"Your cat doesn't know her name, she just knows that when you make a certain sound it means you're talking to or about her."
"That is not nearly as relevant a distinction as you think it is."
"That is not nearly as relevant a distinction as you think it is."
On a level I do appreciate the distinction, there is a jump between "that means I'm being talked about" and the appreciation of the abstract concept of a name.
But really that just means your cat has language cognition analogous to a baby.
I get that a lot of sciences need to be coy around issues of animal cognition because we can only observe and infer but never confirm, but in a casual sense it's silly to insist that humans are somehow utterly unique in the realms of language, emotions, and cognition.
The idea that *feelings* are evolutionarily only as old as Homo Erectus is, in my mind, a combination of silly and arrogant.
