Apes, Language, and the Human Mind

When Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and others first began suggesting that apes (chimpanzees and bonobos) had better communication skills than language experts would credit, she and the others were soundly denounced by a scholarly community who suggested she and the others were fooled by the clever Hans phenomenon or were making up their evidence. As evidence from her research accumulated, cognition theorists, linguists, and the like continued to reject her methods and results. But eventually, the evidence that some apes have some skills comparable to human language skills became insurmountable. This book is in three parts, written by a primatologist, philosopher, and a rhetoric and language scholar. Each takes the academic community to task at a different level. Savage-Rumbaugh presents her evidence that apes demonstrate communication (even language) skills. Stuart Shanker and Talbot Taylor examine the logic and rhetoric her arguments as compared to the arguments of her detractors, demonstrating that Savage-Rumbaugh's work is as serious and valid as that of the others', and demonstrating (at least to my satisfaction) that the arguments of her detractors are specious. The ramifications of this book and several others like it are significant. It says a great deal about the nature of human communication and language if bonobos can use the same processes as children to come to human language. As time passes, the value of a book may ebb. This is a 1998 book in a time when events happen quickly . . . it is for that reason, alone, that I give the book only 4 stars.

This brilliant and original book demonstrates that symbolic representation is the basic substance of language, and shows once and for all that language is not an exclusively human achievement. Savage-Rumbaugh's serendipitous discovery that the critical period for language acquisition in bonobos is in early infancy renders all earlier language experimentation with apes obsolete. Contrary to Chomsky and Pinker, grammar is a high level embellishment to language, rather than the foundation of communicative skill. The philosophical commentaries on Savage-Rumbaugh's work by Shanker and Taylor bring out the revolutionary implications of her findings, and provide a new and more sophisticated point of view on the continuities and discontinuities between ourselves and our nearest relatives. It's good to see contemporary science finally replacing the 17th century perspective of many linguists.

I wonder if the reader from Austin, Texas, read the same book as I did! I could find no trace of any personal attacks (nor personal glorifications, for that matter) in this highly original, provocative and exceptionally well-argued book. Interdisciplinary collaborations on complex themes are notoriously difficult to pull off, but this team has succeeded admirably. The philosophical analysis of the significance of the bonobo ape research for our currently dominant ways of thinking about language, communication and animal capacities is strikingly original. Certainly, these authors do not hold back from exploring the wider significance of their proposed interpretations, but there is a wealth of well-documented and rigorous argument here to support their contentions, and not a shred of evidence of -animus- against those whose views they dispute. A serious and significant book for everyone interested in animal cognition.

This is a rewarding book, especially in its middle two chapters. After the scene-setting of ch. 1, in which we learn just what the Bonobo ape Kanzi can do as far as communicating with a human is concerned, ch. 2 gives us a protracted survey of the Cartesian tradition of thinking about the 'mental' and hence communicative lives of animals, showing the degree to which writers like Pinker, and indeed many of us, are, largely due to an outmoded view of ourselves, caught up in a fallacy about the status of animals vis-à-vis humans which needs to be replaced with a saner outlook. In ch. 3 we are given an insight into the rhetorical strategies of those who perpetuate the Cartesian view, and shown to what extent such strategies may be motivated less by a search for truth than by the socio-politico-economic imperative of our exploitation of the animal world. The authors then proceed to show that arguments which have been used to bolster the 'existential gap' view in fact are incapable of supporting the notion that humans themselves have the exclusive and proprietary capacities which Cartesian thinkers have attributed to them. That is, (a) the evidence which such thinkers use purportedly to prove the existence of various capacities in humans is shown to be equally in evidence in at least one kind of animal, but (b) the evidence which is used purportedly to disprove these capacities in animals is shown in fact to be inadequate to prove the existence of those capacities in humans. In other words, as is further suggested in the final chapter, we have no logical or evidential basis for maintaining the Cartesian view, and the implications for our own human behavior are accordingly far-reaching.