Regarding intellectual capacity: Are animals lower on a continuum or is there a distinct difference?
This thread and this thread have me thinking about the issue.
Assuming we all agree that man's brain is capable of experiencing the senses, and also has an intellect that allows him abstract thought and to think about his own thoughts.... Do animals also have an intellect on a lesser degree? Or are they capable only of experiencing the world through the senses (no intellect whatsoever?).
Assuming we all agree that man's brain is capable of experiencing the senses, and also has an intellect that allows him abstract thought and to think about his own thoughts.... Do animals also have an intellect on a lesser degree? Or are they capable only of experiencing the world through the senses (no intellect whatsoever?).
Comments (66)
As far as I know, neurons work pretty much the same way throughout the animal kingdom. The differences among species in "thinking" is in brain mass and architecture. Birds and animals all share some architecture. A limbic system is present in birds and mammals both, for instance. Animals have emotional capacities. We all have varying sensory capacities--to a greater and lesser degree--memory, problem solving, etc.
There seems to be a distance between the brightest animals and humans, though, both in kind and quantity of intellectual activity. It isn't that we have better neurons--we have a lot more of them arranged in far more complex architecture. Presumably, our mental operations and consciousness are more complex and expansive than that of Chimpanzees, elephants, and parrots.
But... all animal species struggle to survive in a hostile world, and they all use their mental resources to do that. Once they are secure enough, they can feed, seek a mate, and rear their young. Some animals (various species) seem to engage in play--rewarding behaviors not required for survival.
How much of "a being" an animal is maybe depends on how well we know the animal. We get to know our pets very well; they seem like "beings" like us. Biologists who study animals closely find that even insects have a few individual differences. One can "befriend" a squirrel in the back yard and it being an opportunist, will interact with you for food. It's a pleasant experience to have a squirrel sitting on one's knee eating out of one's hand. It will come looking for you at the usual time. It will take on individuality.
Biologists have observed squirrels and birds that store food to fake it if they think a competitor is watching them, or if watched, they may return to a storage location and move the food. Such maneuvers seem to require a kernel of self-awareness.
I would say that intellect is required to unify, identify and re-cognize sensory input. The very fact that there clearly seem to be more and less intelligent animals (from worms or whatever to dogs, apes and cetaceans and so on) seems to necessitate an affirmative answer to your question.
So the neural architecture is basically a standard ape brain enlarged. There is a continuum difference because our brains are bigger. But the development of an ability to structure trains of thought using gramatical rules and combinatorial word units was why homo sap started to think symbolically and rationally.
And it is not about the difference that made just at the individual level. Speech is a social thing and so speech comes to encode social learning, social structures of thought. Ideas have a place to evolve because humans have symbolic culture. Animals are stuck at a biological level where concepts evolve only at that level of existence.
So humans exist at a different level because they have symbolic speech/symbolic culture - the essence of an intellectual life that exists apart from the hurly-burly of the natural animal world.
That doesn't mean animals can't problem-solve or be smart in many ways. They just lack access to our fast-evolving culture of smartness, which completely changes what it means to be smart.
So, let me say at the outset that I certainly accept the evidence of evolutionary biology - that h. sapiens certainly did involve from earlier species of homonid. But my philosophical view is that h. sapiens crossed a threshhold at some time in its development, at which point it became different in kind to other animals, or, to put it another way, it was no longer simply an animal; it transcended the merely biological (a fact which is represented in many myths and cultural tropes).
I actually think the reason my sentiment is controversial, is because the idea that we are simply animals, actually solves the existential problem identified by Erich Fromm, of 'the fear of freedom'. Underlying a great deal of existential anxiety is a sense of not knowing who we are; this is especially acute in modern times, as traditional occupations and social orders have been dissolved. So we are called on to create an identity in our day and age, in ways that simply didn't occur to our immediate ancestors; and it's easy to be scared of that, because in a lot of ways there's no rule-book any more.
So identifying humans as kinds of animals sets the bar low, and also tacitly excuses the indulgence of appetites that traditional philosophy would have considered, well, animal 1.
Can you explain what you mean by the bolded bits? They fit in the sentence with grammatical correctness but when I try to think of what they might mean, I find myself facing a complete blank.
Forgive me if I'm being facetious, but I think the answer is 'no'. I think you could only discuss this question with another human being.
This isn't limited to humans. No life form can be comprehended through biology, because what we know of biology is so little of what might be out there - and that's only contemplating the known unknowns, leaving aside the unknown unknowns (thanks Donald. No, not that one, the other one). That's why biology is such a fascinating field of study. Every direction we look, there are a whole bunch of things we don't understand. Sometimes I think I should have been a biologist, because of that fact, even though I always have been much more drawn to physics because of its mathematical content.
Biology enables us to appreciate a number of very important and useful regularities that are observable amongst life forms, but I don't think many biologists would be prepared to say we understand life. I just think you are way under-selling the amazing incomprehensibility of life, relative to which, IMHO, the stand-out intelligence of h.sapiens relative to other species on Earth seems rather mundane.
I think we can describe the difference biologically, in something like the way that @apokrisis and @Wayfarer have sketched out, but beneath these descriptions there is a deeper conception of human uniqueness directing the investigation, as if we already know what we're looking for. The biological descriptions do not stand on their own, because any biological capacity can be regarded as--and indeed biologically is--just another species characteristic alongside other unique capacities such as the dance of the bee, the problem-solving ability of corvids, or sonar-directed flight. What gives the biological descriptions sense in this context is that we are already looking for what makes us different. But crucially there is nothing here that rules out the conclusion that we are not very different after all. Because in a sense, we're not.*
Which is why I want to describe the difference differently. To begin with, it's more than a "distinct difference"; it's a radical discontinuity, and it has to do with society and culture, history and personhood. Framed in terms of intellectual capacity, discussions often end fruitlessly in debates surrounding intellectually disabled people, infants, and so on. The argument from marginal cases is made to show that humans are not unique in attaining moral status, and although I disagree with its conclusion, it does expose the fallacy of thinking that we can divide humans from non-humans according to certain properties of individuals, as if we grant rights on a case-by-case basis, checking off a list of characteristics, such as intellectual capacity, before we decide to treat a being as a person or not. If we rather see a human as a social person bound up in a culture, the intellectual capacity of individuals drops out of the picture and the intellectually feeble can be seen as part of the moral sphere, the sphere of persons.
History is important here too because it shows that how you understand the question of human uniqueness differs according to what you're interested in. You can discover that humans and animals are on a continuum if the continuity is what you're interested in, that is, if you restrict your enquiry to (ahistorical) biology. There certainly is a continuum in that descriptive context, and you can dismiss the discontinuities if you think they are not fundamental. Everyone would surely agree that our ways of life have changed in important ways over periods of time in which no significant evolutionary changes took place--this is history--so to avoid the conclusion of a discontinuity you would have to dismiss history as unimportant to what we fundamentally are.
So it's about what matters to us. Whether we decide on an overarching continuum or discontinuity depends on which level of description is deemed most overarching. If we see human beings primarily as moral and political agents with the capacity to change the world on the basis of reasons, we will see a discontinuity (this is not to say we cannot arrive at a discontinuity some other way). But if we see human beings as defined by neural capacities, or as determined billiard balls or hostages to their genes, then we will be tempted to see history, reason and morality as just another evolutionary endowment.
* Or, to the extent that a different kind of biology can include or gear into sociology, anthropology, and linguistics without the reductiveness of evolutionary psychology, biology itself could embrace human uniqueness. I guess that's where @apokrisis's approach comes in.
Again - who knows that? Only h. sapiens.
I don't think it is about intelligence and the brain. I'm asking if animals are capable of abstract thought (can they think about things they've never seen, for instance), and I'm asking if they are capable of thinking and analyzing their own thoughts? Can they consciously consider different courses of action, for instance?
It's been said that man's brain/thinking has a dual ability. He can sense the world around him... and he has his intellect that enables him to engage in abstract thought. He can think about his own thinking.
Do animals have an intellect (are they capable of abstract thought, and can they think about their own thinking), or are animals only capable of experiencing the world through their senses?
And I'm questioning his conclusions.
Here is a quote from Ten Philosophical Mistakes
And another that explains what Adler means by the intellect:
I see it as an ontological difference, and I don't think there are that many of them. 'Ontological' means 'pertaining to the meaning of Being' - it's not, as is often casually stated, the analysis of 'what exists'. So I think there's an ontological discontinuity, which actually is revealed in the fact that humans are referred to as 'beings'. The problem with this view, however, is that current philosophy and science doesn't accomodate ontological levels, as far as I can see; this is because it postulates matter~energy as the only real substance or existent, with everything including mind as being derivative from that.
But that is, all due respect, subjective. I will make a bold statement here: that the distinctive capacity of beings is that of self-realisation. Now, some could intepret that in terms of trans-humanism: that humans are now sufficiently skilled and knowledgeable to direct their own ongoing evolution. But I'm not thinking along those lines.
He is Catholic, and so believes that man is 'imageo dei'. I would not defend that particular dogma, but I do believe that the underlying concept is based on a true intuition, which is the uniqueness of man qua cosmic phenomenon.
Nagel's 'Mind and Cosmos' posits that in some sense, humans are like the Universe becoming self-aware 1. Actually that is not such a novel idea, Bohr said (perhaps tongue in cheek) that 'a scientist is only an atom's way of understanding itself'. Julian Huxley said 'As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its past history and its possible future. This cosmic self-awareness is being realized in one tiny fragment of the universe — in a few of us human beings. Perhaps it has been realized elsewhere too, through the evolution of conscious living creatures on the planets of other stars. But on this our planet, it has never happened before.'
So there is some real sense in which, in the human form, the Universe is actually becoming self-aware, and I think that's certainly unique to humans - amongst animals, anyway!
Yes I agree it's an ontological difference, because I think to be human is to be historical. But of course you're right to point out that I'm reluctant to say what I think the ontological difference most fundamentally is, because I don't like having to choose between history, society and personhood.
And when I said it's about what matters to us, I wasn't being entirely relativist. I have an opinion on what ought to matter, and on what ontology ought to be primary, even though I'm hazy as to how to put it. As for ontological levels, note that we do have the concept of local ontologies.
I see. Your question was more specific than I assumed. Broadly speaking I'd agree that abstract thought and thinking about thinking are unique and indicative of a difference in kind, but I don't know how comfortable I am with the implication that the mere sensation/abstract thought dichotomy is the central or underlying discontinuity between humans and animals.
First, you and I, and everybody else, have no idea what all non-human animals know. We don't even know what most other humans know.
Secondly, even if it were true, what would be its relevance to the claim that humans are especially special. I could as easily say
'Who could hear that statement if it were transmitted at a frequency of 40,000 Hz? Only a bat'
The question remains: what is a 'difference in kind'?. So far you have not answered the question, but just given two questionable examples. Examples are not definitions.
But what of the Being of other lifeforms on the Earth? Are all other animals mere matter and energy used to fuel human bodies and factories? Do other animals not have a life of awareness with a logical expression beyond the bodies we observe?
Philosophy is full of terms which aren't amenable to definition and which resist precise explanation. Sorry if I can't be more clear.
I just pointed out the fact of language that humans are generally referred to as 'beings'. Elephants, horses and dogs may be, I suppose. But as far as I can see, the term 'being' in the noun form is used for humans. I think that's interesting.
Surely humans are special because that is something we can easily think, say, or indeed transmit over any chosen frequency given a radio.
But bats? Not so much.
Hearing noises and comprehending messages are unarguable differences in kind.
Even if they don't, how is this justification for denying their Being? Just because a life form doesn't go around thinking and speaking Being doesn't mean they don't expess it. Are animals nothing more than observed matter and energy just because they don't happen to talk about their Being?
What you are arguing is a doctrine of human exceptionalism, which only views humanity as meaningful or significant because they happen to talk about their Being sometimes.
Are you then the first person to ever know what it is like to be a bat?
As for unarguable differences - nobody disputes that there are differences between humans and bats, just as there are differences between weasels and stoats. What I am still left wondering is what does it mean to say that the differences of humans are 'different in kind'. So far there has not been even an attempt to define what that might mean.
I attempted it.
Don't be ridiculous. If you believe bats have language, present the evidence. The research into animal language capabilities is voluminous. And it says even with all possible help from humans, they can't handle fluent grammatical construction.
Quoting andrewk
Well I did define it - the difference between hearing noises and understanding messages.
I don't see any evidence they do, although I think they certainly communicate. (Read the touching story of Nim Chimpsky). But I certainly don't believe animals are 'only matter-energy'; they are organisms, and I believe that mammals and birds are subjects of experience.
I did attempt! Language, mythology, story-telling, not to mention, science, civilization, technology, space travel, computers, the periodic table -this could be quite a long list.
Yes, beavers build dams, bees create hives, birds nest, but those are 'different in kind' to what human beings are demonstrably capable of through science, measurement, language and abstract thought.
Is that getting warmer?
I gave no indication of whether I believe that bats have language or not. What I do believe is that you don't know the answer to that question.
Would it be correct to infer that your definition is that there is a 'difference in kind' between two species if one of them does at least one of the things on your list and the other does none of them?
If so, the list needs to be completed before one can reasonably consider it.
I simply come at this question as a scientist, so never claim absolute knowledge of anything. I only say that considerable research supports my position as the inference to the best explanation. My working belief is that bats don't speak - and so I will be considerably surprised if you can now provide credible evidence that they do.
Animals similar to humans seem to be driven by the pleasure principle. We-animals like pleasure and try to escape pain.
I think all the physical properties of man & beast are similar, not much difference , elephants and whales have much bigger brains than man.
I think in a lot of ways our perceptions are the same, even inferior to many animals. Perception itself carries structure/information.
I am not certain what you mean by 'abstract' thought, which I'll take here to mean a reduction of experience to some form of thought, and I can think of two forms of thought, analogical and logical. Where analogical reasoning compares similarities between two systems to support the conclusion that some further similarity exists. And, you already know what logical thought is all about
I think man and animals share analogical thought processes, but only man so far, is capable of complex logical thought.
Perception itself is image driven (regardless of sense), it imprints, where we differ is in how we (in contradistinction to animals) are able to assign these imprints to statements which we share with others.
OTOH if it's just a working belief then there's no need to debate it. We all have plenty of working beliefs, but don't elevate them the status of philosophical theories.
I of course never said this was about "thinking" because that is an ambiguous term in the context of comparative cognition. Can animals problem solve or form anticipatory imagery? Of course they do.
But I'm puzzled that you seem to think talking about language capacity and speaking are two different things. You might have to explain what is going on there.
Quoting andrewk
It's hardly just a working belief when it is the result of an understanding of the relevant scientific literature. And this is an empirical question, not really a philosophical one - although clearly it is a foundational point for the speculative metaphysics of Peircean semiosis.
What I said was, there is a difference in kind between beings that use language, science, technology and so on, and animals, who don't. I can't see what is difficult to grasp about that distinction.
It's not difficult to grasp. It's just impossibly vague. What does the 'and so on' mean? Walking sticks perhaps? If it was clear, it wouldn't need the 'and so on'.
The boundaries of language, science and technology are also unclear. Many life forms communicate, even coral, so language will need to be much more tightly defined if we want to exclude that (and why should we want to exclude it?).
Use of technology is not confined to humans either. There is a small minority of life forms that use inanimate tools. There is a far greater proportion that use live tools. For instance both parasites and symbiotes use other species to achieve their ends.
It seems to me to be a particularly Western-centric view of the world to say that we are special because only we do an arbitrary collection of things that only we do. It's special pleading.
My view is an amalgam of Eastern influences and pan-psychism. I see all life, and possibly all existence, as one. It is an enormous, rich, unfathomable mystery. For me it is life and consciousness, that are the great mysteries, not the fact that humans just seem to be smarter and more articulate than the other life forms we've encountered thus far.
I'm not saying that's the 'right' view. I don't think there is such a thing as a 'right view'. But I can point out that human exceptionalist positions tend to be either as foggy as Victorian London, or completely lacking in supporting evidence.
Elephants and whales have big brains because they have a lot of body, and the brain runs the body. Voles and sparrows can get along with much less brain, because they have much less body to run. A good share of our vaunted brains have little to do with philosophizing. Large hunks of our brains keep us upright and taking nourishment. We have some hunks of brain that specialize in thinking. Canaries have enlarged lobes concerned with singing. Dog brains have quite a bit of territory devoted to smell. I would expect that whale brains have enlarged lobes dealing with sound imaging.
(But then, horses are a lot bigger than us and they don't have bigger brains. Ditto for hippos. Elephants and whales are, of course, thought to have more extensive mental lives than horses or hippos.)
On being:
I think a dog is a being. It experiences all of the bodily sensations (more, actually) that we do; it feels the same unreflective emotions we feel; it has memories. It anticipates future events (like your arrival at the front door every day at 5:30 p.m.) An old arthritic dog won't respond with its former enthusiasm to the prospect of a walk, but it's still glad to see you. When they have had a stroke, they display the same confusion and uncertainty that people display.
This isn't to humanize the dog. It's to 'animalize' the human. It's in the realm of the body and the way our body enables us To Be that we find common ground with other animals. People who place an over-emphasis on their mental existence, and devalue their physical existence are likely to see less continuity with the rest of the animal kingdom.
Dogs don't/can't worry about the meaning of life? Lucky them, maybe.
Check our /r/likeus for cute gifs and whatnot of animals doing things that humans do. It's cute but also very thought-provoking. Some of the things these animals do are astonishingly human. Had it not been for their physical difference in appearance, they would have passed as humans or near-humans.
In any rate, when we're talking ethics, we can't assume we know what it's like to be a bat, or an antelope, or a cockroach. We have to assume they can experience things, particularly suffering or a wish to survive, the things that make something of ethical value.
OK, then.
I agree - dogs and some other mammals, and birds. But they're not usually referred to as 'beings'. There is some sense to the term 'being' in that it communicates, or connotes, something about the nature of lived experience, which is essentially different to whatever kind of 'being' inanimate objects have. Actually something that comes to mind is Sartre's distinction between being 'in itself' and 'for itself', where the former refers to objects and the latter to beings.
I suppose the ontological distinction I am making is between 'beings' and 'objects'. I think all sentient beings are subjects of experience, but it seems to me only humans are capable of language, techology and abstract thought (although apparently that is an impossibly vague assertion).
I quite like the summary ontological scheme in E F Schumacher's Guide for the Perplexed:
Well, all due respect, everything in the animal kingdom - everything in nature! - ends up dead. It was in respect of this that the Renaissance Platonist Ficino said, if man has not an immortal soul, then he is the most miserable of animals. Why? Because unlike my dog, I can contemplate my mortality and grieve for what I have lost, and will loose.
I know you're probably not going to respond to that, but I think it is what the higher philosophies are pointing towards, and I think it's something that is barely understood or mentioned it, so as long as I am around, I am always going to mention it.
However, that is a rather romanticised view of nature or of the 'animal'. Buddhist lore has always said that one might indeed be 'reborn in the animal realm', but that to do so is a very unfortunate fate, because the chances of being reborn again in the human realm - which is a distinct realm - are exceedingly slight, and because animals are not able to exercise their intelligence, but are bound to follow their instincts. (Not saying any of that is true, but it is 'Eastern'.)
I think anything that is alive is a being, one that is different in kind from all inert objects. All life reacts in some manner that is not entirely predictable. Life is either an emergent phenomena of matter or the product of some intervention.
I entirely agree about what you said about dogs.
Animals feel and so do people, some animals are more sensitive than others, the same with people. I think there is an emotional aspect to intelligence.
It is my intuition that animals are on a continuum with humans, when it comes to the intellect (as defined by Adler). But, I'm not sure how to prove that my intuition is correct.
Studies in animal behavior (including emotions, cognition, memory, perceptions, etc.) will either validate your intuition or they won't. Personally, I bet that it will be shown that your intuition is correct: Animals (including humans) occupy a continuum of capacity and performance in both emotion and intellect.
The details of the continuum probably won't be fully elucidated in the lifetime of any readers here, but the subject is being studied now and results, like Nim's picture sorting, trickle in.
(There is a lot of background noise, like discussions about whether computers are capable of sentience, that needs to be filtered out.)
The capacity to break the world down into conceptual units might be considered a radical break from other animals. The generative capacity that language engenders creates an enormous amount of information that can be stored in memory capacities that only exist with language. It also provides for a generally generalist-type brain which is decoupled from the usual instinctual response to environmental stimuli.
Thus language capacity provides for more survival strategy options. Instead of just associative learning, imitation, reflexes, and fixed-pattern responses, an "inner mental theater" whereby thought can arrange and rearrange the world in this "theater of the mind" is employed as a more generalist approach. This theater of the mind helps us survive by using a vast number of generalist methods such as learning complex tasks, synthesizing conceptual knowledge, sharing complex memes of information, allowances for imagination and novel concept generation, self-talk (which leads to more novel survival strategies) etc. In other words, the immediacy of the world is removed (less if then) and replaced with a complex imagination generating world of mental abstraction.
Further, the abstraction capacity which creates with it a sense of relation of self to others also creates with it deliberate (aka volitional) acts. We choose to do something among a variety of options. We may deliberate in the best way to get it, or what we even really want, but there is at least the sense that we can choose various goals, figure out how to pursue them, debate whether or not we will actually go through pursuing something, etc. In other words we at least feel we know why we are doing something and can plan it out.
Of course studies in animal behaviour have turned out to vary a lot in their conclusions depending on the presuppositions of the human enquirers. Studies of animals in their natural habitats often give quite different findings to those of captivity studies.
More generally, if we become ecologists rather than economists we will look at how everything relates to everything else, Gibsonian 'affordances' and all, instead of seeing how everything relates to human costs and benefits.
Not particularly telling, given that's true of every study humans have ever carried out. I think we sometimes have a tendency to misuse this sort statement to dismiss relevant stuff in the context of consciousness-- but then I suppose that's really an extension of our inability to the our own consciousness seriously as a state of the world. So much philosophy is devoted to saying how consciousness is not a state of the world or doesn't make sense as one.
Quoting anonymous66
No one is arguing that animals aren't capable of cognition. Adler is saying that there are 2 distinct kinds of cognitive powers. Sensible and intellectual.
If there is a bunch of evidence that shows that animals aren't merely using their senses (perception is obviously in the realm of the sense, imagination is in the realm of the senses, memory is the realm of the senses, ), and are also capable of intellectual activity (are they capable of thinking about purely intelligible objects... do they think about justice, virtue, knowledge, souls, angels, God, the infinite, mind itself? Can they understand, judge and reason?), then I haven't seen it. If someone else has, please list that evidence.
Adler also suggests that animals are nominalists.... the fact that Nim was able to group certain pictures together by placing a picture of himself with a group of pictures of humans, suggests that there may be some abstract thought going on. But, that's the only example I can think of.
But, perhaps your (Bitter Crank) point was that there isn't much evidence now, but if people actively look for it, they might derive ways to find it?
I might not be heartbroken if it turns out that there is no evidence.... and that we are in a completely different category. Perhaps there is something to the idea that rational thought is god-like and special.
You can't think like that without the grammatical structuring of human language. So evidence that animals can't master grammar is enough to bolster the strong case they don't think this way - based on the wider fact that there is no behavioural evidence they do think this way.
You also have evidence from humans who have never learnt grammatical language - like the Victorian deaf-mutes who were considered brain-damaged and animal like. Of course, as soon as the deaf have a access to signing - a fully grammatical language - then the think just as well as everyone else.
So given you seem to be involved in some religious argument, it seems sensible to concede a discontinuity between humans and animals on this basis - grammatical language capability. Humans are intellectualising for this biologically-based reason. And not because they are God's creatures partaking of the divine nous, or whatever.
I might not be heartbroken either, if it turns out that there is no evidence. And in any case, I don't expect ever (well, not in the next 2,000,000 years anyway) to find a wolf or a whale thinking about God, angels, infinity, souls, the great chain of being, or such topics.
Apokrisis point about grammar makes sense. A grammatical language seems to be required to think and talk about abstractions. Dogs do seem to live in the present--something people practicing Yoga strive to do. "Be present in the moment...." Hey, my golden retriever was an ace at that. At least as far as I could tell. For all I know, she wasn't just laying on the couch staring out the window;; she may have been communing with the Mind of God, or reviewing the various resentments I am sure she harbored. But I can't say.
Oliver Sacks wrote a book about sign language, and the dramatic impact it had on adults, particularly, adults who had recently learned it. Concepts that had been invisible before suddenly became possible. Their experience of time, for instance, was greatly enriched.
Quoting anonymous66
Well yes, that was my point. My conception of "animal thinking" is that their thinking is rather simple. I'm well aware how easy it is to assign more "thought" to a pet than their behavior requires. As we establish our relationship with a puppy, for instance, dog and human are each learning how the other one operates. Dogs make good pets because their species interacts in groups just by nature. They have to learn how to do it, but they are well equipped. They are sensing, learning, and remembering, the same way a young child senses, learns, and remembers.
Some dogs, parrots, and primates have learned word lists, for instance. They can learn that the word "shoe" matches a shoe-shaped object. This genius border collie in Germany managed to learn 1000+ words (each for a unique object, which it was able to fetch on the basis of the spoken word]. This is outstanding performance for a dog, but it is the sort of things dogs do all the time. Include the world "walk" in a sentence, and the dog is likely to pick that word out and start agitating to go for one.
One of the things about animals learning language is that it doesn't seem to do anything for them. WE like teaching them, and WE think it is exciting to watch them learn and perform, and since the animals are rewarded frequently, they like it as long as the rewards last. But knowing 1000+ German nouns probably didn't enrich the dog's mental life. (Just guessing.) What our dog found life enhancing (going by body language) was getting fed, drinking water, being let outside on demand, going for walks, playing, and being scratched and petted. She had a stiff knee so she started soliciting scratching from us--which she found superior, apparently. She liked our furniture and our food a lot, and appreciated heating and AC. That's about it. She refused to learn commands (aside from speaking for food, sit, lay down, and shut up). No paw shaking, no rolling over, no sitting up, etc.
Our language makes anthropomorphizing almost inevitable. We ascribe thinking to animals when we say "she wants...", "she doesn't like...", "she looked disgusted about..." and so forth. Our language works on people, of course (reasonably well), and dogs are as anxious to please (more so, usually) as people. Interpreting their behavior as sentient just comes naturally. Hell, we ascribe sentience to our cars sometimes.
Quoting anonymous66
What about evidence that they can understand, judge and reason? What about evidence they understand they have and that there are other minds?
I don't believe it can be said that Adler is making a religious argument in his book (at least not in the first 4 chapters). As far as I can tell from his book, he's just using theological terms to distinguish them from things for which there is sense evidence. I think the point is that even if it turns out there is no God, no angels, etc.. the fact remains that man can think about and communicate about things that may or may not exist in the first place, while animals are only aware of what they have sensed (vs intellectualized about). I think it's very possible that all theological concepts only exist in the minds of men. The point is, man was able to conceive of them, even though they don't exist in the real world. As far as we can tell, animals don't have the capability to think about things that don't exist in the real world.
It almost looks like you're saying that you agree with Adler (man is not on a continuum with animals in regards to intellect, he is in a category by himself) because of the evidence, but if that's the case, you want to be sure that everyone knows it's not because "God created us that way".
However dogs (etc) are pre-rational; yogis (etc) trans-rational. 'Falling short' is not the same as 'going beyond'.
However, as you say, biological systems seem much more 'language-like' than 'machine-like', which suggests something very much like the idea of 'logos' (in the pre-Christian sense of a pervading order not a divine command.)
I think the mind is a single power composed of cognition, emotion, sensing, memory, imagination, and what flows there from. We can parse out very specific capacities (like vision acuity or memory competence) but that doesn't mean the capacities aren't integrated.
The entity of each 'self' is a whole. How we perceive, think, feel, remember, and act is blended together.
We trip ourselves up all the time, but just right now we are talking about animals. What trips us up is that dogs--an animal people are very familiar with--are also whole entities, and we connect with them where there is common ground, like emotions, perception, memory, behavior. That's enough on which to build very strong bonds. Any signs of thinking are extra gravy.
The sense of "self' isn't the same as awareness of mind. A number of species pass the "self test"--elephants for instance. Dogs have not. Dogs are unique among animals in following our gaze. I don't think wolves are so abled. But following our gaze doesn't mean they recognize mindedness in us, or possess mindedness themselves. The ability of humans and dogs to follow each other's gaze is a fairly big deal, but it doesn't require "mindedness".
Many animals with whom people become very familiar (pigs, horses, cattle...) also reveal a package of capacities which not only allow us to work with domesticated animals, but provide rewards as well. Small herd dairy farmers (like 30 to 40 cows) really know their cows as individuals. Same thing for horse people, pig farmers, and the like. (Pigs are pretty bright animals, actually. That we raise pigs in rather inhumane conditions distracts us from the mental resources they possess.)
I wasn't being serious about dogs and yoga.
1000+ words is more than sufficient to ask many questions. In all animal "studies" of language acquisition, despite the most fervent bias among researchers, no animal has ever been reported to have asked a question.
This is because, despite their "skill", none possesses the idea that the researcher exists as an individual being, let alone could she be a repository of knowledge. The animal does not even know it exists.
I wonder if the evidence of logical reasoning that is mentioned in the study above would satisfy Adler as being evidence of animal intellect.
Quoting tom
A dog might know that someone is an individual (has a unique set of odors). But no, I wouldn't think a dog would recognize anyone as a repository of knowledge. (Dogs, and some other animals, will solicit assistance from others, though. But doing so doesn't require verbal knowledge.)
Can't have been a sheepdog then, or any normal dog who knows how to sit, stay, fetch etc.
They act on impulse and based on what kind of stimulus is currently concerning them. Some animals such as chimps can learn little bit of language but I remember coming upon a nice quote about chimps and their language ability saying that while they can learn some language, they never seem to have anything to say. This is exactly what one would expect if chimps (and other less intelligent animals) are merely living in the moment and from one impulse to the next. They have no actual thoughts. Humans are truly special and I have no idea why this happens to be so.
Orangutan able to guess a taste without sampling it, just like us.
Chimps and apes. Don't forget Koko.
What I see is disagreements about whether or not they have anything to say. But, nothing conclusive. One group says "yes , they do", another says "no, they don't". I don't know who to believe.
Not many primates have been taught sign language (or some other system) but it seems to be that at least one that had learned did initiate communication. The first thing Koko said was "Heidegger sucks." Then it asked for things that it liked: scratches, tickles, pieces of apple.
I would expect a primate to have rather simple concerns, like wanting something pleasurable, be it food or getting tickled. The life of a wild primate, probably a lab primate too, is fairly complex. How would it talk about any of it's complexity until it had learned words that described this? We have to learn the right words and concepts before we can describe our experiences. We generally need some sort of motivation to talk. (Yes, I know, this sounds contrary to fact since a lot of people seem to need no motivation whatsoever...) We don't just start talking about the difficulty of finding good and affordable rental units when we live on a farm and have no plans to move. Or, we don't start talking about the details of our feces while at a fancy dinner (or, probably, anywhere else except at the gastroenterologist's office). A verbal animal would probably also need a reason to talk about the unpleasantness of one's mate, for instance (its mate, not your mate).
Or more than that, the animal would have to have the capacity for grammatical construction.
Words are one thing. Animals can learn hundreds of them. Rules of recursive sentence structure are a different matter. What Koko and all the other experiments show is no non-human develops the grammatical fluency which is part of human biology.
So you don't need to have a reason to talk. But you do need grammatical capacity to be able to speak in reasoned fashion.
It seems to be the case that primates possess very limited language ability, but how much, how little, isn't settled. Some primate specialists doubt that Koko generated anything spontaneously.
Humans do both -- imitate and generate speech. Baby humans spend quite a bit of time learning how to generate sound -- baby talk. They don't generate "ma ma" or "pa pa" without having sounds, words, and meanings, modeled for them. Eventually they go beyond imitation to generation. Then they won't shut up.
Hmmmm. I suppose I'll just have to wait and see.
In other words we are the only species that builds cars and planes and trains and boats and rubber ducks.