Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(31)

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

What irony: we have traveled all the way from the absence of language as an argument against thought in other species to the position that the manifest thinking by nonlinguistic creatures argues against the importance of language. While I won’t complain about this turn of events, it owes a great debt to language studies on animals such as Alex: not so much because these studies demonstrated language per se but because they helped expose animal thought in a format that we easily relate to. We see a sharp-looking bird, who replies when spoken to, pronouncing object names with great accuracy. He faces a tray full of objects, some made of wool, some of wood, some of plastic, representing all colors of the rainbow. He is invited to feel every object with his beak and tongue, and then, after they have all been returned to the tray, he is asked what the two-cornered blue object is made of. By correctly answering “wool,” he combines his knowledge of color, shape, and material with his memory of what this particular item felt like. Or he sees two keys, one made of green plastic, the other of metal, and is asked “what is different?” He says “color.” Asked “which color bigger,” he answers “green.”8

Anyone watching Alex perform, as I did in the early stages of his career, is blown away. Obviously, skeptics tried to ascribe his skills to rote learning, but since the stimuli changed all the time as did the questions asked, it is hard to see how he could have performed at this level based on stock answers. He would have needed a gigantic memory to handle all possibilities, so much so that it is in fact simpler to assume, as Irene did, that he had acquired a few basic concepts and was capable of mentally combining them. Furthermore, he didn’t need Irene’s presence to answer, nor did he even need to see the actual items. In the absence of any corn, he might be asked what color corn is and would say “yellow.” Particularly impressive was Alex’s ability to distinguish “same” from “different,” which required him to compare objects on a variety of dimensions. All these capacities—labeling, comparing, and judging color, shape, and material—were assumed to require language at the time that Alex began his training. It was an aggravating struggle for Irene to convince the world of his skills, especially since skepticism with respect to birds ran so much deeper than it ever was for our close relatives, the primates. After years of persistence and solid data, however, she had the satisfaction of seeing Alex turn into a celebrity. Upon his death in 2007, he was honored with obituaries in both The New York Times and The Economist.