Do some Animals, aside from Humans, think?

[Skeptic Ginger]

I remember reading many years ago about studies with dolphins where they (and maybe dogs, but I don't recall for sure) were the only animals that had shown the ability for "complex" language understanding. For example, you could tell them something like "take the red ball under the bar and then put it into the round hole," and they would be able to do it. Most animals can only comprehend simple statements like "red ball" but can't master the "unders" and "thens" and "intos." That's my basic recollection, and I'm sure I'm oversimplifying it, but as I said it was maybe 20 years ago.

I've also read some stuff that makes a lot of sense to me (and has been touched on by quarky) about our inability to really comprehend dolphin (and other marine mammal) intelligence because their environments are so alien to us, as is the way they perceive their environment. Their use of sonar means a very different way of translating incoming data, which could mean a very different brain process that we are unable to truly understand. We only test intelligence as we know it ourselves.

Chimps and Bonobos are capable of complex sentence structure.

Back with the links in a few minutes....

 

[nzric]

It seems the question is redundant because the definition of "think" is too broad. As someone pointed out, yes, a dog thinks dog thoughts, a chimp thinks chimp thoughts.

Walrus, maybe you could change the question to "would some animal, aside from Humans, be able to..."

Understand the meaning of "ten minutes"?
Demonstrate gratitude?
Feel a desire for revenge?
Understand a metaphor?
Be moved by a piece of art?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

There are a number of threads on this topic but the two I got the most involved in are linked here. Piggy's thread on Koko the gorilla started off a long discussion based on the fact the science behind Koko the gorilla's use of sign language was really bad. The main researcher was simply not using good scientific technique.

A second thread was going on at the same time which started off on how an article on parrot use of human taught language was being reported in some unreviewed web journal with silly claims the parrot was psychic. But there was other research with parrots that was legit just as there was other research with primates and language that was not absurd as the Koko science was.

But after looking further into the subject as a whole, and having my first absurd argument with CFLarsen, I found a wealth of properly conducted research in teaching non human primates human language.

Piggy remained skeptical and MangaFranga had some criticisms based on the finer points of syntax. I, on the other hand, found the evidence extremely compelling.

Here are my posts from both threads which have the links to the pertinent citations.

Psychic parrot? What are the BBC thinking?
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=2210361#post2210361
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=2212928#post2212928
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=2214193#post2214193
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=2218395#post2218395
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=2219178#post2219178
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=2223277#post2223277


Science Hoax: Simian Sign-Language - Greatest Science Hoax Ever?
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=2248304#post2248304
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=2250774#post2250774
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=2255615#post2255615
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=2255915#post2255915
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=2277989#post2277989
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=2290424#post2290424

I think there is some good discussion about language and thought in the threads. Chomsky has a whole thesis on the concept. (Surprise, politics is his second career.)
Linguistic Contributions to the Study of Mind
Introduction - James McGilvray - The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky, Cambridge, 2005
The 'Chomskyan Era' - Noam Chomsky - Excerpted from The Architecture of Language, 2000


Clearly animal language not taught to them by us is qualitatively different from ours. But animals have to be having some kind of thought process going on without language. The parrot was able to tell numbers, colors and material of objects. It needed human words to tell us it knew those things. But to figure out how many and what color, etc requires thinking of some kind. And my dogs may have just learned what cues mean, but they have to be thinking something when they chase each other around the yard and wrestle for fun. It is completely different behavior than when they chase the critters out of the yard.

And when they hear their leash rattle, they start whining to go on their walk. They definitely know that is distinctly different from scratching the door to go out in the backyard or to get back in.

These are some of the links I found.
Ape Consciousness–Human Consciousness: A Perspective Informed by Language and Culture1

"Uniquely human" component of language found in gregarious birds

The videos on this link are excellent examples of novel use of language by Kanzi the Bonobo after being taught human language. They are short, and pretty interesting.
KANZI AND NOVEL SENTENCES & PANBANISHA DRAWS COFFEE
http://www.greatapetrust.org/research/general/panbanishaKanzi.php#

 

[royniles]

All organisms think in order to move in concert with a calculating mechanism that predicts probable consequences of perceivable options.

But as to abstract thought, I don't think the stage of life has been identified where use of rudimentary symbols as a sort of "options" reference library first began.

We don't really know when organisms could be said to have no "language" by which to communicate with others either.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I bewildered as to why anyone would arrive at the idea that animals don't think. Of course they think. Why would anyone think otherwise? Obviously, other animals are less intelligent than humans (by our typical definition of intelligence) and it is clear that the capacity for abstract thought diminishes with brain size and complexity ultimately to a vanishing point, but it is nonsensical to suppose there is some quantum difference between human brain function and that of other animals. You can thank religion, I would guess, for this ridiculous idea that humans are of another order of being compared to all other life.

This was my first response but I think the question is more about thinking with language and thinking without language.

I certainly learned a boat full in the discussion we had about this. Mangafranga is a linguist of some kind. It took a while to think through the issues of how an animal without speech thinks.

My Mom is currently losing the ability to find the words to say the things she wants to say. And you would think she was confused. But after staying with her over Christmas, I realized she was a lot less confused than it appeared, she just couldn't find the words to tell us what she was thinking. She managed to show me lots of things she was unable to say. It was like communicating with someone who didn't speak your language.

Clearly thinking is not done completely with language. Language does however, completely change brain function once language develops. I think it is an amazing subject to contemplate.

But you are right that it is bizarre anyone could believe animals don't think just because they don't have language. I think the long held egocentric belief that humans were not animals has a lingering effect on many people's perceptions of the differences in animal thought. I was surprised that the obvious success teaching bonobos and chimps human language was not readily believed by a number of people looking at the same evidence I was looking at. Granted there was bad research out there like that with Koko the gorilla and sign language. And much of the early research had to be refined to rule out misinterpretations of the observations. But when you tell a Bonobo to take the TV outside and put the hat in the fridge (or whatever the novel commands are on the video) and you can see for yourself that's exactly what the ape does, it's hard to argue that animal isn't using language.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

We have two border collies, and I have no doubt that they can think. As far as I can tell, though, their way of thinking differs from ours in two respects:

1. Their working memory (analogous to L1 or L2 cache in a computer) is smaller than ours, so they aren't good at solving problems that rely on working backwards from steps they just took. This explains why dogs seem incredibly stupid when they can't figure out how to unwind their leash from the tree they just wrapped themselved around.

2. They don't do deep processing, meaning that they take each situation as it is rather than interpreting it and extrapolating based on past experience. This is why, when I teach a dog to sit, the task "sit in the living room" is different from the task "sit in the back yard". They don't generalize well. This ability in humans is probably what allowed us to develop language.

Speaking of communication, it's a common misconception that dogs communicate verbally, as we do. They do SOME verbal communication, but it's really only needed when the dogs can't see each other. They have an enormous body-language vocabulary. For instance, the old saying "dogs can smell fear" actually arises from the dog's tendency to analyze our body language, often misinterpreting it because our body language is different from theirs. When we are afraid of a dog, it usually shows up in our body language in the form of stiff, deliberate movement. In dog language, stiffness is a sign that a dog is getting ready to attack. Naturally, this upsets the other dog, and he goes on the offensive.

And yet dogs have an excellent long term memory for many things such as where they saw the bunny on the trail, which dogs they met their first year of life which they see as family and which dogs they didn't meet so see as 'not family', an owner who gave them up years later is still recognized, and so on.

 

[jimbob]

skeptigirl, have you read any books by Frans de Waal? You might like them...

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

No, but I just Amazoned a couple and they look excellent. I'll have to read a couple of them.