William M. Fields

Linguistic, Cultural and Cognitive Capacities of Bonobos(Pan Paniscus)

When human cultures merge, each takes on characteristics of the other and a completely new culture may emerge. Can a similar kind of phenomenon occur when the ways of being, doing, thinking, speaking and acting meld between two closely related hominid species, like Panand Homo? We point to a new kind of group process, termed a Pan/ Homoculture, and characterized by changes in the behavior of each species. A common emic perspective has developed between members of different species as they have come to share a common culture, but not a common biology. Their long-term shared experiences lend the force of credibility and meaningfulness to the communications regarding goals, plans and intentions. These expressions, inherently functional and meaningful within the joint subjective experiences of the members of the culture, nonetheless fail to meet standards of basic science, which demand detachment and disembodiment of communication. Because of this failure, accurate emic accounts of experiences within the culture are categorized as ‘anecdotal’. By contrast, identical emic descriptions of experiences in ‘human-only’ cultures carry the force of law when given under oath. Accurate emic descriptions of communication processes—using examples of spontaneous Pan/ Homodialogues—are presented to reveal this bias. These dialogues illustrate the way in which empiricism acts to protect established modes of thought from new frameworks that pose a threat to its established interpretations of extant data. They also illustrate the cultural processes of shared knowledge, shared memory and joint subjective perceptions of reality that structure true symbolic communicative interchange and render it impervious to etic understanding.

Kanzi Acquires Language in a Forest in Georgia

This book develops an idea originating in Japanese primatology and currently increasingly prominent in Western biology: the idea of culture in animals. Culture is often considered what distinguishes humans from animals. While we regard humans as living meaningfully in shared cultures developed and maintained in collaboration, animals are often conceived of as moving instinctively and alone in barren nature, according to innate genetic programs, even when they live in social groups. For instance, in an ambitious attempt to explore how human consciousness evolved, Merlin Donald writes that ‘our exceptional powers as a species derive from the curious fact that we have broken out of one of the most critical limitations of traditional nervous systems — their loneliness, or solipsism’ (Donald 2001: xiii). Although the author’s exposition of culture as a powerful dimension of human life is similar to the notion of culture developed in this book, we do not see culture as a uniquely human possession. Contemporary biologists studying animal behaviour are slowly transforming this black-and-white picture of what it is like to be an animal, as opposed to a human being. Researchers follow in the footsteps of Japanese primatologists by naming the individual animals under study and employing methods that probably would have created a scandal in Western science half a century ago.

What Does It Mean to Study Language

The rapid development of the biological sciences during the past decades is to a large extent due to new forms of specialized research work. Molecular biology and genetics would disintegrate without the continually updated technologies, skills and forms of knowledge that biologists in various fields develop and share with colleagues and students, but not with the rest of us speaking humans.

Design Features of Language

If man is shaped by the same evolutionary mechanisms as the other animal species, then we can reasonably expect to find precursors of human language in the other primates. Detecting these precursors in apes’ interactions has proved to be a difficult task. In an important anthology on primate behaviour, Tree of Origin (2001), edited by Frans de Waal, the psychologist Charles Snowdon discusses language as a problem for evolutionary biology: Of all the topics in this book, the origin of language is one of the most difficult to imagine emerging from our nonhuman primate ancestors. Evidence of cooperative hunting, of the cultural transmission of tool use, of empathy and reconciliation, of manipulating the behavior of social companions is clear in great apes and occasionally in some monkeys. In these areas it is easy to see much of our own behavior reflected in the behavior of apes and monkeys, and vice versa.

Ambiguous Human Culture

Deeply unexpected discoveries often reveal an equally unexpected ignorance. We may not know what we ourselves have discovered, especially not in our professional capacity for the new experiences can take us beyond our scientific training and how we commonly conceptualize results in relevant fields of inquiry These unexpected discoveries are often the most exciting ones, but they tend to make scientific work almost indistinguishable, at least for a period of time, from philosophical thinking. The revealed lack of clarity about the concepts that normally are used to make sense of the data often awakens the philosopher inside the professional scientist. This awakened philosopher is not an expert thinker, but a dazed human being, who faces the challenging fact that she cannot always trust her professional skill. She has the desire to think through, in her own self-made way, what she has experienced, for the manual has become untrustworthy. Philosophical thinking tends to be homespun. It arises when the more elaborate guidelines fail and we trust nothing except what we can achieve by thinking of our own accord. To the extent that professional philosophy exists, philosophy in its most original form arises when the professional doubts the veracity of her reasoning habits, the concepts she uses as if they were self-evident, her almost automatic way of writing articles, her habitual way of teaching and arguing, perhaps even her way of greeting colleagues: everything belonging to the academic culture to which she has adapted herself.

Summary: The Catalogue of Design Features

Comparative studies of cognition in human and nonhuman primates should in the future be complemented by cultural approaches where humans and animals are allowed to affect each other. Such work would help us see the overwhelming affinities and similarities that put the differences in their proper perspective: Biology that lacks an intuitive knowledge of resemblances can provide only an impoverished, mechanistic view of the living world. We may say that the rationalization of this intuitive understanding of similarity is the essence of the new science of living things. (Imanishi 2002: 7)