The recurrent notions are animals do not speak to avoid being hired by
professors
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Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The Grice's Implicature
McEvoy knows how Popper used Buehler, and we know how Grice loved Peirce even
he found him kryptotechnic. And we know that Helm might be interested whether
the alarm call of a prairie dog would be difference if it's this or that breed
of dog that is approaching.
Slobodchikoff makes an analogy to Mandarin.
The word ma can mean “horse,” “mother” or “to scold,” depending on its
intonation.
Whereas the tone of human speech is typically determined by a fundamental
frequency and just three or four overtones layered on top, prairie dogs can
have six or seven audible overtones mingling in a single call.
Slobodchikoff thinks that by modifying these harmonics and combining them in
different ways, prairie dogs form original descriptive phrases: dog big yellow
fast; human small blue slow.
Why would a prairie dog need such specific information?
"My guess is that these descriptions evolved to recognize and remember
predators with different appearances and hunting strategies,” Slobodchikoff
says.
Coyotes, for example, have varying proportions of black, gray, white, red and
yellow in their fur.
"One coyote might walk into a colony relatively nonchalant,” Slobodchikoff
explains.
Some will charge a prairie dog. Others lie down at a burrow, waiting for up to
an hour to pounce.”
Indeed, some of Slobodchikoff’s studies support the idea that prairie dogs
remember individuals.
In one experiment, black-tailed prairie dogs — one of the five prairie-dog
species in North America — distinguished human trespassers by height and
T-shirt color and further produced a signature call for a person who repeatedly
fired a 12-gauge shotgun into the ground.
All this evidence, Slobodchikoff insists, elevates prairie-dog alarm calls from
the level of mere “communication” into the realm of language.
Calling it communication sets up that us-versus-them divide,” he says. "And
that's why I love Grice."
I don’t think there is a gap."
"I think it all integrates in there."
"You can go to Barnes and Noble and pick up essay after essay that says humans
are the only ones with language."
"That cheats our understanding of animal abilities and inhibits the breadth of
our investigation."
"I would like to see people give animals more credence, and I think it’s
happening now, slowly. But I would like to push it along a little faster.”
Slobodchikoff’s research is one of the longest and most comprehensive studies
of highly complex animal communication in the wild, without training or
inducement of any kind.
Yet his peers disagree about the merits of his work, in part because they
disagree more generally about methodology.
Some scientists worry that Slobodchikoff’s studies, especially the early ones,
are too small and depend too much on unreliable techniques.
The statistical approach he uses can be treacherous,” says Julia Fischer of the
German Primate Center in Göttingen.
It tends to pick up patterns that might not be there. If you redo his analysis
with modern techniques, I’m not sure how strong it would be.”
Fischer belongs to one of two unrelated research groups that recently cast
doubt on some aspects of the 1980 vervet-monkey studies.
Based on a reanalysis of the original data and fresh experimentation, the two
groups argue that the vervet calls are not as clear-cut as they have been
viewed and that the monkeys ignore playbacks just as often as they respond to
them appropriately.
Other researchers counter that Slobodchikoff’s techniques are sound and widely
used and that reluctance to embrace his research owes more to prejudice than
empiricism.
"It seems to me that some people don’t trust Con because what he has found is
outside what they are willing to accept,” says James Hare, a biologist at the
University of Manitoba who studies ground squirrels and Grice's squarrels.
"But when you look at it all scientifically, I can’t really pick apart his
methods."
"He presents compelling evidence of fine-grained communication about color,
shape and size. I think language is a perfectly reasonable thing to call it.”
Stephen Anderson, of New Haven, in New England, says the idea that prairie dogs
have language is ludicrous.
The essence of language, he argues, is not a set of symbols or phrases but
rather syntax: the ability to systematically combine symbols into an infinite
array of sentences. I asked him what an animal would have to do to meet the
minimum requirements for language.
He replied that if you showed a parrot a fruit that it had never seen before, a
pineapple, for example, and it said, “My, that looks spiky, so I don’t think I
want to eat it,” that might be sufficient.
Because the fundamental nature of language is so intangible, because there is
no agreed-upon way to determine its existence, it is easy to continually
dismiss new evidence of ostensible animal language as inadequate — intriguing,
but not quite good enough.
Contrast that with the firm scientific consensus that tool use is far more
prevalent in the animal kingdom than previously realized.
Chimpanzees fashion twigs into dipping sticks for termites and honey; sea
otters store rocks in “armpit pouches,” using them to crack open seashells; and
octopuses tote coconut shells to use as shields.
No other animal makes Black and Decker power drills, yet we do not deny the
legitimacy of their crafts.
Why should language be so different?
Setting such disputes aside, Slobodchikoff’s ongoing study is lacking in one
critical aspect: It is unfinished.
"I have great respect for the prairie-dog work, but so far there is no evidence
that the most nuanced information is meaningful to this species,” says
Zuberbühler, the researcher who studied Campbell’s monkeys.
Slobodchikoff’s playback experiments demonstrate that different predator-alarm
calls trigger distinct escape responses, but so far he has not been able to
link the acoustic variations that ostensibly encode color, shape and so on to
any observable behavioral differences.
Without such evidence, he cannot rule out the possibility that some of the
discrepancies in the alarm calls are an inadvertent byproduct of prairie-dog
physiology — an increased sensitivity to a certain color or shape invoking a
more forceful rush of air through the vocal tract, for instance — and that the
animals do not recognize such differences or use them to their advantage.
Perhaps part of what Slobodchikoff deems prairie-dog language is just useless
prattle. This is the gaping pitfall of his field.
Can we ever know, definitively, that another species is saying what we think
it’s saying?
In Flagstaff, Slobodchikoff, Grice, and I spent some time searching for their
former study sites.
One had been converted into a baseball diamond, another into a cow pasture and
others into parking lots and landscaped highway shoulders.
At one point we drove to an alpine meadow strewn with the white discs of
morning glory and bordered by ponderosa pines. Just about a month earlier,
Slobodchikoff saw prairie dogs here.
Now the grass was still and silent.
Dozens of brown mounds rose from the ground, covered in vegetation, like
village ruins reclaimed by a jungle.
When Slobodchikoff started studying prairie dogs in the late 1970s, there were
about 50 healthy colonies within a 30-mile radius of his university.
It was easy to repeatedly study the same colonies over long periods of time.
There are just a few hamlets left in and around Flagstaff.
"Something is happening to prairie dogs,” Slobodchikoff says.
"They’re disappearing all over.”
Before 1800, as many as five billion prairie dogs lived throughout the Great
Plains in colonies that collectively spanned more than 100 million acres.
Today, by some estimates, the five prairie-dog species inhabit as little as one
to two million acres total.
Much like the bison, and the grice in Scotland, prairie dogs have declined in
part because of sanctioned mass slaughter — not for their meat or fur but
simply to eliminate what many people consider a pest.
Ranchers have long held that cattle cannot thrive alongside prairie dogs
because the two creatures compete for pasture.
Studies suggest that such competition is generally negligible.
It takes hundreds of prairie dogs to eat as much grass as a single cow.
There is also a persistent notion that horses and cattle break their legs by
tripping in prairie-dog burrows, though evidence is scant.
Around 1900, another major threat to prairie dogs arrived on the West Coast.
Trade ships from Asia brought rats infested with Yersinia pestis, the bacterium
that causes plague.
Using fleas as an initial vector, Y. pestis didn’t just trigger an epidemic of
plague in San Francisco; it escaped into the wild, eventually establishing
itself in more than 76 mammal species.
Prairie dogs are one of the most susceptible.
Plague can wipe out an entire colony in a week, in part because they are so
intimate and close-quartered.
Shortly before I visited, plague was detected in the alpine meadow surrounding
us. Slobodchikoff explained that despite the efforts of conservation groups,
such as the Prairie Dog Coalition and Habitat Harmony, very few colonies are
vaccinated or shielded from hunting and mass poisoning.
Prairie dogs have hardly any federal or state protections.
"People see them as vermin that spread disease,” Slobodchikoff said. (In truth,
prairie dogs die far too quickly from plague to be a major vector.)
"Most people would be more than happy if we got rid of every single one.”
There are certain animals that we love, defend and even revere precisely
because of their sentience, because they seem to possess minds similar to our
own. After Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey brought the intelligence and kinship of
chimpanzees and gorillas into the limelight, increasing resources were
channeled into saving the great apes from habitat destruction and poaching.
Following John Lilly’s research and writing on dolphin communication in the
1960s, the cetaceans gained an almost cultlike following. Most recently there
has been increasing backlash against the captivity of elephants and orcas,
highly communal and empathic species.
Nothing of the sort has happened for prairie dogs. If Slobodchikoff is right
about their language — to say nothing of all the other undeciphered clucks,
yawps and bellows on Earth — then we will have been the cause of, and the
indifferent witness to, the annihilation of a species that helped transform our
understanding of animal minds. To recognize that we are not alone, that we
share our world with other conscious, thinking, speaking beings, requires us to
sacrifice a great deal of ego. At the same time, it folds us, palpably and
inextricably, into the fabric of a much grander universe. As it stands, our
greatest chance of achieving such a breakthrough may not require radio
telescopes or interstellar travel but rather a new appreciation for a raucous
rodent in our vast grassy backyard. Assuming, that is, that we don’t lose — or
invent — anything in translation.
Just as we were leaving the barren colony in Flagstaff, Slobodchikoff spotted a
lone prairie dog in the distance, standing upright in the classic sentinel
fashion. We fumbled for our binoculars and peered through the passenger window.
“Can you see him?” Slobodchikoff said. I said, “Show me again where you
pointed.” He did. At first, I thought it must have run off. Then I found it:
Just the right shape and color but eerily angular and statuesque.
“I’m not sure that’s a prairie dog,” I told Slobodchikoff. He craned his neck
to re-examine the scene. “You’re right,” he said, lowering his binoculars.
“It’s a rock.”
Cheers,
Speranza
