Sorry this has become a thread hijack. I will continue it on the other thread once I have time to get up to speed there.
There are some fundamental issues here that might help bring the disagreements about what is being observed closer together.
First, there are those who would have all experiments with animal intelligence disavow any empathy on the part of the researcher. In other words researchers should make no assignment of motive or conclude any intent based on what intent or motive a human would have.
Then there is the other extreme, assigning human motive and intent to every observation.
Neither makes sense. The former would imply humans were changed by a god-like action, making us so unique in the animal world that our brains had to have evolved from something functionally completely dissimilar. That isn't the case structurally and in capability (tool use among primates for instance), nor can animal emotion be denied. So a position one cannot conclude
any primate action can be compared to any human action seems absurd.
The latter position, that everything the communicating primates do carries the same motives and intent as humans' denies the differences between us.
This essay (also where my above post quotes came from) brings up a couple things re the differences.
it is clear that the apes studied are, in all well-documented activities, exclusively focused upon the immediate, particular objects of their sense consciousness. They seek concrete sensible rewards readily available in the present. ..... Apes have no proper concept of time in terms of knowing the past as past or the future as future. Nor do they offer simply descriptive comment or pose questions about the contents of the passing world _ not even as a small child does when he asks his father why he shaves or tells his mother she is a good cook even though his stomach is now full.
Time and again it is evident that the most pressing obsession of any ape is the immediate acquisition of a banana (or its equivalent). It has little concern for the sorts of speculative inquiry about that same object which would concern a botanist.
In fact, the whole experiential world of apes is so limited that researchers are severely restricted in terms of their selection of motivational tools capable of use in engaging them to perform or dialogue. ... Small wonder the apes will neither philosophize nor clean their cages!
The second fundamental issue to clarify is what is the difference between language and stimulus-response. Is conversation occurring or are behaviors merely being learned which elicit certain responses?
I think those who believe human thought is completely different from animal thought would discount just about everything and those who infer all primate behavior has human intent and motive would count everything as language.
"Go home get it", my son's first sentence, is a nice example of using language. Before speech he would have cried, I would have figured out it was the missing blanket, a stimulus-response. Now he was not only saying he wanted his blanket, he was communicating he knew where it was and what it took to get it. Somewhere between learning language and stimulus-response, he had to have developed a way of thinking about the location of an object that wasn't in view and some idea of going to the location and finding it there.
If he did that mentally with pictures instead of symbols would it be language? Sure. A picture in your mind is as symbolic as a word.
Rather, more impressive experimental results are now forthcoming, e.g., the Savage-Rumbaugh experiments in which two chimpanzees were taught to communicate and cooperate with each other _ using a computer keyboard to transmit information revealing the location of hidden food.12 In another experiment, after extensive training and prompting, the same animals learned to cooperate with one another by handing over the correct tool needed to obtain food when their primate partner requested it _ again by use of computer symbols and without human presence during the actual experiment....
There can be little doubt, in the case of this experiment, that the visual patterns used in the keyboard system had mental associations with objects, and that the chimpanzee who punched a particular key did this in the expectation that the other animal would hand him a particular tool.13
Still later, these same prodigious chimpanzees advanced to seemingly quite abstract symbolic associations:
When they were trained with arbitrary symbols assigned to the two object categories "foods" and "tools" Austin and Sherman successfully selected the appropriate category, when shown arbitrary symbols which were the names for particular foods or tools (Savage-Rumbaugh <et al.>, 1980). That is, they were able to label labels, rather than merely label objects: for instance if shown the arbitrary pattern indicating "<banana>" they responded by pressing the key meaning "<food,>" but if shown the symbol for "<wrench>" they pressed the "<tool>" key.14
So in this debate, these are the issues. Whether or not the data is being properly obtained and interpreted is secondary. Of course the research methodology is critical to determine conclusions, but if one doesn't examine their position on animal intelligence in the first place and precisely define what suffices as language and what doesn't, conclusions will be unchanged in either camp.
I'll give you an anecdote which shaped my view of the animal mind. We were car camping years ago when some raccoons got into the back of the car and into the oatmeal. Wanting to watch them we set up two candles on the ground and put the oatmeal in between. To our utter amazement, one of the raccoons carefully picked up each candle, one at a time, and turned it upside down and snuffed it out. Tell me how on Earth that animal knew to do that with those candles?
