Discourse and gibbons

[P. Kerim Friedman]

I don't want to start a trend of dog stories ... But my mom's dog practices
deception by pretending to pee on something in order to stall for time while
another dog approaches. He knows that we want to get to the park, but he
wants to "greet" the other dog, and he knows that peeing is the only task he
is allowed to do on the way to the park. So - one leg up and wait!

Don't know if it is discourse or not, but it sure is smart!

The main point I wanted to make was really a simple one: While I agree with
Celso that we should be careful about maintaining definitions and not
applying terms like "discourse" to animal communication that doesn't seem to
share certain features. But, I do think we should also be careful about
equating "agency" with "language". Just because animals don't talk, and
don't code-switch, doesn't mean that they don't have higher-order cognitive
functions (planning, deception, etc.). The complexity of primate social life
is clear enough to anyone who has studied it, complete with politics, love
affairs, retribution, etc. It would take a hard core David Hume empiricist
to deny the complexity of these behaviors and the higher-order mental
functions involved. But that doesn't mean that they have language or
discourse. And it is also important to realize that a lot of linguistic
behavior in humans is little more than the functional equivalent of beating
one's chest. Look at Bush! Oh, and even David Hume said: "Even a dog knows
the difference between being tripped over and getting kicked." (Sorry I
don't have the exact citation. He was using it as a negative example, but I
think it works great the other way.)

A more interesting question (for me) is why we believe that
language=thought. This book sheds a lot of light on the topic:

Lee, Benjamin. Talking Heads : Language, Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of
Subjectivity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

I highly recommend it! (No time now to summarize its main argument, sorry.)

kerim