You see a difference of kind where I see one merely of degree, and your confidence in the sufficient extent of knowledge of nonhuman language and communication, to draw such clear delineations as you do, strikes me as unwarranted. It is a relatively recent innovation in modern understanding even to recognize that any animals beyond our own species have language; where come you by this idea that we know enough about how nonhuman language works to even attempt so broad a conclusion? - or, for that matter, even enough about how human language works? Anyone who's ever tried to explain a complex idea to someone and have them comprehend it, or tried to become a polyglot beyond the age of about ten, should have a better sense of our own limitations than you evince here.
I'm saying that perhaps with the exception of dolphins and mayyyyybe chimps, there is a measurable, observable, quantifiable way in which animal communication is fundamentally different from human language.
So, perhaps you can say that dolphins speak, and maybe chimps speak, and then we can even contemplate that bonobos speak (since they are very similar to chimps, but haven't been studied as much).
But dogs definitely don't speak, and neither do any other mammals that we've tried to test in this way.
Not to mention, there is another characteristic of human language that 0 animals can be taught, as far as we've tried - more complex structure, like "not (c and d)"
I suppose it's a bit like the question of whether non-human animals have "language": they do, in a sense, but it's rather different from human language.
Sure, but even then isn't that making an assumption that animals have the same capacity for communication that we do?
Let me try and explain; I don't speak Spanish, but if I had teach a 7 year old who only knew Spanish, presumably I, as a human, could learn Spanish and then teach the 7 year old whatever I needed to.
I'm not sure there's an equivalent "crow" language that is even possible for anyone to learn, at least in the same way that humans have language. I know that animals "communicate" in some senses with mating calls and the like, but I don't think they have anything even approaching "grammar" and "syntax".
But I suppose if you're going on a deeper level, if you had some way of directly communicating with a crow (like beaming information directly into their brain already translated in a form that they could understand), I still don't know that you could teach them that money equivalence analogy I used.
Again, I'm speaking out of my ass here, I don't know anything about this stuff, just spitballing.
The "entirely different" part is about specific claims about language.
There are many different ways animals are able to communicate with each other, and with humans. Sounds, gestures, songs, body language, scents, and so on.
They can get quite creative, they can be used to communicate emotion, they can indicate that the animals have some sense for the mental state of who they are communicating with, and so on. Almost all of this is fairly obvious to anyone who's ever owned a pet (though there are plenty of cases in which there can be some subjective bias there, so it can be good to devise better tests if you're really skeptical).
But none of them have been demonstrated to have the arbitrarily complex, abstract, compositional nature that human language does; in which a finite (but large) set of words or signs can be strung together in arbitrarily complex ways, allowing a countably infinite number of different ideas to be potentially conveyed.
This is qualitatively different than any other communication method that has been demonstrated in other animals.
There's no dogma about it; it's just something that is unique to humans, as far as we know, just like the amazing ability to manipulate skin color and texture is something that's unique to cuttlefish. There are some things that certain kinds of animals can do that other kinds of animals can't, like flight, breathing via water or air, producing venoms, and so on.
It would be a pretty big scientific breakthrough to discover that there was some mammal that could change its skin like cuttlefish, or to discover that a mammal could be trained to breath water.
Likewise, discovering that non-human animal can learn a human-like language, with its arbitrary complexity through compositionality and ability to express abstract thought, is a pretty big claim too. The problem is, some people make this claim, without sufficient evidence to back it up.
"non-human animals are widely known to have language". I remember reading years ago about Koko the gorilla being taught sign language, but that Koko was incapable of seeing the sign for 'fire' without having a fear response. McCarthy didn't spell it out in the article more than to say:
"The simple understanding that one thing can be another thing is at the root of all things of our doing. From using colored pebbles for the trading of goats to art and language and on to using symbolic marks to represent pieces of the world too small to see."
I infer from this that a more sophisticated (or, in your words, specialized) definition of language that is of interest to McCarthy includes abstraction. I can talk about fire without arousing fear in a fellow human because they understand I'm not announcing the immediate presence of fire, I'm talking about it abstractly. As far as I know, no non-human animals are known to have the ability.
You are proving by extrapolation. That's no good when we want to use it to gauge whether animals have language. That line of argument will work only for humans.
I used Sentinelese just as an example to bring out the fact that we would jump to the conclusion that they have a language just because they are human.
Prove to me that Sentinelese have language without extrapolating. That is prove it without using "all humans have language. Sentinelese are human. Therefore Sentinelese have language". Nothing wrong with that line of reasoning, but its limited in scope.
I am asking for specification of a scientific experiment that can be used to check with acceptable false positives and false negatives whether someone/something has a language that can work beyond the human species. From your tone of authority it should be a piece of cake for you.
It's very clear that language use is occurring. A recent video shows the owner on the phone with the vet, and when she says "come in to express the anal glands" Bunny immediately gets up and uses the "no" button.
Another dog, while its owner is blowdrying her hair, presses the "wet" and then "dry" buttons.
Otter, Bunny's brother dog, learns the context of words from her, and they use words to each other, with clear, contextual meaning. They express humor, sadness, anger, frustration, empathy, caring, happiness, apathy, excitement, and more.
Their grammar is limited, the processing they can do is slower and on a smaller scope than humans. They definitely lack the breadth and depth of human cognition, but I can't understand how, given the overwhelming evidence of deliberate use of language in complex, nuanced, abstract, emotional, contextually relevant ways, people insist that "well that's not what they're doing!"
I think it's very likely that any and every mammal with a brain above a certain size will be able to use language, given the appropriate tools for it.
People are quick to point out the story of Clever Hans, but I think that story is worth revisiting. There's a very powerful bias for people to hold humans above other animals as somehow intrinsically special, fundamentally different from all other creatures, and language use being somehow unique to humanity seems to be one of the most stubbornly held beliefs.
I think we have language because we have vocal cords, complex mouths, opposable thumbs, fingers, and very large primate brains with a proportionally massive neocortex.
Take away the hands and we lose tool use, and probably can't develop culture, and so never develop language or complex vocalization, and never garner the benefits of those things. Take away culture and you have humans living in feral conditions. Modern studies of language deprivation, children raised in feral conditions, and other situations show us that it looks like some humans lose the ability to learn language past a certain age under those conditions.
Take away the effective mouth and vocal cords of human biology, and we may never have developed spoken language, but would likely have developed signing and nonvocal audible communication methods, and then developed culture around that.
So knowing that, when you take another look at the talking dogs with buttons, it's worth considering that up until a few years ago, people had essentially raised their pets in the absence of culture. No efforts were made to teach them language in the context they'd be able to handle. They didn't have tools that served as vocalization, limiting their effective vocabulary to bark, howl, sneeze, and whimper. Some dogs, through care and exposure, were seen as exceptional if they picked up words through context and repetition, like toy names and so forth.
If a standardized vocabulary was made available, with a repeatable training framework for dogs and cats, we give them what amounts to a culture prosthetic, and buttons give them a replacement for mouths and vocal cords.
It shouldn't be unreasonable or even particularly shocking to consider animals with brains similar to our own being capable of language use.
Imagine the conversations you could have with an orca trained to use buttons, or a pig, cow, bear, lion, or whatever your favorite mammal is.
I think we need to be much more open minded, not overly skeptical, and stop trying to find ways of insisting on human exceptionalism. It might help us learn more about how language and cognition work, and what it is about human brains that gives us such an apparent edge. Or maybe that edge isn't as significant as we think?
I’m referring to the fact that non-human animals are widely known to have language, and that the only way the quote could make sense is some specialized meaning of language that wasn’t specified.
Yes, I elided that bit, in the aim of brevity. I think there is a difference between human language and animal languages, in that human language is "creative" - we can freely create new utterances with new meanings, and expect to be understood. We know this of human language, but I would be very interested to learn of evidence of it in other species (chimps come close).
> For a while, we thought it was language and then discovered that it wasn't.
When did this happen? I only studied linguistics at the undergrad level, but as of about 5 years ago, animal language has not made it there other than some examples of 'here are some non-human communication systems, and this is of they differ from language'.
It is not plausible to say that linguists are simply too egotistical to consider the possibility. Scientists in general love animal models. Plenty of linguists would jump at the chance to conduct experiments that are way too unethical to do with human subjects.
There is some promising research into whale songs which might turn out to be analgous. However, as far as I have been able to find, our understanding there is still largely speculative.
From my point of view, you're the one putting forward an unclear statement. I understand what the author is saying clearly ("only humans developed language"), regardless of whether I agree or not. I can't guess what you're referring to, though. Are you referring to non-human animals, to the different species of human in prehistory, or both? What kind of communication are you considering to be language? I may even agree with you, but your tone seems unnecessarily hostile.
You're mixing the ideas of communication and language.
Communication is not language. Language is a type of communication. Language involves the use of symbols in a grammar that is sufficiently complex enough to facilitate recursive structures of arbitrary length.
I think it is likely that many animals like birds, cetaceans and elephants can use language and that it is possible that some dogs and cats can too but your example of a dog understanding that the word walk correlates to going for a walk is not an example of a dog being able to grasp human language.
My mom has Shelties which are a disconcertingly smart herding dog. I've witnessed one of her dogs overhearing relatively complex sentences, pausing to parse them, and then acting on the in away that indicates that they understand not just the correlation between subjects and objects but also the conditional logic in the sentence.
Yes, I'm well aware of the language abilities of other animals. (I'm a retired AI researcher with a Ph.D.) Animals are quite remarkable, but there is still an enormous gulf between them and us. A human child can learn any human language and form complex sentences well before age 2. Well before age 5 they can reason abstractly about cause and effect. No other animal gets close to that ability over their entire lifetime even with intense training.
This is most accurate top-level comment on the page. I once TAed an animal cognition class for Herb Terrace of Nim Chimpsky fame (or infamy), and I can say, we have yet to demonstrate any non-human language use.
Non-human communication is common, but language is different, and requires syntax. Syntax (plus vocabulary) is what enables you to meaningfully say a sentence you've never spoken before, and for another person to understand a sentence they've never heard before.
If you look at the corpuses of non-human communication, they're incredibly small compared to humans. A meercat has a few distinct vocalizations to warn their group depending on the type of a predator, but they can be counted on one hand. A songbird's song is ballistic once learned; it will never vary, even if they go deaf.
> or communicate with each other in a manner more complex than what we hear as a bark or a chirp.
If you're suggesting the supernatural, that's just silly. If you're suggesting linguists have been missing the bit between the formants all this time, I'm pretty sure the literature stands in opposibtion.
> How do we know they aren't communicating concepts as complicated as "Be careful there is a human approaching and it looks dangerous." with one syllable?
Because we already understand the difference between various and sundry monkey calls. In one group, one shriek means a particular ground based predator, and a doubled shriek means a particular air/tree based predator. There's no (physical) room for the nuance you seek to impute.
> If you look at trends in human communication, across all languages, then you'll find syllable reduction increases as the word frequency increases.
And yet, all those other words stick around, and we don't fall into monosyllabic speech. And yet, from monosyllabic "speech" of animals, you jump into advanced consciousness.
It's not the case that we don't understand animal communication. Very simple hypotheses explain a great deal of animal communication. Compare this to quantum physics, some bit of it that we don't yet understand, and see where the difference is found.
> I don't know any animal, other than humans, that will kill another animal just for the sheer pleasure of it.
How do you measure animal pleasure? Have you studied the motivations for chimps killing other chimps? Have you examined why bulldogs attack children, or perhaps, why dingos eat babies? Aside from the fact that you stacked the question to favor your presupposed answer, the "I don't know" defense doesn't hold when you don't seem to have done any research.
(Ever watch a cat play with a mouse? Seems pretty fun. This is not an argument for an advanced cat consciousness.)
I'm sure De Waal addresses this in more detail in his book, but the omission is perhaps less glaring and capable of destroying the entire argument as you present it to be.
Although it is clear that human language is unique and appears much more developed than any animal communication system observed in nature, no one knows what exactly property of language makes it unique. Indeed, infinite use of finite means, or syntactic structure are often put forward as candidates but syntax and generativity have also been observed in bird song. We simply don't know what the defining feature is that sets language apart from animal communication systems.
Similarly, we can't identify the unique cognitive ability that differentiates us from other animals. Since, as De Waal points out, humans are genetically speaking very close to our nearest sibling species, and we simply don't understand what precisely makes us cognitively different from, say Bonobos, the standard assumption should not be that we're somehow gifted with very special cognitive abilities, but that animal cognition is much more similar to our own cognition than is often assumed. Rather than studying where animal cognition, especially in genetically related species, resembles human cognition, we should be studying where it differs from human cognition.
Keep in mind that anatomically modern humans have only been around for two hundred thousand years, and the explosion of human culture only happened around ten thousand years ago. Not a lot of time for massive evolutionary changes.
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