Apes and Language

Abstract

How shall anthropological linguistics assess the significance of the recent experiments with apes and language? The question is a momentous one. The answers may imply a paradigm shift, with Plato finally giving way to Darwin (Linden 1975), or perhaps “an identity crisis for Homo sapiens” (Gallup, Boren, Gagliaro, & Wallnan 1977: 303). At the very least, the issue poses the problem of other minds in a particularly compelling form. In linguistics and psychology, the question has stood the normal terms of the debate between empiricists and rationalists on their heads, with rationalists arguing that the evidence is inadequate, and empiricists arguing that the experiments do not teach, merely reveal (Premack 1976a). Ten years ago, the answer from most established scholars to the question, “Do other animals have language?” would have been an unequivocal “No.” Chomskyan rationalism dominated American linguistics and insisted on what Lenneberg (1967) called “discontinuity theory”—the claim that “it is quite senseless to raise the problem of explaining the evolution of human languages from more primitive systems of communication that appear at lower levels of intellectual capacity” (Chomsky 1968: 59). Even continuity theorists erected formidable barriers; Hockett’s lists of design features (Hockett 1960a; Hockett & Altmann 1968; Hockett & Ascher 1964) stood as a definitive statement against which a reference to the “language” of bees, birds, or dogs could be measured and found imprecise. Now all that has changed; respected students of animal communication speak of a “linguistic model” for the analysis of communication in animals as phylogenetically remote from humans as seagulls (Beer 1976, 1977), and the New York Academy of Sciences sponsors a major symposium (Harnad, Steklis, & Lancaster 1976) at which advocates of discontinuity theory are a distinct minority.