Looks like we’d get some good examples and methodological pointers from the works of Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, a husband-and-wife team of biologists at the University of Pennsylvania (my alma mater). Marc Hauser at Harvard is one of their students. He co-authored a paper in Nature with another biologist and Chomsky a few years ago showing pretty conclusively the non-existence of the latter’s beloved “language organ” or “innate language acquisition device”. (Noam still clings to recursion as possibly unique to humans.)
Primate Societies (ISBN: 0226767167)
Smuts, Barbara B.; Cheney, Dorothy L.; Seyfarth, Robert M.; Wrangham, Richard; Struhsaker, Thomas T. (editors)
1987
How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species (ISBN: 0226102459)
1990
Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind (ISBN: 9780226102436)
2007
Looks like we’d get some good examples and methodological pointers from the works of Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, a husband-and-wife team of biologists at the University of Pennsylvania (my alma mater).
I think we would get some good methodological pointers about how to study baboons in the wild; but I don’t think we’d learn much about how to study social control. And why is it always about social rankings in terms of access to females? Is there really any evidence that baboons control for anything more than “he can beat the crap out of me so I won’t mess with his woman”? Would a baboon male who, by the observer’s determination, is ranked # 5, say, really stay away if one of the hot females was being courter by # 4 but make his move if she were being courted by #6.
I would like to see the work of ape researchers who study regular old control (as the Plooij’s did) using the test for controlled variables before getting into the social stuff.
Looks like we’d
get some good examples and methodological pointers from the works of
Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, a husband-and-wife team of biologists
at the University of Pennsylvania (my alma mater). Marc Hauser at Harvard
is one of their students. He co-authored a paper in Nature
with another biologist and Chomsky a few years ago showing pretty
conclusively the non-existence of the latter’s beloved “language
organ” or “innate language acquisition device”. (Noam
still clings to recursion as possibly unique to
humans.)
I think we could give them some pointers, too, though their
experiments are certainly clever. The problem is in the interpretation.
When one female looks toward the sound of her child crying out, and the
other two look at that mother, what are they each controlling for?
Everything said after observing the behaviors is a guess based more or
less on “what would be going on in me if I were doing that?”
When you have no way of asking to see if this anthropomorphization is
justified, you have to fall back on indirect methods, and the only one I
know of that might work is the test for the controlled variable. I don’t
think that unsupported inferences are very useful, and I don’t believe
the stimulus-response explanations.
Dr. Cheney and Dr.
Seyfarth are skeptical of claims that chimpanzees have a theory of mind,
in part because the experiments supporting that position have been
conducted on captive chimps. Its bewildering to us that none of the
people who study ape cognition have been motivated to study wild
chimpanzees, Dr. Cheney said.
I think that since you have an interest in what Cheney and Seyfarth are
doing as well as in linguistics, you should contact them and start a
dialog on PCT – telling them about Franz Plooij’s work with chimps might
be a good opening.