On Pointing
This is an article that you'll think about all day: The pointing ape.Here's an excerpt, and it's long, but it sets up the entire article:
But to what degree are humans truly unique? Psychology tells us that humans, alone among animals, have the capacity to theorise about the contents of other minds. If you’re reading this essay and wondering where I’m going with this, you’re displaying this capacity. We humans also regulate our own behaviour based on the outcomes of such computations. This is a core tenet in many branches of the cognitive sciences today: the idea that our mentations cause our behaviour. In terms of our language behaviour, human children are magnificent test subjects because every child who masters a language (and this describes the overwhelming majority of humanity) transitions from being a creature without any apparent capacity for symbolic communication, akin to other animals, to being a creature who can skilfully produce and comprehend complex utterances that are, apparently, unique in the world. If we can understand the changing competencies of human children, then, the argument goes, we can discern those infant and toddler capabilities that facilitate this language learning. We can glean the ‘psychological toolkit’ that human babies apply to their social environments to produce their native languages.
Because it is so easy to study children, the literature on this issue is immense. A sub-area in this active research domain involves identifying the competencies present in preverbal children while absent from our living relatives, the great apes. An ability displayed by preverbal children but not adult great apes would be seen as an adaptation unique to us. For decades, the sine qua non of human preverbal communicative exceptionalism was the pointing gesture. A language-competent individual can name an entity or event to which she would like to draw the attention of her social partner; a preverbal child armed with a pointing finger can accomplish much the same.
In the early 1990s, it was a nearly universal axiom in psychology that pointing was a human adaption for creating a ‘referential triangle’ between two people. At that time, I had no particular reason to doubt this story, but quite by happenstance I met someone who gave me grounds to reconsider pointing as a human adaptation in the human toolkit for language. That ‘someone’ was Clint, an adolescent chimpanzee, and this is the story of how he trained me to question the mainstream scientific perspective on pointing as an evolved cognitive adaptation for the acquisition of symbols.
That's the set-up, but it's not just about pointing. It's about a friendship between a great ape and a researcher, and the kind of bond two creatures can have together, even if they're different.
The reason I thought about this article all day, besides its brilliance, is that it made me think about what really distinguishes humans, and how we decide that. Or rather, how we assume that.
In the last few decades, there have been many flags planted about what humans can uniquely do. It seems, though, that over time, those flags keep disappearing. Our claims seem to reflect more what we want to believe about ourselves.
The more research that gets done, though, the more we find pieces of ourselves in others. The great apes. Dolphins. Crows. Elephants. Killer whales. So many nuanced, sophisticated behaviors and emotions.
There is so much to digest in the article, so many rabbit holes to get lost in. It is a very satisfying, pleasant way to spend time.
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