I’ve been reading a little about animal cognition and communication (Shhhhh, its research!). The mystery of “what goes on inside” an elephant’s head is not really what interests me; it’s what animals reveal about the relationship of perception, language and knowledge. If language is what we use to segment and inform the continuum of our perceptions, then language is knowledge (and knowledge is language) and the knowledge of animals must be very, very foreign. Learning about non-human life forms continually confirms my suspicions: (1) We aren’t shaped by language, we are language (whatever language that may be), and (2) Many of us have aliens living in our own homes.
Wittgenstein gave us this famous verdict on animal language and consciousness: “If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.” Some people think he was saying that animals can’t have language as advanced as our own. I think he was saying that lions have different perceptual apparatus, and a different symbology, so even if a lion could communicate in English, or sign language, the words and metaphors it would draw upon would follow a completely different logic. This is exactly why I have always been freaked out by the idea of pets. We’re so casual about having animals live with us, and strangely confident that all our one-sided conversations are penetrating them just as they would a baby, or a mute uncle. Yet animals, so long as we don’t speak their language, should silence us like contemplation of the galaxies.
Think of all the pictures of cats on the web. No matter how much we learn about their bodies and brains, no matter how much we live and interact with them, they remain icons, or symbols, or something. We gaze at them like stars and predicate their meaning and identity with our own image.
The questions that haunt us are: Do they understand me? Do they appreciate beauty? Do they have memories? Do they make meaning? Do they have anything at all like story and narrative? Do they differentiate right and wrong? As this line of questioning continues, it becomes more and more obvious that the answer is no. Well, at least not like that, right? The problem is we have no idea how to phrase the questions so they even make sense in the context of a dolphin’s experience (or an ant’s, or a rabbit’s, or a dinosaur’s, or a blue jay’s).
We know that animals can see, hear, smell, taste, touch and feel; we imagine that they think, reason, and abstract from their own histories of sensory information. We try and put ourselves inside a dog’s colorblind, scent-swamped, ear-pricked experience, marveling at how differently they see the world. But it’s not as though we could simply heighten and dampen certain senses and brain capacities and arrive at a dog’s interpretation of the world. It’s not as if the world is a fixed text, or dataset, seen from various angles, or interpreted through different lenses, which we can compare and contrast. It is dynamic, existing in relationship and process.
Remember triads? All of our information comes to us via “a cooperation of three subjects”: sign, object, and interpretant. According to Charles Pierce, as quoted in this essay, “this tri-relative influence” is not “in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.” It’s not just the world and it’s interpreters, there are these little guys called signs–the words and symbols we use to communicate our perceptions–aiding and interfering. The “tri-relative world” exists in the interface. Animal signs and sign-functions are not like our own. And with this brilliant kernel of evidence *wink*, I suggest that animals do not live on Earth, as we know it: they are aliens on planets that may as well be light years away.
Thomas Sebeok, the semiotician who applied sign study to the study of evolution of life systems, and popularized Biosemiotics, believed that “semiosis [or sign behavior] must be recognized as a pervasive fact of nature as well as of culture.” “The significance circuit,” as Sebeok calls it in his essay, “The Sign Science and The Life Science,” is “based on construction by the observer-participancy of some carbon-based life.” Animal, vegetable, mineral–each the locus of its Umvelt. Not vessels of communication, transmitting information and receiving knowledge, but communication itself, constituting what is seen, known and understood.
Mostly, I just I love the way we talk about our furrier friends, attributing cunning and emotion, and imagining inner monologues.
woah, good topic. have you watched the dog whisperer? dog psychology. yeah, animal perception seems so foreign, like the absence of moral framing, my mom’s cat is walking around chasing a fly right now. cesar millan talks about dogs’s incredible ability to live completely in the moment. or orangutans’s uncanny flash memory, i saw this thing where a monkey plays a memory game and TOTALLY kicks every little kid’s ass.
I can see how animals, between each other, have a language all their own. And my cat is definitely an alien, but what about animals making human-like sounds? Like parrots imitating. Do they do it to please us or get us to do something for them? Or just because they can?
When our cat Sprout wants to go outside or eat, she will stand by her food or the door and make a meowing noise that is more like a human voice than a normal meow. It is shorter and more guttural. Do you think animals will try to mimic humans the way they mimic other animals (e.g. starlings, mockingbirds, etc.)? I think animals kind of do and in the same way we mimic them to get them to come to us.
“like the absence of moral framing”
totally.
cesar millan is rad. animal cognition is such a hot topic these days, and i think he is a pretty amazing introduction to the real questions of the field for most people.
Ariel–
I think mimicry is where humans and animals begin to build some sort of shared language based on common environment. Humans and animals can certainly learn to understand signs that the other makes–is this the same as understanding each other’s language? I think it’s a new relationship between sounds or signals and certain shared objects that necessarily involve the other (human or animal). Also, each animal is different, so parrots may communicate in ways that are closer to our own than, say, a fish.
Lion colloquialisms!
Dolphin suicides!
On another note, Stephan’s neighbor, a middle aged nurse who lives alone and who often tries to entertain us with boring stories, once tried to show me a picture that her sister sent to her via cell phone of Cesar Millan. She was so excited and was pushing her phone to my face, “Look, look my sister met the dog whisperer, Cesar Chavez!” I didn’t know who Cesar Millan was at the time, so I thought, maybe there is a possibility that he shares the name with the beloved farmer and social justice patriarch. But then I thought, no way.
her: “You’ve never heard of Cesar Chavez…??!”
me:“well, no, I mean, I guess not.”
.…
Maybe animals understanding our signs is us understanding each other’s choreography. And we can understand choreography across species if we try because of cause and effect, but for some reason, sounds are native and singular.
So when a bulldog learns to skateboard is it a basis for some sort of “shared language?“
Let us suppose we began sniffing each other’s butts. What would the bulldog think?
Let us not forget that language/communication is, on the most basic of levels, a transference of meaning. A skateboarding bulldog is not, I would suggest, communicating a subscription to any specific culture or niche. The bulldog is not expressing a desire to identify with or utilize the tools of transportation, entertainment or athleticism just as the bulldog does not use a dog bowl because it likes a clean house. This is not to say that the bulldog does not comprehend the skateboard or the ability to skateboard as a tool. On the contrary, I would posit that he/she, and all other “animals” for that matter, are fully aware, at least in some capacity, of mechanical evolution and communication is nothing if not mechanical. This is evidenced by the fact that I am writing this ‘through’ the internet: the latest means of communicating; a transference of meaning utilizing the least amount of energy.
So what then is happening when the bulldog, who’s named Tyson by the way, learns to ride a skateboard? Is it mimicry or is it something else? Is it play? If so, does a bulldog’s perception of such an activity have similarities to our own? Does Tyson utilize play as a means to learn through interactions with its environment?
A dog is on the plane. In the distance a rabbit leaps out of a hole, unaware of the dog’s presence. The unlucky rabbit is spotted and the dog bolts after it, catches the prey, and kills it. This is instinct, known due to millions of years of evolution of both hunting and communicating hunting techniques to offspring.
A boy and a dog are in the park. The boy throws a ball and the dog retrieves it. This is play; a practice made useful for and by the instinct to catch fleeing prey. Once the dog learns to associate an inanimate object (ball, stick, dad’s shoe) with prey and, hence, learns by association (I.e. a transference of meaning) could we not say this is a form of communicating with the boy, it’s pack, a desire to hunt, feed, and survive?
Things get jumbled I’m sure. I mean, though I did reference the internet as the latest example of the evolution of communication (based on its lack of resource consumption, at least locally), you are sitting right next to me on this couch.
Damnit Alisha! What are you trying to communicate with your blog? Or are you playing? Am I playing too? Why can’t we actually talk about this like people with mouths and functioning tongues? Can you smell my feet from where you’re sitting?
hi alisha, thanks for keeping this going. i like the idea of animals as aliens… in our own homes.