Do animals develop concepts?
Also, how does this question of animals developing concepts matter for humans?
Sometimes people show up to a group psychology session that I run who do not have an adequate grasp of English. They know that there is something related to psychology happening, but they can’t enjoy the modern form of the group without having a grasp of the language. They know something that they are interested in is happening, but they are locked out of it.
In a formal sense, life does not need language. Bacteria do not need to develop a complex set of signifiers. If you are a human who can not use language, you may be looked after by your family, like Nietzsche was looked after at the end of his life. If you are in a place where people speak a language that you do not, you are alien to that place insofar as you are alienated by your non-comprehension of the language used to denote and work with concepts. Concepts are beyond language insofar as they can be translated into different languages.
How does language use life? Language is dependent on life and the concepts which understand and actually navigate life. Language exists insofar as there is life which uses concepts to move through the world. The linguistic being is like bacteria moving through through a petri dish, using the concept like the bacteria uses its own natural ability. The world runs by conceptual language. The concept of money allows you to have a house you did not build. The concept of statehood allows you to travel and prevents others from traveling (or visa versa, depending on where you are reading this and what statehood you have attached to your organic being).
It is safe to say that while we are alive, the navigation of our world will use a lot of concepts to mediate existence; life itself, however, does not need the concept in any given moment. Yet, there is a conceptual world that mediates life. If the concept is attached to language, you need to speak that language in order to navigate the space defining the contours of the concept.
Animals do not tend to use money, so it may be hard for an animal to purchase a home. However, an animal will instinctually desire to eat and drink, thus it is thrown into the concept of eating and drinking. Conceptual language creates cooking, but humans and animals, which is to say life, shares the concept of eating and drinking. Humans can become refined eaters and develop societies based on cooking, money exchanges hands, buildings are built, but the source is the instinctual concept of eating which humans create human forms of.
In short, yes, animals do develop concepts. Animals develop concepts because they are thrown into them by instinct and necessity. Even if a concept is not linguistically expressed, it can still be embodied and present within an animal.
We can as humans get down to the animal core of the necessities of our survival as well as bringing ourselves to the height of human linguistic conceptual possibility. We can use concepts and language to create systems and structures which contain within them some relation to an animal core. The existential and creative process, or the philosophical/psychological process as well as the historical technological processes all involve the question of, “what is it that we will be creating?”
Deciding what it is that we will create is foundational question for consciousness that reflects on its own life, and understands its life as something which is creating itself. Whether we align with bacteria (to the best of our ability to create a metaphysics of bacteria) or we align with a bird, or some other spirit animal, or we align to the possibilities of technologies beyond humanity, or even our interpretation of objects, is the wide open frontier of the creative project that is our lives.