great post, two points of disagreement that are worth mentioning
Exploring the full ability of dogs and cats to communicate isn’t so much impractical to do in academia; it just isn’t very theoretically interesting. We know animals can do operant conditioning (we’ve known for over 100 years probably), but we also know they struggle with complex syntax. I guess there’s a lot of uncertainty in the middle, so I’m low confidence about this. But generally to publish a high impact paper about dog or cat communication you’d have to show they can do more than “conditioning”, that they understand syntax in some way. That’s probably pretty hard; maybe you can do it, but do you want to stake your career on it?
That brings me to my second point...is it more than operant conditioning? Some of the videos show the animals pressing multiple buttons. But Billy the Cat’s videos show his trainer teaching his button sequences. I’m not a language expert, but to demonstrate syntax understanding, you have to do more than show he can learn sequences of button presses he was taught verbatim. At a minimum there’d need to be evidence he can form novel sentences by combining buttons in apparently-intentional ways that could only be put together by generalizing from some syntax rules. Maaaybe @Adele Lopez ’s observation that Bunny seems to reverse her owner’s word order might be appropriate evidence. But if she’s been reinforced for her own arbitrarily chosen word order in the past, she might develop it without really appreciating rules of syntax per se. In fact, a hallmark of learning language is that you can learn syntax correctly.
great post, two points of disagreement that are worth mentioning
Exploring the full ability of dogs and cats to communicate isn’t so much impractical to do in academia; it just isn’t very theoretically interesting. We know animals can do operant conditioning (we’ve known for over 100 years probably), but we also know they struggle with complex syntax. I guess there’s a lot of uncertainty in the middle, so I’m low confidence about this. But generally to publish a high impact paper about dog or cat communication you’d have to show they can do more than “conditioning”, that they understand syntax in some way. That’s probably pretty hard; maybe you can do it, but do you want to stake your career on it?
That brings me to my second point...is it more than operant conditioning? Some of the videos show the animals pressing multiple buttons. But Billy the Cat’s videos show his trainer teaching his button sequences. I’m not a language expert, but to demonstrate syntax understanding, you have to do more than show he can learn sequences of button presses he was taught verbatim. At a minimum there’d need to be evidence he can form novel sentences by combining buttons in apparently-intentional ways that could only be put together by generalizing from some syntax rules. Maaaybe @Adele Lopez ’s observation that Bunny seems to reverse her owner’s word order might be appropriate evidence. But if she’s been reinforced for her own arbitrarily chosen word order in the past, she might develop it without really appreciating rules of syntax per se. In fact, a hallmark of learning language is that you can learn syntax correctly.