primate communication?

[Mike Salovesh]

Ronald Kephart wrote:
>
> on 11/7/02 9:54 AM, Valentina Pagliai wrote:
>
> > ... As for "discourse," I think the interesting discourse here (which is
> > becoming dominant in the US) is one that accepts cross-species comparisons.
>
> For the record, do you think such comparisons are valid, or not? Just
> wondering...

Ron:

Strange: I don't understand your question. These comparisons don't seem
to be of the same kind as Lewis Carroll's (apparently) unanswerable "Why
is a raven like a writing desk?"

Here are some possible comparative questions:

1) Do freshly-washed chimps and gibbons smell the same or are they
different?

2) Which smell better, chimps or gibbons?

3) Which species is more likely to have a soul, chimps or gibbons?

4) What do chimp and gibbon calls have in common with human speech?

And so on.  1 is open to direct empirical test. 2 might produce a
reasonable comparison of *human* expressions of preference, but probably
wouldn't tell us much about chimps or gibbons.  3 is not likely (!) to
produce empirically verifiable data about non-humans.  And I tried to
express 4 as a valid comparative question -- allowing for the
possibility that the answer might be "nothing".

In the context of scientifically valid comparison, 3 is a no-starter. I
can see how one or another of the remaining questions could be regarded
as uninteresting or useless or just plain irrelevant, but I don't see
any a priori means of deciding whether the comparisons could be valid.
For what purpose?

The late George Trager and I had a three-year running "debate" (or
interchange, or argument, or amusing way of passing the time). Whenever
we had nothing much else to do, we'd talk about non-human primates and
language. George tended to call any such comparative view "monkey
business". Like someone we both know from another email list, he would
say "Language is defined as a human communication system. Apes ain't
human. QED." I'd turn the question around and ask "Is there anything we
humans can teach apes that bears legitimate comparison with the features
of human speech? If so, what? If not, what does that tell us about
capacity for speech and/or language?"

Obviously, if George had been adamant about his axiomatic restriction of
language to humans our interchange would have stopped as soon as he
declared his belief. In our interchange, we had the most fun considering
the ramifications of cross-species teaching: IF we could teach apes to
do some kind of languaging, but apes do not transmit the behavior to
other apes without direct human intervention, what have we learned? What
if they DO transmit the behavior in their own species without further
human teaching?

The process of comparison, per se, can only be invalid if you try to
compare things that are inherently incommensurable. When you ask whether
Valentina Pagliai thinks cross-species comparisons are valid, are you
really asking whether she (or anybody else) thinks species are each
according to its kind, hence it is impossible to compare them? Or did
you have some specific category of comparisons in mind? Are you really
looking for somebody to repeat what George Trager took as axiomatic?

--  mike salovesh     <m-salovesh-9 at alumni.uchicago.edu>     PEACE !!!