Joan Warmbold wrote: > I appreciate Chris Green's comments on my "warm and bold" statements > regarding Washoe. Did I? > As a side-bar, I so wish that many of you would read this book!! I mean, > come on, it's written by a scientific academic colleague (Roger is an > experimental psychologist) who has spent his life-time working with Washoe > and her foster children and their use of sign language. I must confess that I have not read Fouts' book. When I was interested in this topic, I paid much more attention to Kanzi and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (partly because one of my philosopher colleagues here at York worked with them for a while, and so he was the one on whom I honed my opinions of this topic). The problem appears to be that even the most rigorous studies of ape language never seem to disentangle syntax from pragmatics. For instance, if you asked Kanzi to put the keys in the fridge, he would do it. But so would any creature that could understand he symbols for "keys" "fridge" and "in." You don't need syntax. There is only one way that keys, fridges, and "in" can *practically* go together. I always wanted to know what would happen if you told Kanzi to put the fridge in the keys. Would he freeze and look at you funny, like any human over the age of three would? Or would he happily put the keys in the fridge? Actually, there is a book by Joel Wallman called /Aping Language/ (1992) that went through the Kanzi protocols, picking out the very small number of sentences that were not pragmatically constrained in this way. His conclusion was that Kanzi's behavior was essentially random in such instances.
Thus, like Chomsky, I have no doubt that these are very smart animals who can acquire a small set of lexical symbols, and will figure out what you want them to do as best they can. But do they have our innate capacity to abduce grammar from the linguistic environment around us? Not a chance. Or, to use my favorite of Chomsky's analogies: Can humans fly? Yes, in fact at every Olympic Games humans fly about the same distance your average chicken can fly. We call it the Long Jump. But the mechanisms by which humans and chickens "fly" are so wildly different that it makes almost no sense to even pose the question. Chickens, inept as they are, fly in essentially the same way that eagles do. Humans, on the other hand, use their quite different abilities to reach approximately the same level of achievement as a low-level bird, but it makes little sense to call it flying. Mutatis Mutandis for chimps and language. If you happen to care what I think about all this in more detail, have a look at a 1997 chapter a wrote with John Vervaeke called "But What Have You Done for Us Lately?: Some Recent Perspectives on Linguistic Nativism" at http://www.yorku.ca/christo/papers/innate.htm Regards, Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-5115 ex. 66164 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ====================================== ---
