They bark, therefore we ride

Illustration by Gustavo Doré

In September 2003, reading the book On the Will in Nature (1836) by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, I found the following words in page 40 of its Spanish translation by Alianza Editorial:

…according to those verses by Goethe: “The dog would like to come with us from the stable: the echo of its barking proves that we are riding.”

I immediately thought that this phrase must be the origin of the Spanish proverb they bark, therefore we ride, which used to be attributed to Don Quixote. Since I didn’t remember having read it there, just in case, I found a digitalized version of Don Quixote and looked up the phrase in question. It was not there. Next I did a Google search of the phrase, which came up with about sixty references, all of which stated that it was a phrase from Don Quixote. I also looked for the German translation of Goethe’s phrase as quoted by Schopenhauer, and got five references to Goethe’s poem Kläffer (Barker, 1808). Therefore, at that time the information used by Google to search for that phrase in Spanish was totally wrong, while the information written in German was correct, although less abundant.

My next step was to consult Jordi Porta, a colleague of mine at the Higher Polytechnic School of the Autonomous University of Madrid, of which at that time I was the director, and who worked full time at the Royal Spanish Academy of Language. Jordi told me that the RAE had the digitalized version of all the editions of Don Quixote published since its first edition, and that it was possible to search if such a phrase appeared in any of them. He made the search, and the result was negative. So, we’d got the confirmation that the attribution to Don Quixote was erroneous. When I search for this phrase on Google today, almost all the references indicate that the attribution to Don Quixote is incorrect.

At the beginning of 2023, when the ChatGPT program appeared, I decided to ask about this, to see how it would respond. My question was:

Whose quote is this: They bark, therefore we ride!

This was ChatGPT’s response:

The quote "They bark, therefore we ride!" is a popular expression, commonly attributed to the Spanish writer Francisco de Quevedo. However, there is no documentary source that verifies that he said or wrote it. Therefore, the authorship of this phrase is unknown.

von Goethe

Quevedo? No! Then I replied:

But I think this quote is from Goethe.

And I received the following answer:

You may be referring to another similar but different quote, as "They bark, therefore we ride!" is a popular expression in Spanish and does not appear in any known work by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. However, Goethe wrote in his work "Faust" the following phrase that bears a certain similarity to the popular expression...

And it added a quote that has nothing to do with they bark, therefore we ride. As I provided to ChatGPT more information, such as the Schopenhauer quote and the attribution to the Kläffer poem, it agreed with me on everything.

A year later, I raised the same question with Google's GEMINI program. This was its response:

Contrary to popular belief, the quote "They bark, therefore we ride!" does not appear in the work "Don Quixote de la Mancha" by Miguel de Cervantes... The phrase... "they bark therefore we ride" appears in the book "Don Quixote de la Mancha 2.0" by Andrés Trapiello, published in 2005.

I then added this question: Doesn't it have to do with Goethe? And the answer was:

The specific phrase "They bark, therefore we ride!" is not found in Goethe’s work... There are some similarities with Goethe’s poem "Kläffer", published in 1808... It is possible that Trapiello’s phrase was inspired by Goethe’s poem, but there is no direct connection or a specific attribution.

GEMINI insisted, therefore, on attributing it to Trapiello, whose book came much later than the popular use of the phrase. I insisted that I had known the phrase long before 2005, and that I considered it a Spanish proverb, and the answer was:

It is possible that the phrase "They bark, therefore we ride!" was used orally or in unofficial texts before the publication of Trapiello’s book. However, there is no documented evidence to confirm this... It is also important to note that the popularization of the phrase in recent years is largely due to Trapiello's book... [This is not true] It is possible that the phrase is an old Castilian saying, but there is no evidence to prove it.

Conclusion: unlike ChatGPT, which always agrees with the user, GEMINI appears to stick to its first response, no matter what you say. I don’t know which of the two approaches is better worse. While ChatGPT seems to assume that the customer is always right, GEMINI reminds many current politicians, who tend to be impervious to arguments.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca