He is alleged to have threatened Popper with a
handy found object on one occasion, the “Wittgenstein’s Poker” incident,
but there is no evidence of modification or enhancement of the poker.

Yes there was. It was used (modifying) for leverage in a social negotiation. Its just that the poker was the modification to a social situation.

What was the outcome?

New Caledonian crows have possibly the most advanced tool use of any animal except humans. The crows manufacture and use complex tools including straight and hooked sticks and complex flat tools made from leaves. They are able to select correct length sticks from a set with significantly better than random frequencies for a task of removing food from perspex tubes. Significantly, they are able to do this on first exposure to a novel task, indicating a real level of causal insight into the problem.

None of this compares with the ability of humans, even the very young, to modify found objects and combine materials into purpose-built tools. This doesn’t tell us much about the Philosophical Investigations issue but we don’t know for sure that Wittgenstein could bind a rock to a stick to make a club. He is alleged to have threatened Popper with a handy found object on one occasion, the “Wittgenstein’s Poker” incident, but there is no evidence of modification or enhancement of the poker.

2. Signalling, where other members of the species are either wired or have learned to pick up a message from the sound – the most obvious are warning calls and mating signals.

3. Descriptive. This is where things get really interesting, because the descriptive function is hard to find in animals, while humans do it all the time.

There is a theory that the descriptive function evolved out of the play of young animals and also their interaction with their mothers (which would include grooming).

Hunting did not lead to big brains because hunting AND gathering lead to big brains because the division of labour was organised socially.

(Simplistically thinking it was just hunting would be vey attractive to recidivists like alpha male lawyerly trained politicians rather than scientifically educated leaders)(yes I am trolling).

Once we could organise day to day activities and develop ritual and ceremony to educate the young in handing on social technologies (like Jurkupa) to organise the day to day hunting AND gathering, we had it made.

Because if we could learn AND teach a way of moving across the landscape then we could learn new ways in new places from savanah to jungles to glacial grasslands to the high artic.

Not only that, when could apply the same skills in adaption to the resultant new landscapes that our cultures developed on these ‘old growth’ terrains (agriculture, bulk trade and nomadism being the two big ones) and we had large numbers of peoples settling or moving around these new landscapes become the terrain for new movements and so new social landscapes.

For example the marketplace, the monastery, the big house, the temple, and the coffee house will come, and on top of them we will get stock markets and then weird differential schemes like the options market. Each more removed from the world of dirt beneath our feet. Virtual reality is a pure form of the all to human adaption of social negotiation/creation of multiple niches by one species.

All because we are the only animal that has socially negotiated, and socially maintains through a cultural system best described I think by Mary Douglas which both supplies and maintains oppositoinally defined and rejecting thought styles which gives this social system the robustness to maintain a diversity of options in social circulation (ie some will appear non-rational to economists at certain times) but without which there would be no economy to study at all.

The economic landscape is a derivative (however powerfully conditioning) of the social abilities we have to organise the day to day activities and be able to hand them on, this social ability (oh so much more than grooming) is itself a derivative of our basic physiological upbringing in an ecology.

As ANIMALS. A psychological fact reduced by the religiously biased to soul.

but it is good to see economists start looking at these things. Lazy lap dogs.

Now where’s my dole check, I though I’d left it in my copy of The Prince, but…