baboons ability seems language-like - devil in the like

[Celso Alvarez Cáccamo]

Peter Patrick wrote:

At 14:27 15-10-2007 +0100, Patrick, Peter L wrote:
>It seems to me that what is going on with the baboons is still not (very) 
>linguistic, and involves not sentences but rather adjacency pairs. Though 
>familiar from CA, these need not necessarily involve language - lots of 
>interactional things we do could be classified as adjacency pairs w/o 
>having speech occur.

Yes, but perhaps not ;-).  As you know, the relationship between the two 
parts of an adjacency pair is not causal, as it is in an stimulus-response 
pair. Rather, it works by virtue of preference organization, which arises 
from the 'projection' of the first part toward a preferred second part. But 
as far as we know baboons don't have displacement, so they cannot decide 
NOT to utter the second part, or to postpone it, or to produce an ironic 
one, or... From what I understand, in the baboon world, once the 
hierarchical relationship between two individuals is established, a threat 
call is an index of that relationship, and a fear scream is, too. So, 
baboons are surprised as if they suddenly heard a scream of pain in a 
healthy individual and immediately AFTER they saw a big rock falling on its 
leg. As the authors say, in their experiment, baboons establish a causal 
relationship between the two events, and they perceive there's a strange 
reversal of the natural order.

But there are two elements in this supposed "adjacency pair": "speech act", 
and "speaker's identity". The problem with interpreting the 
Threat-by-Subordinate-Individual => Fear-Scream-by-Dominant-Individual 
sequence in terms of preference organization is to determine what exactly 
is reversed or altered: whether (a) the "illocutionary force signalling 
device" of the second turn (which the authors curiously lump together with 
social relationships etc. into "propositional information"), that is, the 
call type itself, or (b) the identity of the speaker (the 'I hereby' part), 
which is indicated by the indexical voice quality that identifies a 
dominant individual when it naturally should be the voice of a more 
subordinate one -- in Austin's terms, one of the "felicity conditions" 
fails: that the speaker be the right one or have the right identity.

So, we don't know what specifically surprises baboons in this experiment. 
But if we humans hear a comparable sequence (say, president Evo Morales 
threatens president Bush with an invasion and president Bush screams with 
fear, with all my respect for Morales), we understand that there's more 
going on there: either Bush is being ironic, or Morales is speaking on 
behalf of the entire world except the USA in the UN, or we expect yet a 
third turn, or we understand both turns are FIRST parts of different pairs 
and expect the completion of both perhaps by other individuals, or we think 
we have missed some previous turn (say, that Bush had first threatened 
Morales and Morales retorted with another, face-saving threat), or Bush has 
chosen to interpret Morales' turn, whatever it said, as a real threat in 
order to invade Bolivia (remember Grenada?, Iraq?, Vietnam?, will we see it 
in Iran?...), etc. etc. Which interpretation to take would depend on a 
large number of contextual factors.

So, it is preference organization, not causality, that underlies the 
production of adjacency pairs, because these are "normative practices", 
aren't they?  And social normative practices cannot be understood without 
dettachment-from-stimulus, prevarication, intentionality, that is, the 
ability to choose and to deceive in communication. And as far as we know, 
baboons don't choose their responses, do they?  If baboons chose their 
responses, we could argue that their surprise in this experiment was a 
surprise toward the second baboon's choice, and that they do "parse" 
sequential organization.

I don't think this experiment proves that baboons have pragmatics, as 
Janina Fenigsen argues. It seems to show they have a sense of causality, 
yes, which the authors themselves mention.

-celso
Celso Alvarez Cáccamo