The Aesop's Fable Paradigm

An Unlikely Intersection of Folklore and Science

Marisa Wieneke, Kristina Downs, K. Brandon Barker, Daniel J. Povinelli, K. Brandon Barker, Daniel J. Povinelli

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253059246
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Aesop's Fable Paradigm is a collection of essays that explore the cutting-edge intersection of Folklore and Science. From moralizing fables to fantastic folktales, humans have been telling stories about animals—animals who can talk, feel, think, and make moral judgments just as we do—for a very long time. In contrast, scientific studies of the mental lives of animals have professed to be investigating the nature of animal minds slowly, cautiously, objectively, with no room for fanciful tales, fables, or myths.But recently, these folkloric and scientific traditions have merged in an unexpected and shocking way: scientists have attempted to prove that at least some animal fables are actually true.

These interdisciplinary chapters examine how science has targeted the well-known Aesop's fable "The Crow and the Pitcher" as their starting point. They explore the ever-growing set of experimental studies which purport to prove that crows possess an understanding of higher-order concepts like weight, mass, and even Archimedes' insight about the physics of water displacement.

The Aesop's Fable Paradigm explores how these scientific studies are doomed to accomplish little more than to mirror anthropomorphic representations of animals in human folklore and reveal that the problem of folkloric projection extends far beyond the "Aesop's Fable Paradigm" into every nook and cranny of research on animal cognition.

K. BRANDON BARKER

THE ANIMAL QUESTION AS FOLKLORE IN SCIENCE

Abstract: Looking to answer ancient questions about the similarities and differences between humans and nonhuman animals, animal cognition scientists have deployed a traditional Aesopian fable, the Crow and the Pitcher, as narrative frame and structural precedent for experimental investigation. Herein, I consider the theoretical implications of this peculiar intersection between folklore and science in the contexts of Alan Dundes’s notion of folk ideas (1971) and folkloristic genre theory. Ultimately, I gauge whether the so-called Aesop’s Fable Paradigm is simply a folkloric cameo in science or a more complicated case of genuine scientific folklore.

In a 2009 issue of Current Biology, scientists Christopher David Bird and Nathan John Emery published a compelling study on birds’ problem-solving behaviors: “Rooks use Stones to Raise the Water Level to Reach a Floating Worm.” Therein, Bird and Emery detail their findings that captive rooks, which have been trained to drop stones via a cleverly designed collapsible platform task, will—when faced with the problem of an out-of-reach worm floating on the surface of the water in a partially filled tube—displace the water by placing stones in the tube. Raising the water level in this manner, the rooks successfully obtain the worm. The scientists frame their work in the context of a well-known Aesopian fable, the Crow and the Pitcher:

The results of these experiments provide the first empirical evidence that a species of corvid is capable of the remarkable problem-solving ability described more than two-thousand years ago by Aesop.

What was once thought to be a fictional account of the solution by a bird appears to have been based on a cognitive reality. (2009, 1411)¹

Inasmuch as the Aesop’s Fable experiment demands attention from both sides of the humanist/scientist divide, it also represents the conglomerate of ancient, pervasive questions we humans ask ourselves about the inherent similarities and differences between people and nonhuman animals. Oversimplifying, I will refer to this amorphous, unwieldly set in the singular as the animal question.

Animals surround us. Animal studies continue to sweep across the face of humanistic and so-called posthumanistic scholarship; contemporary debates concerning ethical treatment of nonhuman animals rage on in both scholarly and legal environments.² Animal presence in popular culture is nearly too pervasive to summarize. Alongside Animal Planet and cute dog memes, I could not help but notice that in 2017 (the year after our 2016 American Folklore Society panel on the Aesop’s Fable Paradigm that gave rise to this book), Time magazine, National Geographic, and Scientific American all published special issues on animals—respectively, The Animal Mind: How They Think. How They Feel. How to Understand Them; Inside Animal Minds: What They Think, Feel, and Know; and Secret Lives of Animals: Strange True Tales from the Wild Kingdom.³ Whether we are children being told a traditional animal tale, or children watching videos of anthropomorphized cartoon animals; whether we are scientists comparing cognition between children and chimpanzees, or philosophers pondering the mental states of physical and subjective self-awareness in species ranging from elephants to ants; whether we are biological anthropologists doing fieldwork in some remote forest, or animal rights activists fighting for more humane treatment of domesticated livestock; whether we are folklorists hoping to understand the complexities of human representations of animals in totemic material culture and traditional narratives, or even if we are simply dog owners trying to house train our family pet, it seems we cannot stop ourselves from asking the animal question.

More germane to our topic, Bird and Emery’s Aesop’s Fable experiment joins the litany of animal questions asked in the scientific investigation of animal cognition. Folklorists and humanists looking for an accessible entry into the history of animal science in psychology will find a short, but culturally insightful, discussion in Graham Richards’s chapter on the “Psychological Uses of Animals” in his Putting Psychology in Its Place ([1995] 2010). Therein, Richards identifies ways that animals are used by psychologists:

1. To trace the evolutionary roots of human behavior.

2. As “behavioral units” for studying something called “behavior.”

3. As sources of insight into behavioral dynamics, especially social dynamics.

4. To trace the borderline of what is distinctively human. (234)

Scientists have in recent years published more than thirty variants of the original Aesop’s Fable experiment, featuring different animal species as well as human children. Taken together, they constitute, for the scientists, an experimental paradigm.⁴ The Aesop’s Fable Paradigm fits easily into Richards’s second category as it studies problem solving behavior in the contexts of causal regularities, into the first category as it studies the breadth of similar problem solving abilities across a range of distantly related species, and into the fourth as it compares the performance of crows and other animals with the performance of human children.⁵

The Aesop’s Fable Paradigm’s source of inspiration, however, seems to also fit the experiments into Richards’s category 3—though probably not in any way that the scientists intend. That is, while the Aesop’s Fable Paradigm does not explicitly test the crows’ social behaviors, the paradigm may yet tell us something about the social dynamics of people.⁶ Richards observes that the entire topic can be viewed “as an expression of the intrinsic psychological significance of animals for humans” ([1995] 2010, 240). He adds, “The fact that modern Psychology is still involved in this game, at however a sophisticated level, further testifies to the inseparability of Psychology [the discipline] and psychology [i.e., the psychology of psychologists]” (240). And here, another—more folkloristic—question emerges: As a presentation of human psychology, can we consider the Aesop’s Fable experiments as scientific culture reflecting a more genuine kind of folklore?

We can safely say that, broadly considered, scientific paradigms have been conceptualized as at least partially constituted by the socioculturally maintained ideas of scientists since, at least, the work of Thomas Kuhn, and the Aesop’s Fable Paradigm is clearly folklore in science in at least one sense—as the transposition of a traditional narrative.⁷ But is the Aesop’s Fable Paradigm folklore in science in another sense—as the distilled presentation of communal answers to the animal question, answers such as animals are similar to humans, animals solve problems in human-like ways, animals behave in ways that seem analogous to humans because their inner-workings are similar to humans’ inner-workings, animals are like children, animals and children are just simplified adult humans? I argue that it can be, and if we desire a folkloristic name for these communally maintained, scientific answers to the animal question, Alan Dundes’s folk ideas could serve.

For Dundes, folk ideas are “traditional notions that a group of people have about the nature of man, of the world, and of man’s life in the world” (1971, 95). On one hand, any serious answer to any iteration of the animal question is likely to overlap with the parts of Dundes’s definition that deal with nature and human life in the world. On the other hand, it remains unclear whether we should think of the scientists’ answers as traditional folklore. We would dangerously stretch the reach of folkloristic thinking, for example, by categorizing experimental investigations in science as a genre of folklore (consider the issues of anonymity, communal ownership, variation, etc.). But it is important to keep in mind, here, that Dundes was not thinking in terms of a genre: “Folk ideas would not constitute a genre of folklore but rather would be expressed in a great variety of many genres” (1971, 95). As a matter of fact, Dundes frames his entire premise of folk ideas with a critique of genre-theory: “Despite the practical necessity of defining and refining genre categories, the fact remains that the folklorist’s habit of thinking of his field almost exclusively in terms of traditional genres tends to be a limiting one” (94). Perhaps, we can thread the needle. Since the scientists have co-opted a fable for their experimentation, I suggest we use genre-theory as a folkloristic point of view from which we can search for cryptic expressions of folk ideas in the Aesop’s Fable Paradigm.

The Crow and the Pitcher is an animal tale, a fable; how has this fable become science? It is an arresting question because we must face a certain amount of surprise before setting out for sober answers. We are—of course—surprised and impressed that Bird and Emery’s clever crows are capable of, at least, some form of goal-directed problem solving that allows them to obtain the floating worm. But, if we are being honest, folklorists are also surprised because we have learned that the behavior of an animal character in a well-known fable has been actualized in scientific experimentation. Discomfort follows surprise as we realize that the fable has suddenly been ripped from its ancient discursive function as a fantastic rhetorical device that, William Hansen teaches us, was meant to “exemplify a proposition metaphorically” and from its traditional literary function as a piece of short fiction meant to express an “explicit moral” (1998, 259–61). Variability and context shifts are not newly recognized phenomena, but a fable being forced into dialog with the scientific arbitration of veridical reality raises other issues for genre theory.

Consider the problems that arise when we invert our truth evaluation by describing the Crow and the Pitcher as a mere fictional, and ultimately flippant, account of a bird solving a problem. So much analysis tells us that literal interpretations—based upon veridical truth values—miss implied truths and cultural commentary embedded within the semantics of traditional narratives—not to mention the sociocultural contexts of any given telling. The Crow and the Pitcher is cataloged in the Motif-Index as an example of Wisdom Gained from Experience (J101), and modern literary variants of the fable often express a moral concerning the nature of problem-solving, such as Where force fails, patience will often succeed; or With a little planning, you can gain what at first seems impossible; or a frequently attributed version of the moral, which Bird and Emery cite in their conclusion, Necessity is the mother of invention:

Aesop used his fable to ascribe the moral that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Our evidence suggests that in this case, it is cognitive generalization that may provide the toolbox from which the solution could be drawn. (2009, 1412)⁸

In this case, the reflexivity embedded in the moral seems to engulf both the narrative plot of the fable and the breakthrough that made the fable scientifically relevant, for the “invented” experimental design “has proven useful for testing whether tool-using and non-tool-using birds understand the causal properties of objects, as well as comparing their understanding with that of human children” (Emery 2016, 132).⁹ Suddenly, the Aesop’s Fable Paradigm’s professed topics of birds’ causal understanding of water displacement become fully intertwined with folk ideas about the mind, such as parents mentally invent their offspring, or mental problems are solved in ways analogous to physical problems, or both mental and physical problems are solved with tools.

That we are dealing with folk ideas about the mind is important precisely because the correlative “findings” associated with the Aesop’s Fable Paradigm claim discovery of a staggering set of mental abilities in the birds, such as insight and a complex understanding of the physics of water displacement. Some authors go so far as to compare the crows’ understanding of causal relationships in the physics of water displacement to five-, six-, and even seven-year-old children. If comparisons to seven-year-old children raise the stakes in these experiments, they also prompt another serious question for folklorists. In the contexts of contemporary print traditions, in which Aesop’s Fables most frequently appear in children’s literature, the folk—we presume—immediately recognize that the anthropomorphized actions of animal characters in a fable say more about the world of humans than they do about the real-world animals the characters represent. Take, as a bit of evidence, a seven-year-old’s impromptu recitation of “The Tortoise and the Hare” published by the scientifically well-versed folklorist Brian Sutton-Smith in The Folk Stories of Children (1981):

Once upon a time there was an ox and a tortoise. And they were fighting over to see who was the fastest. So they decided to have a race. So the rabbit ran as fast as he could when he saw the tortoise. So the ox laid down and took a nap. And when he woke up he saw the tortoise three miles away from him. And then he ran as fast as he could. Before he could reach the finish line the tortoise won. And he saw the tortoise taking home diamonds and diamonds and diamonds. And he was so mad that he went to the manager and the ox said, “I demand this money!” But the mayor said, “But Ox, the tortoise won so he gets the money.” But the rabbit ran as far as he could and nobody ever saw him again. And that was the end of th...