At first sight, this came across as language learning, but I am not sure this is the right interpretation. Irene didn’t claim that Alex’s talking amounted to speaking in the linguistic sense. But of course, the labeling of objects is very much part of language, and we should not forget that once upon a time linguists defined language simply as symbolic communication. Only when apes proved capable of such communication did they feel the need to raise the bar and add refinements such as that language requires syntax and recursivity. Language acquisition by animals became a huge topic that drew enormous public interest. It was as if all questions about animal intelligence boiled down to a sort of Turing test: can we, humans, hold a sensible conversation with them? Language is such a marker of humanity that an eighteenth-century French bishop was ready to baptize an ape provided he could speak. It surely was all that science seemed to care about in the 1960s and 1970s, resulting in attempts to talk with dolphins and teach language to a multitude of primates. Some of this attention turned sour, however, when the American psychologist Herbert Terrace, in 1979, published a highly skeptical article about the sign-language capacities of Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee named after American linguist Noam Chomsky.3
Terrace found Nim a boring conversationalist. The vast majority of his utterances were requests for desirable outcomes, such as food, rather than expressions of thoughts, opinions, or ideas. Terrace’s surprise at this was by itself rather surprising, however, given his reliance on operant conditioning. Since this is not how we teach children language, one wonders why it was used for an ape. Having been rewarded thousands of times for hand signals, why wouldn’t Nim use these signals to obtain rewards? He simply did what he was taught. As a result of this project, however, the voices pro and contra animal language were getting louder by the day. To find a bird voice among this cacophony threw many people off, because while apes obviously don’t talk, Alex carefully pronounced every word. Superficially, his behavior resembled language more than that of any other animal, even if there was little agreement about what it actually meant.
Irene’s choice of species was intriguing since Doctor Dolittle, the central character of a series of children’s books, owned an African gray, named Polynesia, who taught the good doctor the language of animals. Irene had always been attracted to these stories and as a child already presented her pet budgie with a drawer full of buttons to see how the bird would arrange them.4 Her work with Alex grew straight out of her early captivation with birds and their taste in colors and shapes. But before discussing her research further, let me briefly dwell on the desire to talk with animals—a desire often expressed by scientists working on animal cognition—as it relates to the deeper connection often assumed between cognition and language.
Oddly enough, this particular desire must have passed me by, because I have never felt it. I am not waiting to hear what my animals have to say about themselves, taking the rather Wittgensteinian position that their message might not be all that enlightening. Even with respect to my fellow humans, I am dubious that language tells us what is going on in their heads. I am surrounded by colleagues who study members of our species by presenting them with questionnaires. They trust the answers they receive and have ways, they assure me, of checking their veracity. But who says that what people tell us about themselves reveals actual emotions and motivations?
This may be true for simple attitudes free from moralizations (“What is your favorite music?”), but it seems almost pointless to ask people about their love life, eating habits, or treatment of others (“Are you pleasant to work with?”). It is far too easy to invent post hoc reasons for one’s behavior, to be silent about one’s sexual habits, to downplay excessive eating or drinking, or to present oneself as more admirable than one really is. No one is going to admit to murderous thoughts, stinginess, or being a jerk. People lie all the time, so why would they stop in front of a psychologist who writes down everything they say? In one study, female college students reported more sex partners when they were hooked up to a fake lie-detector machine than without it, thus demonstrating that they had been lying before.5 I am in fact relieved to work with subjects that don’t talk. I don’t need to worry about the truth of their utterances. Instead of asking them how often they engage in sex, I just count the occasions. I am perfectly happy being an animal watcher.
Now that I think of it, my distrust of language goes even deeper, because I am also unconvinced of its role in the thinking process. I am not sure that I think in words, and I never seem to hear any inner voices. This caused a bit of an embarrassment once at a meeting about the evolution of conscience, when fellow scholars kept referring to an inner voice that tells us what is right and wrong. I am sorry, I said, but I never hear such voices. Am I a man without a conscience, or do I—as the American animal expert Temple Grandin once famously said about herself—think in pictures? Moreover, which language are we talking about? Speaking two languages at home and a third one at work, my thinking must be awfully muddled. Yet I have never noticed any effect, despite the widespread assumption that language is at the root of human thought. In his 1973 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, tellingly entitled “Thoughtless Brutes,” the American philosopher Norman Malcolm stated that “the relationship between language and thought must be so close that it is really senseless to conjecture that people may not have thoughts, and also senseless to conjecture that animals may have thoughts.”6
Since we routinely express ideas and feelings in language, we may be forgiven for assigning a role to it, but isn’t it remarkable how often we struggle to find our words? It’s not that we don’t know what we thought or felt, but we just can’t put our verbal finger on it. This would of course be wholly unnecessary if thoughts and feelings were linguistic products to begin with. In that case, we’d expect a waterfall of words! It is now widely accepted that, even though language assists human thinking by providing categories and concepts, it is not the stuff of thought. We don’t actually need language in order to think. The Swiss pioneer of cognitive development, Jean Piaget, most certainly was not ready to deny thought to preverbal children, which is why he declared cognition to be independent of language. With animals, the situation is similar. As the chief architect of the modern concept of mind, the American philosopher Jerry Fodor, put it: “The obvious (and I should have thought sufficient) refutation of the claim that natural languages are the medium of thought is that there are nonverbal organisms that think.”7