Is there a major objective difference between our species and every other animal?

[mistersloane]

language is a prerequisite for thought?

That's a great phrase, well put.

 

[Mr. Tea]

now this is extraordinarily unempirical. who knows what dogs can think? or are you one of these people who thinks language is a prerequisite for thought?

The perfectly empirical bit of that post is that dogs make different sounds depending on their mood, as do many other animals - while still other animals use visual displays, pheremone signals and so on. In fact dogs use all of these (as do humans, whether we realise it or not). The admittedly unempirical bit is my supposition that dogs' vocal sounds do not constitute verbal communication, and I would say that I think they probably don't, because the simplest explanation for their behaviour is that they don't. Why would a dog need 'words' for "hungry", "happy" etc. when it has at its disposal a set of easily understandable non-verbal signals, combining both sounds and other sensorial stimuli, to put across messages like "I'm hungry!", "I'm happy!" and so on?

Which leads to the next point: if dogs really did have a language in some way equivalent to a human langauge, then why should any two dogs that haven't grown up together in the same family or pack 'speak' the same language? Surely there would be many different canine languages, just as there are many different human langauges?
I don't know if anyone has ever done an experiment on this, but I bet two dogs that have never met could be shown to communicate just as easily with each other if they came from different parts of the world as if they came from very nearby (and would therefore, according to the dog-language hypothesis, 'speak' a similar dialect). Whereas a hypothetical alien anthropologist would be able to see that two humans behave very differently together when they speak a language in common than when they don't.

Edit: as for language being a prerequisite for thought...hmm, I'm not sure where I stand on that. Probably not a strict prerequisite, although I certainly think it helps facilitate it.

 

[IdleRich]

"as for language being a prerequisite for thought...hmm, I'm not sure where I stand on that. Probably not a strict prerequisite, although I certainly think it helps facilitate it."

This is a funny one. Presumably if you have absolutely no thought whatsoever you cannot develop a language but (not quite so uncontroversial but it seems reasonable to me that) if you have no language at all your thought is extremely limited. I can only guess that there is some of kind of push-pull relationship whereby a limited amount of thought allows you to develop some language which in turn allows you to expand the horizons of your thought and devise more language and so on. Does that seem plausible?

 

[Mr. Tea]

It would seem so, although probably more likely if you're talking about the evolution of a species over many generations, rather than the personal development of a single individual.

Fairly complex problem-solving behaviour - of the same sort of level that young kids typically achieve - has been demonstrated in some of the higher (non-human) animals, and I would certainly call this evidence of thinking. But if I'm trying so solve a problem (a strictly non-verbal one, e.g. not a crossword) I definitely find myself thinking "So if I put this bit here, I can attach it to that..." or whatever, so by verbalising thoughts I find it much easier to find solutions.

On the other hand, there are those irritating people who seem to have the ability to talk for hours without ever thinking about anything at all...

 

[IdleRich]

"It would seem so, although probably more likely if you're talking about the evolution of a species over many generations, rather than the personal development of a single individual."

Of course.

"Fairly complex problem-solving behaviour - of the same sort of level that young kids typically achieve - has been demonstrated in some of the higher (non-human) animals, and I would certainly call this evidence of thinking."

Perhaps I should have said "abstract thought".

 

[noel emits]

I seriously think language gets in the way of thought if anything.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Hmm?

I seriously think language gets in the way of thought if anything.

Uh-huh.

 

[noel emits]

Thought is limited if it is reduced to what is expressible lingually. It's also slow.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Yeah, I was just having a little joke by responding with non-words.

Edit: with hilarious consequences.

 

[IdleRich]

"I seriously think language gets in the way of thought if anything."

That may be the case at times but I can't believe that it is generally the case.

 

[noel emits]

Aha!

 

[nomadologist]

lots of people (linguists).

a word is a pair: a sound and a meaning. this relation is `arbitrary'; there is no relation b/t sound and symbol. dog sounds do not seem to have this property as MrT pointed out.

still, though they don't *seem* to us to have any content like words do, but this may be that we don't get what they mean. I guess this is possible.

but my point above about compositionality still stands. if complex signals are formed from simple bits, which maintain their original meanings, then dog communication is *qualitatively* the same as human communication. otherwise not. i.e. if the symbol A retains the same, identifiable meaning in

A B C [John likes Mary]

and

C B A [Mary likes John]

but the two strings have distinct meanings then we can say that the symbol has its own meaning, and the system has the compositionality property. otherwise not really.

I seriously doubt that the string bark-whine-yelp and the string yelp-whine-bark have substantially distinct meanings, no more than the human equivalent scream-squeal-gag and gag-squeal-scream have distinct meanings other than just the sequence. maybe I am just not imaginative enough I hope you see what I mean.

Still I am not totally convinced that this special property of humans---for it does seem to be that---makes us different from other species in a way that is qualitatively different than the differences between other species and all others.

I've never read any linguists who talk about other species communication.

You and Mr. Tea sound like Saussure-lite, and I wholly disagree with the assumption that language precedes thought. "Thought" is the illusion of self or consciousness produced by electrical impulses in a brain or nervous system of an animal.

Do you think babies don't "think" because they can't yet speak/don't yet have access to language? I think they can and do.

In birds, it is widely studied and well established that their own little "warble-yelp-warble" strings of sounds DO have meanings like "there is a predator in the bushes that is large"--which I don't see as being any more or less "complex" than Mary likes Jon.

 

[nomadologist]

http://runews.rockefeller.edu/index.php?page=engine&id=28

Now Rockefeller University scientists have found that zebra finches, songbirds native to Australia, use infant-like strategies to learn their song. Some finches focus on perfecting individual song components, referred to as "syllables," while others practice longer patterns called motifs. Which strategy they choose, or what combination of strategies, seems to depend on what their siblings are doing. In time, all are able to sing the same adult song.

The results, reported in the December 13 online issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are the first to show a social influence on how birds learn their song by analyzing song-learning with birds kept in family groups rather than in isolation chambers.

The Rockefeller team also shows for the first time that individual birds, of the same species, can follow different strategies to get to the same end point of singing the adult song. Until now, scientists thought that the vocal learning process in birds was mainly a matter of filling in details in a pre-existing developmental program. If so, then this program is, in zebra finches, a very flexible one.

"This research points to a remarkable parallel in vocal learning in infants and some songbirds," says senior author Fernando Nottebohm, Ph.D., Dorothea L. Leonhardt Professor and head of the Laboratory of Animal Behavior at Rockefeller.

"In both cases vocal learning seems to be approached as a challenge in problem solving," says Nottebohm, whose studies in canaries in the 1980s provided the first evidence of spontaneous neuronal replacement in the adult vertebrate brain.

A problem-solving approach may apply to other kinds of sensory motor learning beyond vocal learning, he added, suggesting that zebra finches may offer further insights into human learning.

"I find it amazing that something that infants, with brains weighing approximately 1,000 grams, do over a period of years can be accomplished, perhaps in a similar way, by young songbirds over a period of weeks, with brains weighing just 1 gram," says Nottebohm.

"Of course," he adds, "the diversity of sounds mastered by the young birds is much smaller, but all the same there is a remarkable parallel between what they do and the way in which humans acquire the sounds of language."

 

[noel emits]

I think a distinction should be made between communication (even if complex and subtle) and thought - what goes inside.

A bird may well be able to communicate situations such as a specific type of predator being in the area but is it really thinking to itself "oh there's one of those furry things with teeth, I'd better warn the others", or is it just a set response to a particular stimulus?

 

[noel emits]

I have a lot of time for animals but it is very easy to anthropomorphise erroneously as I think that is a basic pattern matching function of the human brain - like seeing faces in clouds or whatever.

 

[nomadologist]

I'm not saying any species has what you're calling "brain patterns" identical to humans, but how do you know animals don't have some sort of thought when they hear communications? It seems completely plausible to me that a bird would feel fear when they hear another bird tell them there's a predator coming, and perhaps even get some sort of mental image of what a predator looks like. How is that not "thought"?

 

[Mr. Tea]

I think a distinction should be made between communication (even if complex and subtle) and thought - what goes inside.

A bird may well be able to communicate situations such as a specific type of predator being in the area but is it really thinking to itself "oh there's one of those furry things with teeth, I'd better warn the others", or is it just a set response to a particular stimulus?

I think this is a very important distinction.
Whether or not the bird is acting purely on instinct - in which case, I suspect, the sound for a larger (and presumably more dangerous) predator would just be a louder or more urgent version of the sound for a smaller one - could be tested by seeing whether all birds of the same species have the same set of sounds for the same predator-hazard situations, or not. If they did, it would suggest it is a hard-wired instinctive response, and so obviously nothing remotely approaching a language. If not, and if it were provable that differences were inherited by learning rather than by genetics, that would go a long way towards suggesting a language-like response, but it still wouldn't prove that conceptual communication (as noel mentions) is happening.

Edit: nomad, you'll notice I haven't said I think language is a prerequisite for thought, just that it's likely to be a prerequisite for complex conceptual thought. And frea (in your example) is most definitely an emotion, rather than a thought, isn't it?

 

[nomadologist]

but is it really thinking to itself "oh there's one of those furry things with teeth, I'd better warn the others", or is it just a set response to a particular stimulus?

What makes you so certain human language isn't a set of responses to particular stimuli??

 

[nomadologist]

Why are you so intent on positing this false dichotomy between "instinct" and "language", Mr. Tea? Could language not be itself a human instinct?

 

[nomadologist]

Icould be tested by seeing whether all birds of the same species have the same set of sounds for the same predator-hazard situations, or not. If they did, it would suggest it is a hard-wired instinctive response, and so obviously nothing remotely approaching a language.

First, it has been tested, and different species of birds have different songs that communicate what humans call "linguistic" principles.

What about human language is not a "hard-wired instinctive response"? It's probably THE MOST hard-wired instinctive response in humans.