What makes homo sapiens "human"?

Firstly I'm not sure how you can claim that language-using animals never use abstraction when language itself is abstraction.Moreover a google search on "animal language" turned up some illuminating examples:

quote:

---

The New York Times
June 6, 1995, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final

​

Chimp Talk Debate: Is It Really Language?

​

By George Johnson

​

PANBANISHA, a Bonobo chimpanzee who has become something of a star among animal language researchers, was strolling through the Georgia woods with a group of her fellow primates -- scientists at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Suddenly, the chimp pulled one of them aside. Grabbing a special keyboard of the kind used to teach severely retarded children to communicate, she repeatedly pressed three symbols -- "Fight," "Mad," "Austin" -- in various combinations.

​

Austin is the name of another chimpanzee at the center. Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, one of Panbanisha's trainers, asked, "Was there a fight at Austin's house?"

---

from No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.santafe.edu/~johnson/articles.chimp.html"Mad"? That sure sounds pretty abstract to me.The researcher in the article goes on to criticize linguists for ignoring developments in animals that they recognize as language precursors in human children. It sounds a little like some of that is going on here.Humans have an amazing affinity towards making and speaking languages. Languages have an amazing ability to be spread from brain to brain. I don't think it's outrageous to suggest that an animal brain can learn to use language, since brains can learn to do just about anything given enough training. Steven Pinker suggested that so-called "animal language" is nothing more than the animal learning which buttons to press to get the funny hairless apes to give out M&M's, but there's really little evidence that human language is any different.

There's a difference, though, between being capable of language and having language.Nobody would argue that an average human is without the capability for language. But if you take that human and raise them without language, guess what? They don't learn a language.After a certain age they never really pick up language - for instance they never use it for the abstract ideas you're talking about.That suggests some very meaningful things to me, like that language is not an inherent ability of the human brain, but rather, a capability of brains in general for which the human brain has evolved to be especially proficient at.Animals may not come up with languages on their own, but humans usually don't, either. But chimpanzees who have been taught human language have been observed teaching it to others in the wild. So it spreads from brain to brain. I don't think that the fact that humans thought of language first, or have a brain specifically adapted to it, is an unbridgable gap - no more than a brid's wings, specifically adapted for flight, constitute an unbridgable gap.

No, but language is abstraction. Abstraction is the assoication of lexical objects with physical ones - like names.Names are an abstraction. If animals are using names, then they're using abstraction.

As an emotion, it's certainly "considered apart from concrete existence." "Mad" is certainly abstract."Concrete" are objects that exist in space. You are a concrete object, as am I. "Humanity" is not, because it's "Thought of or stated without reference to a specific instance".Now that we've got that little grammar primer out of the way... Does your dog bark "about" being mad when he's not? Being able to recognize emotional states in other entities is an example of abstract thinking. Your dog takes certain actions when he's mad, but he doesn't make reference to the emotion itself - he has no concept of the temporal nature of emotions. (As far as we know.) You may not have read closely enough. The chimp in question (Panbanisha) was not communicating her own emotional state, but that of another. That's abstract thought and additionally, one of the precursors of consciousness - the ability to form a "theory of self", a mental ability to percieve other individuals as having the same internal faculties (personal narrative, emotional state) as yourself. It's the difference between your dog ringing the bells when he wants to go outside and your dog ringing the bells when he knows another dog wants to go outside. It's the ability to think of others as having the same emotional and mental life that you do.

No, but if he understands another's name, and uses it to reference the other thing, that's abstract thought.I have two cats with different names. To my cats, one name means "high likelyhood of food" and the other means "low likelyhood of food" and none of the other sounds of speech have much meaning for them. That's what it means to recognize names without abstract thought.

Well hell, how about all the times that humans have communicated nonsense, or failed to be interpreted correctly? Does that mean no human can communicate?If you can train a chimp, behaviorally, to go through all the motions of language to such a degree that they appear intelligent, how do I know the same isn't true for you? How do I know that Custard is "really" capable of abstract thought, and not simply the result of very good training?Isn't that what we do to babies? Train them for language, behaviorally? How do we know that all human beings aren't simply "dogs doing tricks"?We're in some pretty deep philosophical waters, now, and at this point, we're talking about what constitutes intelligence. It's like the Turing test for AI in computers - if a computer can convince a human interoggator that it is intelligent in enough situations, isn't it? If that's not sufficient, how do I know that any human is intelligent?This message has been edited by crashfrog, 06-29-2004 12:55 AM

I humbly, and without guile or malice, suggest that you did, too.

No, that's abstract thought, too. Learning that one word can refer to a set of many words is abstract thought. Well, there's nothing to indicate that any human but me is aware of the difference. Presumably because that chimp has used that to mean "yes" before. When someone nods in response to your questions, why do you take it to mean "yes"? When a chimp is observed using words which don't refer to objects or actions, that's the most likely conclusion. And I felt the researcher adequately addressed those critics - she pointed out, as I said in my post, that they were simply ignoring behaviors in chimps that are considered precursors to language in humans. I find their criticism to be a double standard, and therefore I don't assign a lot of validity to it. And it has better rebuttals to those arguments than anything I can offer. I'm not saying that the question is definitively answered. But it's a duplicitous double standard to simply dismiss the notion that these chimps are actually learning language. The question is far from settled, but you and the critics seem determined to move the goal posts whenever a chimp (or whatever) gets a little closer.

Or, say, what it meant to have color? Or what it meant to be a number? That sort of thought?

quote:

---

Dr. Pepperberg, listing Alex's accomplishments, said he could identify 50 different objects and recognize quantities up to 6; that he could distinguish 7 colors and 5 shapes, and understand "bigger," "smaller," "same" and "different," and that he was learning the concepts of "over" and "under." Hold a tray of different shapes and colored objects in front of him, as Dr. Pepperberg was doing the other day as a reporter watched, and he can distinguish an object by its color, shape and the material it is made of. (Dr. Pepperberg said she frequently changed objects to make sure Alex wasn't just memorizing things and that she structured experiments to avoid involuntary cues from his examiner).

---

from Does Alex, an African Gray parrot, think?Learning to recognize relationships between objects, like "over" or "under", and apply them to different objects, is abstract thought.I'm not saying that Alex the Parrot settles the issue. But to simply dismiss the evidence because you don't like the outcome is just plain bad science.

Alex the parrot knows what things are made of. He can count.The recognition that "peach" is a kind of "fruit" is thinking in sets (ala the peach is a member of the set "fruit", while "table" is not). Alex the parrot can think in sets.Again you haven't presented an example of anything that is fundamentally different than what animals can do.

Well, most people have a problem with that concept, which suggests to me that that's a complex situation of abstract reasoning, not the simplest fundamental case of it. I'm not saying that animals have a human-scale ability to address abstract concepts. I'm saying that fundamentally, there is no barrier to an animal communicating and thinking about abstract concepts.Look, if you raise a human without language, they have exactly the same problems with abstraction that you've described. That suggests to me that the crucial factor is language exposure, not some "organ of abstraction" found in the human brain. Yes, it is. Relationships are abstraction. Disagree? Show me under. Not something under something else. Just under.The ability to generalize a relationship from a specific arrangement of objects is abstraction. Dr. Terrence makes claims in the article but no support is given. I wouldn't consider that valid criticism. Oh, right. They use the elements of language, in the way that language is used and for the same purpose that language is used, but they're not using language, because we know animals don't use language.Absolutely, perfectly circular. You claim that animals can't use language, and you rebut each counterexample as mere imitation of language, which you're able to conclude because you know animals don't use language. Humans can get into an airplane and fly across the globe. The same principle lifts birds into the air. Are those the same thing? Of course not. Are they fundamentally the same kind of flight? They are indeed.Oh, were you ever going to explain to me how I know anybody but me actually uses language, and not simply its elements? I'm not asking that to be an asshole or tell you you don't know how to speak. I'm trying to see what you believe the fundamental difference is between using "genuine" language and simply its exact elements, grammar, and context.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 06-29-2004 02:57 AM

No, he described what the bird was thinking (or rather what it was not thinking). The article desacribes what the bird was doing - assigning the right number to objects presented to it, making the right noise according to the material.But making an assertion about what's going on in the bird's head when he's doing that is a claim that requires some proof, and none was provided in the article. It's not a great article for either side, but it's an example of a bird doing things that you said it couldn't - give right answers when interrogated about abstract concepts. Well, I'm glad you agree, but it sort of confused me when we had this exchange: No, of course it's not. But if an animal could accurately report which objects were on the other objects, for any conciveable object, that would be a conception of "on".Just like how I know you know what "on" means; you're able to recognize an "on" relationship regardless of which specific objects are used. And I did say that the matter is far from settled. But there is very suggestive evidence that animals are capable of rudimentary abstraction. Certainly nothing on a human scale. But enough to suggest, along the evidence of humans who can't use abstraction, that abstractive ability is not the unique ability of the human brain. Certainly the proficiency is. But the ability itself is not. And I have no vested interest in rebutting such a claim. But the claim was made that there was no evidence for abstract thought in animals, and that claim is false. There is evidence. Shakspeare contains abstraction. Bee dances contain abstraction. In that sense, yes, they are comparable.On the other hand, bee dancing isn't the world's most versatile language. Since it's only capable of making two abstractions (heading and distance), I wouldn't suggest bees have the ability to learn any other languages. (Bees don't even have brains, exactly - they have neural ganglia.) Well, are you saying that they have to be perfect at it in order to be considered capable of it? Are you saying that, when I encounter a person with less than perfect grammar (as I so often do in my job) that I should consider them not a speaker of a language but simply a master of its appearace?You still haven't told me how I'm supposed to know you're really using language, by the way.Look, let me ask you this. If language was such a fundamental and unique component of the human brain, how is it that you can have a human without language? Why is it that if developing humans "miss out" on language development at an early age - the age that much of the brain structures itself - they never achieve language proficiency better than that we see in these chimpanzees?This message has been edited by crashfrog, 06-29-2004 03:48 AM

Well, maybe it's not "language" in the strictest sense, but it is abstraction, and I thought that was the topic under discussion. Ok, well, help me with my confusion. For instance I have no idea how that statement applies to our discussion. The phenomenon of children raised without language. Here's a link with much information. I found it quite informative the last time I looked at it: No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.feralchildren.com/en/index.phpWhy would it? A) That comparison would be spectacularly inconsiderate; and B) The chimpanzees able to do the things we were talking about were raised under some pretty exceptional conditions. It is not the habit of wild chimpanzees to think abstractly to the degree they have been observed to do in these experiments.But, from that page:

quote:

---

It seems that Victor of Aveyron was eventually able to respond to some spoken commands, although to what extent he was genuinely understanding the language we don't know. He never spoke.

---

quote:

---

Kaspar Hauser was visited by the Feuerbach in July 1828, who reported on his linguistic abilities. He said that conjunctions, participles, and adverbs were virtually entirely lacking in his speech, and that his syntax was seriously deficient.

---

quote:

---

Even if they've missed out on the critical period for language acquisition (such as Genie), feral children can be taught a few words, and very simple grammatical constructions.

---

That sounds to me very much like the communication developments described in the chimp examples, don't you think? Now, there's the possibilty also that the language difficulty stems not from missing language acquisition during a critical period but from the severe physiological and psychological trauma of a feral development. But the similarity is striking.

"Imbued with the ability to fly?" The way you make it out, flight is a magic property of birds.Birds fly because of the way air moves over their limbs. If you could get air to move that way over a man's limbs, he would fly too. There's no fundamental difference between the way that a bird flies and the way a man flies in an airplane.If you wanted to talk about fundamental differences, planes and rockets are fundamentally different. That's two fundamentally different ways to fly. Birds and rockets are fundamentally different in a way that birds and planes are not. So now that you know what I'm talking about, show me what humans are doing that's fundamentally different than what the chimps and the parrots are being made to do.

I would too, and I would before I tried to pass this off as a sure thing. I just think it's worth thinking about. Unfortunately I think a paucity of data is inherent in the subject - there's a reason they refer to this as "the forbidden experiment."