The Link Between Language and Cognition is a Red Herring

“It is far too easy to invent post-hoc reasons for one’s behaviour, 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Since we routinely express ideas and feelings in language, we can 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 in The Language of Thought (1975): ‘The obvious (and I should have thought sufficient) refutation of the claim that natural languages are the medium of thought is that there are non-verbal organisms that think.’”

“You won’t often hear me say something like this, but I consider humans the only linguistic species. We honestly have no evidence for symbolic communication, equally rich and multifunctional as ours, outside our species. Language parallels between our species and others have been called a ‘red herring’.”

“But as with so many larger human phenomena, once we break it down into smaller pieces, some of these pieces can be found elsewhere. It is a procedure I have applied myself in my popular books about primate politics, culture, even morality.”

“Critical pieces such as power alliances (politics) and the spreading of habits (culture), as well as empathy and fairness (morality), are detectable outside our species. The same holds for capacities underlying language.”

“Honeybees accurately signal distant nectar locations to the hive, and monkeys might utter calls in predictable sequences that resemble rudimentary syntax.”

“The most intriguing parallel is perhaps referential signalling. Vervet monkeys on the plains of Kenya have distinct alarm calls for a leopard, an eagle or a snake. These predator-specific calls constitute a life-saving communication system, because different dangers demand different responses.”

“Hand gestures among other primates are especially noteworthy, since in the apes they are under voluntary control and often learned. Apes move and wave their hands all the time while communicating, and they have an impressive repertoire of specific gestures such as stretching out an open hand to beg for something, or moving a whole arm over another as a sign of dominance.”

“We share this behaviour with them and only them: monkeys have virtually no such gestures. The manual signals of apes are intentional, highly flexible and used to refine the message of communication.”

“There is a notable irony here. In an earlier age, the absence of language was used as an argument against the existence of thought in other species. Today I find myself upholding the position that the manifest reality of thinking by nonlinguistic creatures argues against the importance of language.”

“Reprinted from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal. Copyright© 2016 by Frans de Waal. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.”