) Wittgenstein, L Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell:Oxford 2001, p148e