Kanzi vs Descartes

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and her co-authors have written a densely argued book about one of the most fascinating topics in semiotics “How do we recognize the presence of language?”. This encompasses ‘What is Language? What is its function? and where does it come from in terms of mentation?’. The major study subject of this book, Apes Language and the Human Mind, is a Bonobo named Kanzi who is widely considered to be the most linguistically competent ape alive today. He grew up in a lexigram and vocal English using social group with his step mother (in his early life) and many researchers, who rather than training him, lived with him in an intensely interactive social milieu. Ironically this is what Herbert Terrace, who later decried linguistic capabilities in Chimpanzees, had originally planned for his experiment with a chimpanzee named Nim. Nim was supposed to be raised as a signing chimp integrated into a household with deaf children but this project did not come to fruition. In the years since the first experiment with Washoe, the first sign language using chimp in the late 1960’s, most ape language researchers have struggled to set up criteria for what constitutes language capability in apes and how to test whether their charges could be said to have it. As research progressed the bar was raised from 1 word comprehension (labeling), to meeting Hockett’s 6 major criteria (Hockett 1963) such as prolongation of reference and separation of content and affect, to a need to demonstrate comprehension of novel utterances. The argument about where to draw the line, and whether compliance with requests similar to a young child’s abilities is sufficient, is to a large extent based on whether the examiner has a continuist or Cartesianist approach to the question of what is language.