Koko The Gorilla Mourning The Loss Of Robin Williams

[Damansarajaya]

34. "He who proposes, must prove."

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/2007----.htm

On the Myth of Ape Language

Noam Chomsky interviewed by Matt Aames Cucchiaro

Electronic mail correspondence, 2007/2008

CUCCHIARO: As a prominent figure in the ‘Cognitive Revolution’ of the 1950s, you were quite vocal in your criticism against Behaviorism—the dominant academic field of psychology at the time. In your Review of BF Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, you challenged his belief that language is acquired through training and in principle could be learned by other animals as well. Joseph Ledoux, neuroscientist at NYU, says that 'during the Behaviorists reign, for example, it was assumed that psychologists could study any kind of animal and find out how humans learn the things we learn. This logic was not only applied to those things that humans and animals do, like finding food and avoiding danger, but also to those things that humans do easily and animals do poorly if at all, like speaking.'

CHOMSKY: He's correct, dramatically so with regard to "radical behaviorists," like Skinner, but pretty much across the board. A curious fact is that they did not seem to realize how remote their doctrines were from serious biology.

CUCCHIARO: In Daniel Gilbert’s (Harvard psychologist) recent bestseller, Stumbling on Happiness, he says that psychologists who’ve said that humans are the only animals who can use language were particularly well remembered when chimpanzees were taught to communicate with hand signs.’ I told him that you’d be interested to know about any examples of chimps using language, and he gave me a Wikipedia article to forward to you on ‘The Great Ape Language’.

CHOMSKY: Thanks. I'm well familiar with this work. It's an insult to chimpanzee intelligence to consider this their means of communication. It's rather as if humans were taught to mimic some aspects of the waggle dance of bees and researchers were to say, "Wow, we've taught humans to communicate." Furthermore, the more serious researchers, like Dave Premack, understand all of this very well.

CUCCHIARO: It seems that even after the numerous studies conducted in the 1970s -- and well beyond -- had clearly failed, the notion of chimps possibly learning language still persists. What do you think when researchers to this day, such as Susan Rumbaugh (ape trainer), claim that Bonobo chimps can draw signs and refer to it as language similar to humans’ ability?

CHOMSKY: It's all totally meaningless, so I don't participate in the debate. Humans can be taught to do a fair imitation of the complex bee communication system. That is not of the slightest interest to bee scientists, who are rational, and understand something about science: they are interested in the nature of bees, and it is of no interest if some other organism can be trained to partially mimic some superficial aspects of the waggle dance. And one could of course not get a grant to teach grad students to behave like imperfect bees. When we turn to the study of humans, for some reason irrationality commonly prevails -- possibly a reflection of old-fashioned dualism -- and it is considered significant that apes (or birds, which tend to do much better) can be trained to mimic some superficial aspects of human language. But the same rational criteria should hold as in the case of bees and graduate students. Possibly training graduate students to mimic the waggle dance could teach us something about human capacity, though it's unlikely. Similarly, it's possible that training apes to do things with signs can teach us something about the cognitive capacities of apes. That's the way the matter is approached by serious scientists, like Anne and David Premack. Others prefer to fool themselves.

This (idea that apes can learn language) is all sentimentality of the worst sort.