Putting apes ( body and language ) together again A review article of : Clark , A . Being

Introduction In Apes, Language and Human Mind the achievements of Kanzi, a bonobo chimpanzee, are used to re-evaluate the language abilities of non-human primates. The book's authors, Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker and Taylor, (S-RST) contend that the language achievements of non-humans are made needlessly difficult to evaluate by the anthropocentrism of traditional views of mind. A major part of S-RST's argument takes the form of a critique of what they see as the obstacles to understanding Kanzi's significance. Andy Clark's (AC) Being there: putting mind, world and body together again is equally opposed to traditional conceptions of mind, but his main thrust is positive. Although also generally opposed to anthropocentrism, Clark is primarily concerned to develop an empirical and theoretical case for the view that cognition is not handled exclusively by brains, but should instead be seen as 'distributed' in a range of ways between brains, bodies and world. Our motivation for discussing the two works together is, in a nutshell, that we think Clark's theoretical approach is a better way of thinking about Kanzi than anything S-RST offer. That is to say that while we share S-RST's view that Kanzi's story is important, we end up disappointed with their proposed interpretation of his achievements. Although Clark makes no mention of nonhuman language in Being There, we think Kanzi's achievements are appropriately understood in terms of distributed cognition. Indeed, not only do they support Clark's view of how mind, bodies and brains interact, but they also count as good evidence that human language is an example of distributed cognition. Both works, as we see them, have a common critical foil in the view that cognitive capacities, including those relevant to language, are entirely dependent on localised or specialised capabilities of the brain. Commitment to this type of 'cognitive internalism', we argue, hampers empirical understanding of how minded beings deal with world. Similarly, it hinders thinking about how apes exploit human language. Thus, by defending the view that cognition is distributed, we aim to promote new understanding of language, including ape language. Clark's distributed view was anticipated in phenomenology, and has come to be important across behavioural ecology, neurophysiology, robotics, psychology, and cognitive anthropology. To our knowledge, as yet, it has made no significant impression in the language sciences. In seeking to alter this state of affairs, we argue that it is precisely because linguistic cognition is distributed that Kanzi is able to …