Times Piece on "Doctor Dolittle's Delusion"

[Salinas17 at aol.com]

News piece on Stephen R. Anderson's forthcoming book "Doctor Dolittle's
Delusion"
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/07/science/07cont.html?pagewanted=1

<<...To linguists, languages are not lists of words, but frames governed by
syntax, the art that gives different meanings to "The murderer believed Mary to
be John's mother," "Mary believed John's mother to be the murderer" or "To be
the murderer, Mary believed John's mother.">>

It is difficult to understand what Anderson believes animals are deficit in
from these examples. I understand that chimps seem to be capable of
communicating "You gave my ball to Kokie."

<<Dr. Anderson concedes that animals communicate, often in detail. Waggling
bee dances indicate the direction and distance to a trove of pollen, and
monkeys and squirrels have different alarm calls for different predators... But...
bees do not reminisce about last year's honey and apes do not ask their
language teachers why they are captives.>>

It is difficult to understand what Anderson believes animals are deficit in
from these examples.  I suspect there are many humans who don't "reminisce"
about last year's honey.  And I did not know that "reminiscing"  was a quality of
language.  Animals certainly have memories of course -- and some might be
good memories -- and they might be able to communicate them.  As far as apes not
asking why they are captives -- a look into history shows that human slaves
frequently assumed that slavery was their status and also had no reason to ask
why they were captives either.

The concepts of murder, belief and captivity may all be cultural late-comers
and, while the arrangement of their relationships to other sentence parts may
be syntactic, their absence from animal speech might be explained by their
absence from relatively recent human speech.  What this may be is the absence of
human culture in animals, not the absence of language.  If communication is
acheived, then the difference is in what is communicated.

Most humans are definitely not good at telling others where the best pollen
is by doing a dance, or even by describing it verbally.  I have no idea which
flowers to go to in order to get the best pollen or how to tell others about
it.  Is that a language incompetency?

It seems to me that two jumps are being compressed into one here.  The
complexity of human speech -- and the use of syntax -- may allow us to communicate
more detail about more things.  But that is the advantage of the system, not of
being biologically human.  We really don't know what a human isolated from
the language of other humans can manage.

On the other hand, what allowed us to use such a complex system is a
different jump and a different question.

Steve Long