Animal Thinking and Language
"Animal Thinking and Language" refers to the cognitive processes and communication systems of non-human animals. It explores the extent to which animals can think, problem-solve, and communicate using language or other forms of symbolic communication. Researchers study animal cognition and language abilities to gain insights into the evolution of human cognition and language, as well as to better understand the capabilities of other species.
8 Key excerpts on "Animal Thinking and Language"
eBook - ePub- T. W. Simon, R. J. Scholes, T. W. Simon, R. J. Scholes(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...The perspective I have in mind is a zoological, ethological one based on recent discoveries about the rich variety of behavior displayed by various groups of animals. Especially important is the communication between individuals which serves to coordinate social behavior. It may not be going too far to suggest that the title of this entire volume might be “Languages, Minds, and Brains.” There is no doubt that animals possess a wide variety of brains, including a few that are larger than our own, and insofar as minds are linked to the functioning of brains they too may exist in a sufficient variety of forms to provide fruitful opportunities for comparative investigation. Whether language occurs in more than one species is a question to which I will return later. Insofar as nonhuman animals may think at all, a biologically comparative analysis might be fruitful, as has been the case with other human attributes. Perhaps a better understanding of thinking as it may occur in simpler form in other species would throw helpful light on the operations of our own minds. Such a suggestion tends to arouse visceral reactions related to our gut feelings of human uniqueness and superiority. But as scientists and scholars we should be able to escape the limitations of our autonomic nervous systems and examine such questions with a willingness to learn about important human attributes such as language and thinking from any helpful source of information and understanding. It is widely believed that we are the only species capable of linguistic communication, at least the only one to be found on this planet. And since linguistic capability is believed essential for significant thinking, acceptance of one assumption of human uniqueness seems to entail the other as a necessary consequence. This sort of faith in a qualitative human intellectual uniqueness has been somewhat shaken in recent years by several discoveries about the communication behavior of animals...
eBook - ePub- Nicky Hayes(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...Animal cognition 6 A s we saw in Chapter 1, one of the oldest ideas in comparative psychology is that animals act in a machine-like fashion, with nothing other than the most basic kinds of associative memory—without thinking or other forms of cognitive processing. But the more we find out about what animals do, and what they are capable of doing, the more this idea is gradually disappearing. In Chapter 2 we found that the idea that animals act in a purely mechanistic fashion has even been seriously challenged by those researching into classical and operant conditioning: the areas once thought to represent the essence of mechanistic learning. Over the past few decades, the evidence has been building up that animals have far more cognitive abilities than has traditionally been believed. This evidence comes from all branches of comparative psychology. We have seen in the preceding chapters how cognitive appraisals may be involved in parent-infant relationships, social organisation, and various aspects of communication. Some of the other evidence has come from explicit research into animal cognitive abilities, including the cognitive types of learning, like imitation or the formation of cognitive maps, and also including research into other cognitive abilities of animals. Some evidence, too, has come from attempts to teach animals language. In this chapter we will look at some of the evidence for animal cognitive abilities, before going on to consider how these findings may make sense, in terms of our knowledge of evolutionary processes. Imitation Imitation is a form of learning which, of necessity, involves some degree of cognitive input...
eBook - ePubAnimal Learning and Cognition
An Introduction
- John M. Pearce(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...Without the capacity to think, people would have little need for a language, as they would not have any ideas to communicate; and without certain mental processes we would be unable to produce grammatically correct sentences that are comprehensible to others. Ultimately, therefore, the constraints on language use by animals may be imposed by the limitations of their thought processes. Discussions concerning the nature of animal thought are rare, principally because so little is known about it. We can, however, identify some thought processes that are essential for language and ask whether animals possess them. Sentence production Turning first to sentence production, two aspects of thought would seem to be essential. The language user must be able to construct sentences in a correct order. For example, to express the idea in three words that “Tim likes Alex”, it is necessary to know that the subject of an English sentence precedes the verb, which, in turn, precedes the object. In Chapter 10, monkeys were shown to be capable of learning to touch in the correct order a number of colored keys that were displayed simultaneously. Moreover, this ability was sustained when they were tested with a novel subset of the array. Taken together with other findings cited in that chapter, these results provide convincing evidence that monkeys, at least, can represent information about serial order. A capacity to learn about serial order will, however, be of little use for language if each member of the series is a specific item. Instead, the members of the series need to be categories, so that different exemplars of each category can be placed in the correct position in the sequence and thus allow the creation of novel sentences. In Chapter 7, a number of studies were described that show that animals can classify objects into categories...
eBook - ePubThe Wisdom of the Liminal
Evolution and Other Animals in Human Becoming
- Celia Deane-Drummond(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Eerdmans(Publisher)
...Chapter Five Human Language and Animal Communication Perhaps of all the qualities purported to be most characteristic of humans, language is the one that is more often than not cited as a basis for arguing that humans should exercise supremacy over other creatures. Yet analysis of the way other creatures communicate with each other illuminates both common and distinctive evolutionary bases for human language and the way it developed and diversified in social communities. After touching on philosophical issues of why language has become of such central concern to present-day humans, I intend in this chapter to build on the discussion in chapter 2 of how animal minds work, including human minds. Without a closer look at these facets, it is difficult to make a reasonable comparison of communication systems between different species in the biological classification group Animalia, which takes in birds, fish, mammals, insects, and so on. I have touched on these issues in earlier chapters on reason and freedom, but this needs to be more explicit in this chapter, since knowing the fine-tuning of the way human minds work is necessary to understand their particular requirements for human communication and what might be considered highly distinctive facets of human language. Furthermore, symbolic and language development contributes not just to communication as such, but arguably to thinking itself. I will also give some specific examples of animal communication systems to illustrate the sheer variety in different species. As an intermediary between animal communication and the full-blown development of complex human language, I will discuss symbol making in early hominids and the possible reasons for its evolutionary development...
eBook - ePubAnimal Minds
Beyond Cognition to Consciousness
- Donald R. Griffin(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...CHAPTER NINE Communication as Evidence of Thinking It is much more effective for one animal to anticipate another’s actions than to wait until they are under way. This is especially obvious in the case of aggressive encounters. When a dominant animal signals its intention to attack, it is much better for a subordinate to perceive this as a threat than to wait until it is actually injured. For threats can be dealt with in several ways, including retreat, counterthreats that may deter the attack, or submissive behavior. Insofar as animals ever experience conscious thoughts and feelings, these are very likely to accompany social behavior and interactions between predators and prey. Many if not most interactions between animals may well involve at least simple feelings and thoughts about the situation. If so, other animals with which signals are exchanged will benefit by correctly understanding what the communicator feels or wants, as emphasized by Krebs and Dawkins (1984). Communication is often a two-way process, a repeated exchange of signals by which two or more animals can evaluate each other’s feelings and thoughts as well as their likelihood of behaving in various ways. Animal communication can therefore provide a useful and significant “window” on animal minds, that is, a source of objective evidence about the thoughts and feelings that have previously seemed so inaccessible to scientific investigation. Experimental playbacks of communicative signals are of crucial importance because they allow a limited but revealing sort of participatory dialog between animal and scientist. Sounds are the most easily simulated signals, but other sensory channels can also be employed in playback experiments, provided only that technical means are available to reproduce the animal signal with adequate fidelity...
- Kristin Andrews, Jacob Beck, Kristin Andrews, Jacob Beck(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...If we’re interested in what makes humans special or unique, we can compare ourselves to other creatures that have minds and attend to the differences. Thinking about animal minds can thus enhance our understanding of our own natures. Finally, animals are our neighbors. We share our planet – and sometimes even our homes – with animals. Many of us form relationships with animals. Even those of us who prefer human companions tend to find animals fascinating to observe. We all face ethical questions about whether to consume animals and how to treat them. We thus have strong reasons to try to understand animal minds on their own terms, independently of whether they shed light on the nature of minds in general or human minds in particular. The essays in this volume have been separated into eight sections. While the essays within each section tend to have much in common, there are interesting points of contact across sections as well. In the remainder of this introduction, we’ll provide a brief summary of each contribution and highlight some of the larger themes that emerge. Mental representation The ability to represent the world is often considered a mark of the mental. But when does mental representation arise? Do sunflower buds represent the sun since they follow it throughout the day? What about simple animals, such as insects? Andrew Knoll and Georges Rey shed light on these foundational questions by investigating the navigational abilities of ants and bees, and draw lessons about the minimal requirements for mental representation. In part because analytic philosophy was dominated by the study of language throughout most of the twentieth century, philosophers have tended to view mental representation through a linguistic lens. But when we focus on animal cognition, the linguistic lens often seems to distort its target. Many philosophers have wanted to attribute nonlinguistic representations to animals...
- Wilhelm Wundt(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Lecture XXIII § I. P ROBLEMS OF A NIMAL P SYCHOLOGY ; D EFICIENCIES OF THE S CIENCE. § II. M ETHODOLOGICAL R ULES. § III. A CTS OF C OGNITION AND R ECOGNITION A MONG A NIMALS. § IV. A SSOCIATION A MONG THE L OWER A NIMALS. § I I N the preceding lectures we have considered the associative and intellectual processes of consciousness, first in their general and normal features and then under the various aspects which they present in mental disturbance, dreaming, and certain conditions related to that of sleep and dreaming. There now remains one last question, the answer to which is important if we are to understand the nature of these processes and their relation to the other functions of the mind, the question of animal intelligence, or, to express it more exactly, of the nature and significance of those animal actions the conditions of whose origin lead us to refer them to mental processes similar to our own associations, and possibly even to our own processes of judgment and inference. The study of animal psychology may be approached from two different points of view. We may set out from the notion of a kind of comparative physiology of mind, a universal history of the development of mental life in the organic world. Then the observation of animals is the more important matter; man is only considered as one, though, of course, the highest, of the developmental stages to be examined. Or we may make human psychology the principal object of investigation. Then the expressions of mental life in animals will be taken into account only so far as they throw light upon the evolution of consciousness in man. You will remember that we decided at the outset of these lectures to deal with animal psychology in this second sense, and for the more limited purpose. If we compare these two ways of treating psychology with comparative and human physiology, we cannot fail to see that the two spheres of investigation are very different as regards methods and appliances...
eBook - ePub- Derek Bickerton(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
...It seems obvious to humans that this should be so, because from their first to their last breaths all humans inhabit a world drenched in symbolism. This could hardly be otherwise for any species with language, which is symbolic throughout. Consequently the notion that symbolic representation is somehow natural and doesn’t require any special explanation is very hard for us to get rid of. The tacit belief that other animals see the same world as we do, filled with potentially nameable objects and events for which they simply haven’t yet found names, probably goes a long way toward explaining the frequently expressed belief that a mere increase in brain size or intelligence or social complexity or understanding of others’ intentions (Theory of Mind) would have sufficed to launch language. But nothing in ethology or ecology or biology or comparative psychology supports the notion that for other animals the world is composed of a set of discrete categories that are potentially nameable. If a concept representing some animal species X can surface in the mind only under one of two conditions—either when some physical manifestation of X or something closely connected with X triggers it or when it is accidentally excited by random activity in the brain—there is no way any nonhuman animal could even conceive of the possibility that an arbitrary chunk of sound or a gesture could stand as the permanent label of some discrete class of entity. The distinction between the “namelessness” of all other species’ Umwelts and the “namefulness” of the human Umwelt is too absolute for a transition to have been made without intervening steps (a factor not considered in Deacon 1997, where a direct emergence of symbolism from specific human behaviors is envisioned)...
