This is all very interesting. The fact is that we appear to haveJayhawk wrote:I guess I think it's vain and unscientific to automatically assume that complex animals that guard borders by going on patrols, work systematically to hunt small mammals, teach their kids to make simple tools, form alliances that lead to changes in leadership, share food based upon favors done by other chimps (and withhold food from others for behavior not supportive), etc. don't have complex thoughts of their own. Observations by Goodall have documented such behaviors in the wild. Other chimp researchers have observed similar behaviors. If you've never heard Goodall speak, and had the chance to talk with her afterwards, she's either one heck of a liar (but then how do you explain the film footage, consistent observations over 30+ years, and other independent researchers reporting the same behavior elsewhere?) or we need to remove our "special" view of ourselves and realize we're just animals, too.But language is not just "vocalization or signs". It's extremely complex--and it can express extremely complex ideas. We don't even know how complex the ideas of dolphins, parrots, and bonobos are. Do they think things like, "I can't believe that numbskull Bob didn't give me a treat after I did all those tricks for him. If he doesn't give me a double ration tomorrow, I'm not going to do any more, no matter how he pleads, but if he does, maybe I'll consider forgiving him. But maybe he didn't give me a treat because Trixie is better at tricks than I am. Wow! Maybe they're planning to get rid of me. I'd better be careful until I know for sure."
Granted, I'm talking observable behaviors here, because chimps don't have the vocal chords to support human speech, and their hands and arms really aren't well designed for ASL, either. I can't talk with chimps, but their behaviors show evidence of planning, memory, social relationships, etc, and anything short of measuring observable behaviors in non-speaking organisms is only guessing.
Eric
a syntactic organ, as Mike put it, not that it's located
anywhere locally in the brain, that enables us to
use grammar to put signs together into new sentences;
we can generate and understand sentences that
have never been expressed before--this one, for instance.
And this seems to be used in ocurrent thoughts,
where we speak to ourselves in real time, as it were.
Well, so far, there is no strong evidence that non-human
animals have this syntactic ability--they may have vocabularies,
like Alex, but they aren't any good at sentences.
They may have rudimentary language, but not
language like ours, that is, syntactical language,
apparently.
At the same time, for all the good reasons you've just
given, animals are capable of representing cognitively
complex states of affairs. They can think and reason
about propositions that we express in sentences but
they can't.
This suggests that a) either they DO have syntactic
abilities, or b) it is possible to represent and reason
about complex states of affairs, propositions, without
a grammar, without syntactic ability.
This gets us to the question of the nature of thought.
I go for b. Plainly Max, my dog, has concepts, quite an
array of them, that he deploys to realize that
I will give him the treat if he goes into the pen,
but it isn't something he thinks occurrently ('Hey, he'll
give me the treat if I run into the pen!') and the
thought doesn't seem to be realized in any syntactic
form.
Jerry Fodor maintains that all thought, including animal
thought, takes place in a language of thought,
which is an unconscious innate syntactic language,
with inate symbols with built in meanings. So anything,
chimps, humans, dogs, that can think and reason
has a syntactic language built in as it were.
The language of thought isn't conscious, it doesn't
confer linguistic abilities like ours, Fodor thinks,
still something like a real full blown language underlies thought
always.
There are some difficulties here, I believe.
First, if all human beings have an innate syntactic
language, one would expect all human languages
to have the same grammar--the grammar of LOT.
It would naturally inform our speech, and it would be
positively counterproductive to speak a language
with a different grammer from LOT, because it
would take time and energy to translate back
and forth from LOT, where the real thinking is
going on.
Second, if non-human animals have a LOT, with
a syntax, given their striking intelligence and
social organization, all that would prevent them
from talking to each other in sentences is
the inability to vocalize sufficiently. They've
got all the cognitive stuff built in. But, given
the extraordinary advantages of such speech
in socially organized communities, it is terribly
hard to believe that evolution wouldn't have
broken through in several places to
full-blown language. Wolves would talk,
chimps would talk, we wouldn't expect
to be the only ones, certainly.
On the other hand, if LOT is mistaken, if animals
have no inate grammar, well, how do they
represent complex states of affairs, as I agree
with you they do?
So we have arrived at the question:
How does thought work? Can something
without a grammar nonetheless deploy
concepts to represent complex states
of affairs? How?