At 9:07 AM -0600 11/5/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >In the light of the passing of Alex the thinking parrot and Washoe the >talking chimp (and since when did the New York Times start writing >obituaries for animals, anyway?), and (I seem to recall) Joan Warmbold's >warm and bold endorsement of their keepers' claims, I offer the following >recent on-line piece as a counter opinion: > >e-Skeptic newsletter >Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 >Aping Language: A skeptical analysis of the evidence for nonhuman primate >language > >by Clive Wynne >http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-10-31.html#feature
Sure that it's not (in the words of PDQ Bach (Peter Schickele) a bargain counter opinion? As I had anticipated, the article leans heavily on Herb Terrace's book NIM. Some background: Terrace didn't sour on ape language until after his funding for the NIM project suffered nonrenewal. He started questioning the ape language work after he was unable to continue his participation in it. Further, Nim's (his chimp subject) verbal progress has been criticized (sorry, no citation, it's been a long time) as more limited than usual because much of the training was done by students who had a high rate of turnover. Not a good situation for teaching language to anyone. Of course his criticisms of Washoe, Kanzi, et al could still be valid, but it puts them in context. A more general criticism: I'd like to see skeptics apply the same criteria to human behavior as they do to nonhuman. How many humans can be said to 'understand' grammar (define 'understand)? Think of your students! How many of the supposed qualitative differences between chimp and human language behavior boil down to an assumption that certain cognitive processes are involved in human behavior because it's human behavior? This is where skepticism comes in. Hank Schlinger has been fighting this battle in Skeptic magazine. No question that human behavior is vastly more complex than ape, but the parsimonious assumption should be that this difference is quantitative until proven otherwise. There is some interesting data on possible emergent processes in human language behavior in the behavioral literature (see equivalence class formation and relational framing) -- we're still trying to sort out whether these phenomena can be derived from basic operant conditioning principles common to all animals, or whether they constitute a true instance of an emergent phenomenon. I'm still waiting for a convincing demonstration that the structures of human brains differ from those of nonhuman primates in other than extent. Function is a more difficult question; there's the problem of demonstrating that functional (MRI) differences are causes of behavioral differences rather than effects of them. Since no one I know denies that behavior is mediated by the brain one would expect differences in brain and behavior to be correlated. -- The best argument against Intelligent Design is that fact that people believe in it. * PAUL K. BRANDON [EMAIL PROTECTED] * * Psychology Dept Minnesota State University * * 23 Armstrong Hall, Mankato, MN 56001 ph 507-389-6217 * * http://krypton.mnsu.edu/~pkbrando/ * ---
