4The minds of preverbal infants are also difficult to establish, and here researchers too sometimes fall into opposing camps of romantics, who lean toward accepting indications of sophisticated mental abilities in babies, and killjoys, who lean toward dismissing such claims. For instance, evidence that babies assess individuals on the basis of seeing them help or hinder others has been challenged by simpler explanations based on associative learning.
5It is still not known why our minds generate fantastic dream events. Some evidence suggests that dreaming helps memory consolidation and reorganization of recently experienced events.
6This riddle is often used not just to raise the question of unobserved reality but the distinction between sound waves and sound perception.
7Developmentalists have expended much research effort over the years trying to show where Piaget had been wrong. Though most of his object permanence stages have been confirmed, research suggests that infants can achieve some stages earlier than originally proposed. However, crucial to the present argument are only the final stages, and these are still only completed by children at about the end of the second year of life.
8This raises questions about other claims of competences in animals, such as marmosets and gibbons. They warrant further examination with careful control conditions.
9Initial research with gorillas failed to find successes, leading to speculation that they may be the only great ape to have lost an ancestral capacity. Subsequent studies, however, have found gorillas pass the test.
10There is some variation in terms of the onset between cultures, but even Bedouin children, said to have had no prior exposure to reflective surfaces, pass the task by the end of the second year.
11Extensive conditioning attempts have failed to make capuchin monkeys “pass” the task.
12Even among the great apes tested, not all passed the task. In fact, only 43 percent of chimpanzees (42 of 97), 33 percent of gorillas (5 out of 15), and 50 percent of orangutans (3 of 6) did in published reports so far. What should we make of the great apes that have failed the task? It may mean that some do not get it. It is possible, for instance, that some of the tested animals were too young, just as humans under eighteen months tend to be too young to pass. But there are also many other reasons why an individual may have been classified as not passing the task, given that studies have employed different criteria (e.g. in terms of the required frequency and accuracy of reaching for the mark). Some subjects may simply not be motivated to retrieve the mark, may not have paid attention, and so forth. What is clear, though, is that mirror self-recognition is within the capacity of these species.
13The feedback in the last two conditions was the same, yet children retrieved the sticker in one but not the other condition. So there is more to passing the task than distinguishing feedback from other sensory input.
14Passing the test may indicate self-awareness about one’s appearance in a mirror, but there is little to suggest that it entails awareness about other aspects of self. Research demonstrates that even awareness about one’s physical appearance depends on the context. Visual self-recognition in live video is more difficult for children than in mirrors. Self-recognition in delayed videos only emerges at around age three to four. In a recent study we found that in adults self-recognition in mirrors and photos involves different brain activity.
15The middle of the second year is a watershed in children’s cognitive development. In fact, various other expressions of this ability appear around this time in other domains. In a review of the research literature Andrew Whiten and I found that great apes, unlike other animals, have provided at least some evidence for capacities in all of these domains.
16Note that it is possible that a trait inherited from a common ancestor is subsequently lost and that there are trait distributions where competing models make the same number of assumptions, so that parsimony cannot distinguish between them.
FOUR
Talking Apes
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes.1
—ALDOUS HUXLEY
UPON SEEING A LIVING CHIMPANZEE, the bishop of Polignac in Paris in the early eighteenth century is reported to have proclaimed: “Speak and I will baptize thee.” The idea that language is distinctly human is common, and versions of it can be found in the writings of many influential scientists, including Noam Chomsky, Michael Corballis, Terrance Deacon, and Steven Pinker, to name a few. But is language really the essential quality that elevates us to humanity (and, so qualifies us, at least according to the bishop’s view, for a soul worth saving)?
Language is a universal part of the human condition. Every human group has one or more languages with which it communicates, and language permeates most of what we think and do. You would be in deep trouble if you had lost your faculty for language; for starters, you would not be reading this. Nineteenth-century postmortem studies on the brains of people who had lost it established the left side of the cortex as crucial for language.2 With dedicated areas for the production and comprehension of language, we seem to be hardwired for it—for connecting our brains so that we can exchange vast amounts of information between each other. This information flow is essential to human cooperation and culture, and it is not surprising, then, that many scholars argue that language is the defining characteristic of the human mind.
However, animals also have—sometimes quite sophisticated—means of communication. A bee signals the location and abundance of a food source to its hive, meerkats stand guard and alert their group about predators, birds dance with each other before selecting a mate, and in most mammals mother and offspring inform each other about their whereabouts. There are important reasons to have reliable transfer of information between members of a species, and animals have therefore evolved acoustic, haptic (touch-based), visual, and chemical ways of communicating. Are these then not languages? Are we merely biased because we have not fully deciphered what birds, monkeys, or whales are saying?
To find out what might be unique about the human communication system, we need to have a closer look at what characterizes human language. The first thing to note is that we speak not one but over 6,000 different languages. Furthermore, some people do not speak but instead use sign languages to express the same wealth of information with gestures. Others can use touch to read Braille with their fingertips. Our faculty of language transcends different modalities. To examine the essential characteristics of human language, we therefore need to look deeper than the ability to utter words—which, of course, parrots share with us.
THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL FEATURE OF language is that it allows us to exchange thought. In conversations we connect the private world of our minds to the minds of others as we share attitudes, beliefs, desires, knowledge, feelings, memories, and expectations. This book is designed to put my thinking about this subject into your head through the symbols of the written word. You have tens of thousands of words in your vocabulary. They are arbitrary conventions. The word “walking” has nothing about it that in itself refers to a type of locomotion. We could equally have called it gehen, as Germans do. Human languages differ in the symbols they employ for the same meaning; if you want to learn a foreign language, you need to study which symbols speakers of this language use to represent which concepts.
A symbol, be it a sound, a drawing, or a gesture, is a thing that is intended to stand for something else. Language works because individuals agree on the meaning of a set of symbols and how they should be used. Symbols are about something. That is the key to any representation: it is about something other than itself. Consider the following three paintings.
FIGURE 4.1.
A painting by the chimpanzee Ockie.
The first picture (Figure 4.1) is a painting made by the chimpanzee Ockie as I sat next to him and supplied him with materials. Ockie likes smearing paint almost as much as he likes eating it. I could easily have chosen from among the paintings my daughter, Nina, made when she was one year old to make the
following point: these pictures are what they appear to be—pieces of paper with paint on them. They may be beautiful, but they are not about anything else. Ockie’s painting may remind you of abstract art. Some of these pictures may, in fact, be indistinguishable from such art and are sometimes even sold as such. However, while the artist can tell you what the painting represents—even if it may sound rather absurd or far-fetched to you—as far as I know the chimpanzee paintings, like those of my daughter, represent nothing more than themselves.3
The second picture (Figure 4.2) is one of the first representational drawings ever produced by my son, Timo, when he was two and a half years old. He explained to me that it was of a group of whales. You may be able to decipher where the Papa whale and the Mama whale are; I was told that there was also a Timo whale in front of Papa and a baby whale at the top. This, then, is representational; it is symbolic. Putting aside concerns about realism, in addition to the primary reality of the color on a piece of paper, the picture represents something else, namely a family of whales.
FIGURE 4.2.
A picture of four whales by my son, Timo (age thirty months).
Language is built on such “representational insight.” Very young infants are not bothered if you read them a picture book upside down. (Try it out if you have a child younger than about eighteen months.) They do not care, presumably because they do not interpret the pictures as we do. A simple way to test whether children understand its symbolic character is to give them the opportunity to learn from a picture about something else. For instance, one can point out the location of a hidden object in a picture of a room, and then observe whether children can use this cue to find the object in the actual room. For a long time results of such studies suggested that children develop this representational insight surprisingly late, between age two and a half and three—about the time they start to draw symbolically. However, after some study I found even twenty-four-month-olds can, at least initially, use a picture to successfully guide their searches.4 They can learn from what they see represented—so be mindful about what you let your toddler watch.
The third picture (Figure 4.3) is by Rory, the then four-year-old daughter of my colleague, developmental psychologist Virginia Slaughter. It is a drawing of herself drawing a picture of what looks to be herself. This picture within a picture demonstrates an important capacity: the ability to build models of models. In this case, the drawing shows that Rory could reflect on the relation between a symbol and what it stands for. In psychological jargon, this is known as forming a “meta-representation,” and the ability to do so has many uses, as we will discover. It must have been essential in the evolution of any language that is comprised of arbitrary symbols. After all, to propose, understand, and agree that an arbitrary symbol has a specific meaning, people must have had an ability to reflect on the relationship between symbols and referents in the first place.
FIGURE 4.3.
A picture by Rory (age four) of Rory drawing a picture.
So how did we initially come up with the words to symbolize concepts in our languages? In some cases, as in the ticktock of a clock, the meaning of a word is related to its sound. This is known as “onomatopoeia.” Such words are like paintings, in that they somehow share salient characteristics of the referent. They may hence be relatively easy to agree on,5 and it has therefore been argued that spoken words originate from parallels between sound and meaning. However, why then are words for the same thing so different from each other in different languages? Most words do not sound anything like the thing they stand for. When it comes to abstract concepts such as “justice” or “evolution,” it is not clear how they possibly could.
Agreeing on things we can all see may be relatively easy, since you can point to an object or action and make the proposed sound or other symbol. Even if the sound is nothing like the thing in question, one can imagine that repeated pointing and co-occurrence would establish the connection between symbol and referent in a group of people. But how did our ancestors manage to establish words for concepts that are not directly observable at all? Much of that, it turns out, has been accomplished by piggybacking on concepts that are observable. This is an important idea to grasp. We milk concrete contexts, such as what happens in a kitchen, as a source for a multitude of metaphors that allow us to talk about abstract concepts. Perhaps you need to let this idea simmer. Let it ferment. Do not regurgitate half-baked ideas. It is better to properly digest it. It is food for thought. You can cook up your own examples. But please do not stew over this for too long, even if you may have whet your appetite for more. These samples should be enough to get a taste of the nature of metaphors. They can be delectable. But they can also be less palatable, especially when they are mixed.
Metaphors allow us to use the concrete to express the abstract. In many cases we are so used to them that we may not even think of them as analogies. For instance, in English we often use words for spatial relations to refer to abstract relations in time. Here are a few examples starting with the first letter of the alphabet: about, across, against, along, among, around, and at. There are also several starting with b. Our spatial understanding scaffolds our communication about time.
We may also tell extended metaphors, such as allegories or parables, to make a point about a subject that is not directly observable. These may be individually concocted stories, but useful ones are repeated and become part of the cultural-linguistic heritage. Our metaphorical heritage includes many idioms—phrases that have particular nonliteral meanings. The English language has thousands of idioms. We might say that someone is “like a bull in a china shop” to offer a concrete sense of what destruction clumsiness can bring in a fragile world, even if the context to which it is applied refers to destruction that is entirely social or emotional. To recognize the analogy, one must be able to map the relevant dimensions of the concrete situation (bull moving about, pushing over precious china) to the situation at hand (even if it does not involve large animals or porcelain). This ability to invent and understand novel metaphors again illustrates the importance of reflecting on representational relations.
Because speakers have to establish agreement on meaning, languages are regional. Languages were not established by expert committees or by decree, but gradually evolved out of people’s interactions with each other and their desire to communicate. Separation, physical or social, breeds new dialects. Yet as long as there is interaction, language boundaries are more fluid than names for languages or national borders might suggest. For example, I grew up in Germany a stone’s throw away from the Dutch border. My parents’ version of German, their local dialect rather than what they were taught at school, is very similar to the local dialect on the Dutch side. The Germans might not understand high Dutch, and the Dutch may not understand high German,6 but the farmers on either side of the border use pretty much the same language. They are neighbors, after all. Their language is part of the West Germanic dialect continuum.
The language of the Germanic tribes that settled the British isles more than 1,500 years ago has been separate from mainland German for long enough, and exposed to sufficient Celtic, Norman, and other influences, to be mutually unintelligible. Yet a good proportion of English words are still identical to German. I hear myself mutter the German/English words “arm,” “hand,” “finger,” and “ring,” as I look down in search of examples. Even many of the idioms used in both languages are similar, though at times strangely different. For instance, in German it is an elephant, not a bull, that is messing about in the china store. Curiously, the dialect of my parents sits in many ways between modern English and modern German (e.g., Schwester is German for “sister,” but my parents would say süster)—so when they visited me in New Zealand, despite not speaking any English, they at times managed to make themselves understood speaking their low Saxon dialect (Plattdeutsch). This is because some of the tribes that invaded Britain, and so founded the English language, came from Old Saxony. Languages are the product of
history, of past social interactions between individuals who needed to communicate. We inherit them socially from our forebears.
Though dictionaries and linguistic pedants may make it appear as if languages are fixed, they are alive and constantly changing. Old words, phrases, and pronunciations disappear, and new ones are added. Much has happened since English and German parted ways, and speakers of these languages have established new conventions. New words are introduced, become useful or fashionable, are abbreviated or merge with other words, and then are superseded by yet newer expressions. We can propose new words, drawing for instance on analogous relations, contrast them to similar symbols, and negotiate their precise definition. We could, for instance, agree that a new word, “gappist,” shall from now on refer to someone who exaggerates the mental gap between animals and humans, whereas a “gapanier” is someone who understates the gap between animal and human minds. Naturally, this only works if the words catch on and people use them.
WE CAN UTTER AND UNDERSTAND novel expressions. While English is fairly restricted in admitting new words, other languages allow speakers to create new words on the fly. There cannot be a dictionary that contains all German words, for example, because separate elements seamlessly merge into larger words. I once saw a street sign with the word Astabbruchgefahr—which literally means “Branchbreakingofdanger.” I had never seen this word before but understood enough not to linger next to the sign.7 Instead of combining syllables into words, most of the creative work in the English language is done by combining and recombining words into novel sentences. You can understand almost any coherent sentence, such as this one, even if you have never heard or read it in your entire life. And you can make up new sentences as you please. Human languages are generative in this way. Imagine a world in which we were limited to a fixed set of, say, ten words or sentences. Such a scenario might make a plot for a quirky movie, but it would quickly become constraining.
The Gap Page 8
