Apes, Language, and the Human Mind

Rating:
Summary: There's nothing 'personal' here!
Review: I wonder if the reader from Austin, Texas, read the same book as I did! I could find no trace of any personal attacks (nor personal glorifications, for that matter) in this highly original, provocative and exceptionally well-argued book. Interdisciplinary collaborations on complex themes are notoriously difficult to pull off, but this team has succeeded admirably. The philosophical analysis of the significance of the bonobo ape research for our currently dominant ways of thinking about language, communication and animal capacities is strikingly original. Certainly, these authors do not hold back from exploring the wider significance of their proposed interpretations, but there is a wealth of well-documented and rigorous argument here to support their contentions, and not a shred of evidence of -animus- against those whose views they dispute. A serious and significant book for everyone interested in animal cognition.

Rating:
Summary: Serious ideas packaged with a mean spirit.
Review: If you liked Savage-Rumbaugh's "Kanzi" stay away from this book. I don't mean that there is nothing interesting here. To the contrary, three smart people with interesting analyses of non-human thinking and linguistic abilities wrote the book. The first chapter is a charming and (typical of Savage-Rumbaugh) insightful discussion of life with Kanzi and research that has led to the powerful claims that Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues make based on Bonobo research. There are cute pictures and it displays little of the paranoia that permeates the rest of the book. The first chapter is exclusively written by Savage-Rumbaugh. The other chapters are, we are told, a joint effort. Chapter two is undoubtedly spearheaded by philosopher Stuart Shanker and chapter three by linguist Talbot Taylor. The final chapter bears stronger signs of all three. Each chapter takes a slightly different perspective and, if Oxford University Press had provided a competent editor, each c! hapter would have been a delight to read--full of focused and insightful commentary. But, lacking an editor with good sense, this was not to be.

The problems start in the philosophy chapter, but remain and grow throughout the subsequent chapters of the book. The first serious problem is the vilification of any opposition. It is not that the authors disagree with the opposition: they resort to name calling and mean-spirited denigration of anyone who does not simply accept Savage-Rumbaugh's work as revolutionary. Such skeptics are biased, anthropomorphic, dogmatic and, by the last chapter (entitled "Beyond Speciesism") ultimately bigotted (in its most evil sense). This final chapter is an interesting summary of arguments for language and mind in non-humans punctuated by a nasty and rambling accusation of the personal integrity of anyone who fails to appreciate the self-proclaimed paradigm shift created by Kanzi. This anger is so strange, too. While these people seem! to think that everyone is a convinced Cartesian, shocked b! y the possibility that non-humans can think, I don't seem to be able to find that tendency at all. With my students, the difficult part is getting them to see that there is any issue at all about animals having complex minds. Among academics, the issue of animal thought is treated quite seriously. The authors seem to think that it is simply stupid and disreputable to have any doubts at all. Kanzi has solved all the problems--case closed!

The second big problem is the personal glorification of Savage-Rumbaugh. The cover shows what appears to be Kanzi on a throne with Savage-Rumbaugh humbly kneeling to him. This is a misrepresentation of the contents of the book. This document is not an ode to Kanzi, but an outraged demand for glorification by Savage-Rumbaugh and a thoroughly uncritical acceptance of her superiority by her co-authors. There are not even any giants on whose back Savage-Rumbaugh has stood. She is simply the Einstein of the mind who has shattered the evil misconc! eptions of all who came before. Makes ya' a little jittery.

What is mystifying about the nasty parts of this book is how completely unnecessary they are. Although it would appear from their writing that Savage-Rumbaugh is being ignored, the truth is quite the opposite. Nearly every new book on language (and there are many) treats Kanzi seriously. Yes, Steve Pinker was dismissive, but he was more flippant than mean. Just get over it, y'all. This stuff, however, is just downright mean. Furthermore, it is not as if Savage-Rumbaugh is overly generous with her potential supporters. Her ridiculing of Roger Fouts and Washoe in the earlier "Kanzi" (with Washoe running back and forth on her little island randomly searching for an object as Fouts, like a total fool, claims she understands--real nice, Sue) is part of her general dismissal of all previous ape research. This is necessary, because Savage-Rumbaugh's line is that you can't have language if you don't start young ! and if you don't get it through comprehension (rather than! production). Washoe did it the wrong way--so, a priori, no language for him. In addition, her first chapter casts doubts on the ability of (non-Bonobo) chimpanzees to achieve the same heights as Kanzi. It's pretty much Kanzi (and sister Panbanisha) or nothing.

Scientifically, there is a problem here: Savage-Rumbaugh controls the data. It isn't her fault. In itself, it isn't wrong. It is a problem, though. Ape research is very restricted and the Georgia family controls the keys to the door. They only let their friends in (ever tried to get some videotape from them? Forget it.). Part of the allure of Chomsky's original linguistic analyses is that the data were stunningly democratic--use your own linguistic intuitions about sentences and watch your child grow up. Mainstream cognitive psychology has spent a generation questioning linguistic insight as adequate data and it has certainly NOT accepted a Cartesian or Chomskian line. For ape research, there is one path: study Savag! e-Rumbaugh and, it appears, don't ask questions. It is not surprising that her co-authors are neither scientists nor are they friendly to science at all. Hard questions are solved by a cult of personality and intellectual victories are won by name-calling. Science is, for them, the act of studying the sacred texts (and, perhaps wisely for them, staying away from those oversexed apes). They proclaim paradigm shifts and throw away the gains and procedures of a dynamic and living science--a science that has been very generous to Savage-Rumbaugh and made possible the clever methods whereby questions about mind and language can be creatively studied.

I wanted to like this book. I thoroughly enjoyed "Kanzi" and I have read the serious science part of the animal language research carefully and respectfully (including technical publications). But this book has made me question the motives of the Georgia researchers and their commitment to honest analysis. And it is reall! y too bad. The questions in the current language debate are! really so wonderful and the evidence is diverse and fascinating. In most cases, the ideas are being traded with a lively and constructive spirit. Just not in this book.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and Original
Review: This brilliant and original book demonstrates that symbolic representation is the basic substance of language, and shows once and for all that language is not an exclusively human achievement. Savage-Rumbaugh's serendipitous discovery that the critical period for language acquisition in bonobos is in early infancy renders all earlier language experimentation with apes obsolete. Contrary to Chomsky and Pinker, grammar is a high level embellishment to language, rather than the foundation of communicative skill. The philosophical commentaries on Savage-Rumbaugh's work by Shanker and Taylor bring out the revolutionary implications of her findings, and provide a new and more sophisticated point of view on the continuities and discontinuities between ourselves and our nearest relatives. It's good to see contemporary science finally replacing the 17th century perspective of many linguists.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and Original
Review: This brilliant and original book demonstrates that symbolic representation is the basic substance of language, and shows once and for all that language is not an exclusively human achievement. Savage-Rumbaugh's serendipitous discovery that the critical period for language acquisition in bonobos is in early infancy renders all earlier language experimentation with apes obsolete. Contrary to Chomsky and Pinker, grammar is a high level embellishment to language, rather than the foundation of communicative skill. The philosophical commentaries on Savage-Rumbaugh's work by Shanker and Taylor bring out the revolutionary implications of her findings, and provide a new and more sophisticated point of view on the continuities and discontinuities between ourselves and our nearest relatives. It's good to see contemporary science finally replacing the 17th century perspective of many linguists.

Rating:
Summary: thought-provoking and compelling
Review: This is a rewarding book, especially in its middle two chapters. After the scene-setting of ch. 1, in which we learn just what the Bonobo ape Kanzi can do as far as communicating with a human is concerned, ch. 2 gives us a protracted survey of the Cartesian tradition of thinking about the 'mental' and hence communicative lives of animals, showing the degree to which writers like Pinker, and indeed many of us, are, largely due to an outmoded view of ourselves, caught up in a fallacy about the status of animals vis-à-vis humans which needs to be replaced with a saner outlook. In ch. 3 we are given an insight into the rhetorical strategies of those who perpetuate the Cartesian view, and shown to what extent such strategies may be motivated less by a search for truth than by the socio-politico-economic imperative of our exploitation of the animal world. The authors then proceed to show that arguments which have been used to bolster the 'existential gap' view in fact are incapable of supporting the notion that humans themselves have the exclusive and proprietary capacities which Cartesian thinkers have attributed to them. That is, (a) the evidence which such thinkers use purportedly to prove the existence of various capacities in humans is shown to be equally in evidence in at least one kind of animal, but (b) the evidence which is used purportedly to disprove these capacities in animals is shown in fact to be inadequate to prove the existence of those capacities in humans. In other words, as is further suggested in the final chapter, we have no logical or evidential basis for maintaining the Cartesian view, and the implications for our own human behavior are accordingly far-reaching.