some Rico correspondence

[Bill Fosher]

Melanie writes:

 

Kind of like if I were a Flat Earther it would be up to me to convince everyone else the earth was flat, not for the rest of the scientific community to convince me that it's round.

 

Or to not care whether they're all sitting in a circle patting themselves on the back for reaching the same conclusions by making the same assumptions -- right, wrong, or otherwise.

 

As a non-scientist, I can tell that there are a couple of issues where I have asked people to prove to me that the world is round, and I still don't feel I've gotten any proof -- just the citation of other studies based on the presumption of a round earth.

 

Sometimes I kick and fuss about these issues, but lately I've decided that my flat little world is a fine place, even if I'm the only one on it.

 

(The current debate on another list is whether there's any justificaiton for treating tapeworms in lambs. I am of the flat earth school that says that anything that causes scours and can be treated for 12 cents per lamb is worth treating. I get studies thrown at me that say that tapeworms are "generally considered non-pathogenic" or "rarely cause much damage" but nothing about who does the considering or how much damage is acceptable. You'd think that drenching lambs was nuclear war the way some people want to avoid it.)

[Eileen Stein]

 

I'm not Bloom, and I'm not a linguist either, but I don't think these performances would constitute evidence that a dog understood a word in the same sense that humans understand words. Only that dogs can respond to multiple speakers. >>

 

Well, then why did he bring up the question of whether dogs could respond to multiple speakers, if their doing so would have no significance?

 

 

Because understanding of symbols is not required to follow commands. >>

 

Then I guess you're not using the word "symbol" in its ordinary meaning? When Rico is told, "Bring your ball" or "bring your zebra," the "bring your" part is constant. The only variable is the noun. I don't understand how the word "ball" in that case can be anything other than a symbol for the round object that Rico brings.

 

>

 

If he does it in various contexts, in different places, with different types of livestock (or lawn chairs), for different people, doesn't that suggest that he understands it as a concept? Or not? It seems to me that if he does it in these different contexts he is not just performing the action that has become associated with the whistle, because those are not the actions that were (previously) associated with the whistle.

 

>

 

Well, yes, I understand that is necessary for it to be "good science." (When I offered answers to Bloom's closing questions, I wasn't suggesting that those statements of mine should be accepted in lieu of controlled experiments. I was just predicting, based on my knowledge of dogs, what the outcome of such controlled experiments would be.) What I don't understand is why it's okay scientifically for him to say, "Rico, in contrast, learns only through a specific fetching game." It has certainly not been demonstrated in a controlled context that Rico learns only through fetching games.

 

>

 

Hmm. I guess the interesting hypothesis in Descartes' day was that dogs feel pain the way humans do. I wonder who gets to define the interesting hypothesis, since that ability really determines the outcome with questions which, like this one, seem totally unsusceptible of proof to a scientific certainty.

 

 

Right. To a dog. But not to a person. I can ask you, "is 'come bye' clockwise or counterclockwise?" I can say, "Fly's come bye side is not as natural as her away side." I think dogs probably cannot think this way. To a dog, "come bye" means "flank left around the sheep." No more, no less. If you say "come bye," your dog will look for sheep and be confused if there are none. >>

 

Unless there are lawn chairs or Hogettes. Yes, he'll be confused if there's nothing to go around, because yes, he understands "come by" to mean go left around something. But the fact that he doesn't understand other possible meanings of "come by" doesn't mean he doesn't understand "come by." I don't understand your usage of the word "symbol," apparently, but that doesn't mean I have no understanding of the meaning of the word "symbol."

[SoloRiver]

Well, then why did he bring up the question of whether dogs could respond to multiple speakers, if their doing so would have no significance?

 

If they did so it would eliminate the possibility that the word was understood only in the context of a particular person, but would not eliminate other non-language possibilities. But, I'm not Bloom so I can't really answer your question. You'd have to ask him.

 

Then I guess you're not using the word "symbol" in its ordinary meaning? When Rico is told, "Bring your ball" or "bring your zebra," the "bring you" part is constant. The only variable is the noun. I don't understand how the word "ball" in that case can be anything other than a symbol for the round object that Rico brings.

 

I am not using the word "symbol" in its ordinary meaning. "Symbol" is a word that has a specific meaning in linguistics. The hallmark of human language is that it is primarily symbolic. I think when you use the word "symbol" you are using it as a synonym for the more general term "sign" and that is where we are getting confused.

 

There are three kinds of signs, apres Peirce:

 

* Icons have a physical resemblance between the signal and the meaning.

* Indices have a correlation in space and time with its meaning.

* Symbols (content words like nouns, verbs and adjectives) are (sound) patterns) that get meaning primarily from its mental association with other symbols and secondarily from its correlation with environmental patterns.

 

From http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~port/teach/103/...mbol.short.html

Longer version: http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~port/teach/103/sign.symbol.html

 

This page also discusses human vs. nonhuman communication.

 

Peirce discussing symbols:

http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/terms/symbol.html

 

If he does it in various contexts, in different places, with different types of livestock (or lawn chairs), for different people, doesn't that suggest that he understands it as a concept? Or not?

 

I'm not sure that being able to respond to commands in different contexts means that a dog can think about flank commands conceptually or abstractly. If he could, then he could also understand if you told him something about flank commands in the absence of anything to run around -- while sitting in an easy chair by the fire sipping brandy or what have you. He may not be able to answer you, which gets to your question of how can one tell what the dog understands? -- but hey, I'm not an ethologist and I don't study these things -- I only have a basic background in anthropological linguistics because I'm in a four-field department. I think it is probably not a stretch to say that dogs cannot understand abstractions, but admit that I can't prove it (but you can't prove that they can, either).

 

Well, yes, I understand that is necessary for it to be "good science." What I don't understand is why it's okay scientifically for him to say, "Rico, in contrast, learns only through a specific fetching game." It has certainly not been demonstrated in a controlled context that Rico learns only through fetching games.

 

I'll have to agree with you there. I would have said, "It has not been demonstrated that Rico can learn this many words outside of the context of his fetching game." To be fair, Bloom's article was a comment, not a presentation of research, and therefore relatively informal (though not on the level of a Discover magazine or New York Times science section article).

 

Hmm. I guess the interesting hypothesis in Descartes' day was that dogs feel pain the way humans do. I wonder who gets to define the interesting hypothesis, since that ability really determines the outcome with questions which, like this one, seem totally unsusceptible of proof to a scientific certainty.

 

Well, now I think you're getting offended when you don't need to. If you go back to the context in which this research is conducted, it makes sense. First of all, it is not a controversial statement to say that it appears humans have language capacities that are vastly different in degree, kind, or both from the sorts of communication systems nonhuman animals use. We have a myriad different known languages, we have writing, we produce novels, magazines, we use telephones, we post on Internet discussion boards, at the very least we rely on these language capabilities more than any other animal appears to, if indeed other animals have human-like language but just happen to be hiding their capabilities really really well. It is a hypothesis that symbol-based communication (which can be abstract and therefore lead to telephones, novels, and the Internet) is unique to humans and evolved only in our lineage. This hypothesis appears to be supported by most of the available evidence. Therefore, for researchers in this field, this is the null hypothesis that must be rejected if one is interested in demonstrating that nonhuman animals such as dogs in fact have human-like language capabilities. The person doing the research gets to decide which hypothesis is interesting and gets to decide which one is the null hypothesis. You are welcome to do your own research with the study structured differently. I am not sure why it is offensive to you that things are the way they are.

 

But anyway, the Kaminski et al. study does a bit of chipping away at the null hypothesis, by showing that at least one dog learns words in a way it was previously thought only humans could. Can we extend this all the way to saying that dogs understand words as symbols? No, but if more and more studies show that dogs can do things only humans are supposed to be able to do we get closer to being able to say that, and that's how science works.

 

If you are, on the basis of personal experience, comfortable with believing that dogs understand words as symbols without scientific proof, that is your prerogative. I do not need scientific studies either, personally, to tell me that they probably don't because from what I have experienced, I don't think that they do, which is fine with me and does not detract at all from their general wonderfulness and dogginess.

 

Unless there are lawn chairs or Hogettes. Yes, he'll be confused if there's nothing to go around, because yes, he understands "come by" to mean go left around something. But the fact that he doesn't understand other possible meanings of "come by" doesn't mean he doesn't understand "come by."

 

I guess at this point I don't understand your meaning of the word "understand."

[kevinb]

I have been following this thread for several days and like others dont fully understand some of the article. But I want to add my experience with my BC Peg. She is the first BC I've had. She knows certain words and associates those words with actions/places. Peg can also spell. We play in the backyard and the word out, play, backyard can be spoken or spelled and get the same response. Tone of voice doesn' make much difference either. She can also find tennis balls in the backyard and will look in places I've hidden them before. I know some may not believe this but I dont play hide the tennis ball often it may be 3 to 4 month span from one time to the next. I normally hide 6 or 7 tennis balls in the fence, under things, different parts of the yard, with Peg in the house I let her out and give the command of find the ball. Invariably she will look in locations from the last time we played the game first.

As for knowing the location of places she knows which banks, fast food and convenience stores give dog treats. And she recognizes the way to each grandmothers house. I know this might not have much bearing on the discussion but I think it shows the reseachers need to learn/live with the breed before they try to draw paralells.

 

Kevin

I like my dogs more than I like most people.

[Eileen Stein]

>

 

Where are you getting it that I'm offended? My point is simply that if it's impossible to prove something either way, then what is accepted as the null hypothesis -- or conversely, the interesting hypothesis -- makes all the difference, and form becomes substance. I'm not offended that this is the way things are. I'm just pointing out the limitations from a practical point of view of this being the way things are, much as Bill did with his Flat Earth example.

 

>

 

All true, but all irrelevant, I should think, to the question of whether dogs can understand simple words (sound-meaning relations). Why should the fact that we have wondrously sophisticated linguistic abilities make it any less likely that dogs share our most basic linguistic abilities? And if it doesn't make it any less likely, why is it relevant to what the null hypothesis should be?

 

I don't understand the meaning of "symbol" in linguistics from your explanation here, but I'll take a look at the references you cite.

 

>

 

Well, naturally, when something hasn't been proven one way or the other, sensible people draw their own conclusions, either firm or tentative, from their own experience.

 

>

 

Oh no, not the little people in fur coats again!

[PennyT]

Before I posted or wrote initially to Paul Bloom, I got all of his article

in the Perspectives sections of Science without charge and also paid the

ridiculous, worse than ATM gouges in a truck stop for cash, price for the

actual Kaminski article in Science without ever getting access to the entire

issue of the magazine. The ten dollar fee was probably more than an entire print

issue costs.

 

Vicki Hearne: With some notable exceptions, much of what she wrote annoyed

me, too, and more annoyingly still, now that she could be usefully engaged in

writing on this subject, she went and died a few years ago.

 

Bias: I have been wondering about bias. If Rico (or another dog) shows

understanding in a way that answers "yes" to the unresolved questions Dr.

Bloom poses, would he then conclude the dog knew sound-meaning relations? Or

would he then just raise the bar?

 

There do seem to be underlying convictions on both sides. Maybe I can

exclude Melanie and Bill and Pearse and several others from that value

judgment because I feel sure they would be just as content if it is true dogs learn a bit of language as children learn a lot of it as

they are if dogs don't.

 

I, however, won't be. My beliefs on the subject are based on my own

observations, anecdotes, and giving credence to

Darwin's belief that he could not have convinced himself of the soundness of

evolution without also crediting some nonhuman animals with the ability to

learn some language. "If no organic being

excepting man had possessed any mental power, or if his powers had been of

a wholly different nature from those of the lower animals, then we should

never have been able to convince ourselves that our high faculties had been

gradually developed." That's a way of saying sine qua non; it is not

trivial.

 

I regretfully suppose that a lot of the reluctance on the part of

researchers to take anecdotal evidence seriously enough to research and

define many

language issues fairly is based on an underlying fear of posing ethical

issues on too

bright a marquee. If apes or dogs can understand or learn language in even a rude and incipient formas human

children do, then using nonhuman animals

in medical

experiments (never mind cosmetic experiments and so on) poses an ethical

dilemma the researchers and philosophers do not want to deal with.

 

Who can blame

them for making the definitional dance ever more complex and building in

bias?

 

One example of this bias is in the linguistics article which I am going to

paraphrase. The word "kitty" is presented as a symbol a dog cannot

understand because a human mother can talk about a "kitty" to her child

without the child thinking either that a cat is present (I don't know at

what age this would be true for children) or that the utterance involves

action (again age may be a factor) and because for the child and mother

"kitty" will trigger a string of associations. To distinguish this from

indexical understanding in a dog, the article suggests saying "go for a

walk" or "take a walk" ("walk" would probably do) to a dog who knows what

that means and seeing what happens. There are two biases I see in that

example. First, try saying "go to Disney World" or "go see the new Shrek

movie" to the child and see if the child does not take that to mean doing

something fun and is not disappointed to discover mom didn't mean it.

Second, the idea of "going for a walk" is symbolic (as is "kitty") but understanding is demonstrated as an index.

 

The bias is probably a lot more complex than simply the ethical issues

that can arise for researchers on animals. There are a mountain of 19th

Century bias based objections to evolution based on disgust at the whole idea which are still alive and kicking today. There seems to me to be an intellectual stake even for philosophers and

scientists who think evolution happened in believing that only humans learn

language in any way, shape, or form. "Intellectual stake" is likely too mild a

phrasing. Both non-creationist philosophers who hold language to be the special province of humans and some creationists seem to share a need to believe in linguistic uniqueness for humans.

 

I do not see the bias I discussed above in Paul Bloom's article or read it into the article as subtext. If I had, what he said wouldn't have sparked my curiosity. What he wrote in Science showed a lively, genuine interest, so I took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and wrote to him. With Melanie's help, I now interpret not caring much who the speaker is as a way of demonstrating symbolic understanding which takes into account not being able to talk.

 

It's been almost 30 years since I slogged through any of Chomsky. I do recall thinking that the definitional bias was obvious.

 

I want to know if anyone else has any thoughts on this. Melanie, don't be shy.

 

I also wanna know why Charles lets his border collies speculate in the futures market. If anything could show that border collies are not smart or don't understand and acquire some human language, that would be it.

 

Edit in: I wrote this before several of the last posts went up, and I posted without noticing they were there. So now I am going to go read the posts carefully and that new link.

 

Penny

[PennyT]

And then again, maybe Paul Bloom was the perfect person to respond in Science to the Rico experiment because he believes heart and soul in the soundness of the linguistic uniqueness bias or in the soundness of the linguistic uniqueness theory, to use a less loaded phrase.

 

I do get the impression that he would not demand that the strange person who asks for Rico's cooperation be someone who dislikes (distrusts or something of that nature) dogs or is someone unfamiliar with interacting with dogs because Dr. Bloom did agree that attention to who the speaker is can matter to both humans and dogs.

 

I also want to find out if a person in an experiment on how children learn is allowed to be someone who is used to getting children to cooperate or at least knows something about that.

 

Penny

[Eileen Stein]

Melanie, I should have said explicitly (instead of just thinking implicitly) what a great contribution your expertise has made to this thread. In particular, your pointing out that these guys are not interested in dogs per se, which is a thought I evidently find it hard to truly grasp even when it's said over and over again, but which explains so much.

 

I've been trying to pin down what annoys me about what Bloom and some others have said. I understand and accept all the things you have said about the scientific method. All the things Bloom says, when put into that context, are unobjectionable. But when quoted in the popular or semi-popular press, those things come across as saying much more than apparently they really are, and with the weight of science behind them.

 

Maybe this will help explain it. As you know, our legal system has a methodology that could be analogized to the scientific method. An accused person is presumed innocent, and if that presumption is not overcome by proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the presumption remains and the person is deemed innocent. Well and good--everyone knows that and it's accepted within and without the legal profession. If in a legal context following O.J. Simpson's acquittal, such as a lawsuit by O.J. to collect life insurance proceeds, a lawyer had said O.J. was innocent, everyone would understand that he was merely expressing the legal presumption. But if, following O.J. Simpson's trial, a lawyer had been quoted in the press as espousing the view that O.J. was innocent, he would be taken as saying something quite different than that O.J. had been acquitted -- his statement would probably be understood as meaning that, bringing to bear his legal expertise on the issue, he had concluded that O.J. really, truly did not commit the murders he was charged with. If people familiar with the evidence and its significance took issue with him, and if he or others said, "Oh, he doesn't really mean that O.J. is innocent, you must not understand the presumption of innocence if you interpret his words that way," it would seem incongruous and strange because of the confusion of two different contexts.

 

I'm not sure this does really explain it, but I think it works at getting closer to it. Most of the things I take issue with are not things that would bother me at all in the context of designing or interpreting experiments, but do bother me when presented as public assertions or pronouncements. But then I don't think Bloom can be faulted for this, because I don't know that he intended his words to fall into that wider public context.

 

Anyway, a kind anonymous benefactor has just given me access to the original Kaminski article, and right now I want to read it, as well as reading the Peirce references. And I also want to give more consideration to Penny's "kitty" post above, which on first reading appears extremely interesting.

[Rave]

I'm too braindead from lack of sleep to comment on the mind-boggling discussions here, but will add that my Wick will watch TV, not just listen. She prefers the BC's (as in real life) and will bark at any non-BC's at first. I watch a lot of dog sports on TV, reviewing tapes and such of students, as well as things like the Great Outdoors Games, and Wick will sit and watch it with me as long as the dogs are on...and this dog won't sit sit for much.

 

I heard somewhere (on Dateline or similar show) that a study showed TV perception in cats has to do with how fast their eye and/or brain processes (don't remember actual physiology), and that the slower the process, the more the cat could perceive on TV. Sorry I can't remember more, as I'm working on just a few hours sleep here.

 

-Laura

[Rebecca, Irena Farm]

Jen (Wick's littermate) also watches TV during the many animal shows we watch. When a herd of elk or whatever go by, she tries to flank around the tv. She seems convinced they really are there and it's just the fact that the furniture is in the way that prevents her from directly interacting with them. She keeps trying though.

[Deanna in OR]

I think I'll "throw another log on the fire", related to dogs' communication (if not "language" capabilities)

 

first, a bit of background. I get a newletter from the Assistance Dog Institute (ADI)in Santa Rosa, CA. They train dogs and people as assistance dog teams; they train people to train assistance dog teams; and they also train Social Therapy dog/people teams. It was founded in 1991 by Dr. Bonnie Bergen, who earlier founded Canine Companions for Independence, another assistance dog organization.

 

In the last 2 newletters, there have been articles written by Dr. Bergen about her work in training her dog to learn a couple of new ways to "hear" humans. The first article was about how she taught her dog to "read"--to recognize written word commands on large flashcards and respond in the same way the dog would to for a related spoken word or hand signal. She taught the dog to respond to a variety of commands like "sit", "down", etc. that were written on large cards, independent of a verbal command. Other dogs have since been trained to do this, too. The purpose for this was to train a dog with a method that could be use by someone with limited speech and mobility, to communicate with their assistance dog.

 

These flash cards would qualify as "symbols" to a linguist, according to the categories that Melanie has shared with us.

 

The more recent article, which I just read last night, talked about how she created iconic flash cards that showed a stick figure dog performing various actions--"Sit", "Turn around", etc. The really interesting thing that she discovered was that after the dog learned a couple of these stick-figure iconic commands, by pairing the known spoken command with the flash card, she showed another one that the dog hadn't seen before-- and the dog performed the behavior shown by the stick figure dog, after looking at the figure, without hearing the associated verbal command first. In other words, the dog learned to associate the visual image showing what to do, and that the iconic flash card should be taken as a "command" or instruction to copy the posture shown on the card.

 

This capability has been duplicated with several other dogs, according to the newletter article.

 

Since ADI uses mainly labs and goldens as their assistance dogs, goldens were the breed that demonstrated this capability. Now just think about how it would have gone if they had used border collies!

 

If you interested in learning more about this, their website is Assistance Dog Institute

and a photo of a dog responding to a flashcard at ADI Research

 

While they don't have details of these articles on the website, you can contact them to get details of this work if you want to learn more.

 

I haven't seen these dogs do this, and it didn't sound from the articles like these were rigorous scientific studies, but it sure sounds like an interesting topic to study further.

 

Deanna in OR

[SoloRiver]

Yeah, you can't blame scientists for what the popular press does to their research. It drives me up the wall. It's why I have a really hard time watching the Discovery Channel a lot of the time. I guess it's like watching a "Breed All About It" episode about Border Collies -- half of the stuff is oversimplified, and the other half is just wrong.

 

Where are you getting it that I'm offended? My point is simply that if it's impossible to prove something either way, then what is accepted as the null hypothesis -- or conversely, the interesting hypothesis -- makes all the difference, and form becomes substance.

 

I thought you were offended because you brought up Descartes, which brings up associated icky thoughts about cruelty to animals and vivisection and stuff like that. (One of the hallmarks of symbol-based language is that word concepts become associated through convention with other word concepts.) It is true that the way experiments are formulated reveals bias and a good scientists tries to be reflexive in his or her approach. But at the same time, I don't think it's very out there to suggest that dogs don't have language capabilities and humans do -- I think anecdotal evidence would tend to support that hypothesis -- and I have pretty smart dogs.

 

All true, but all irrelevant, I should think, to the question of whether dogs can understand simple words (sound-meaning relations). Why should the fact that we have wondrously sophisticated linguistic abilities make it any less likely that dogs share our most basic linguistic abilities?

 

It's not just what we do. It's what dogs (and other animals -- save perhaps some cetaceans from what I understand) don't do.

 

As for the flash cards, those would be indexical. They become associated in time and space with certain activities. They are just like any other commands except that they are visual instead of verbal. When training, we teach commands by pairing the command with an action usually through classical conditioning. If we show the dog a flash card that means "sit," the dog will sit. We do not show the dog a "sit" card when we actually do not want him to sit, but want to discuss the concept of sitting with him. He probably cannot understand the flash card at that level. If we show him the flash card he can only understand it in the context of a command situation. This isn't language. Think of the difference between these two responses:

 

Dog upon seeing card: Sit.

Child upon seeing card: "That is a card that tells dogs to sit."

 

Or another example. Could a dog learn the meaning of the word "happy?" He may learn to associate the word with excitement and anticipation and animation, but does he understand happiness as a concept? Can he think about the last time he was happy and contrast it with feeling sad? I have no doubt that dogs can feel happy and sad -- I just don't think they can discuss the difference. Am I making any sense?

[PennyT]

Melanie: Or another example. Could a dog learn the meaning of the word "happy?" He may learn to associate the word with excitement and anticipation and animation, but does he understand happiness as a concept? Can he think about the last time he was happy and contrast it with feeling sad? I have no doubt that dogs can feel happy and sad -- I just don't think they can discuss the difference. Am I making any sense?

 

Penny: Of course, you're making sense. You're just raising the bar from a couple of hundred sound-meaning relations to demonstrating the difference between being happy and sad. Shame on you. Bad girl. No click. No treat.

[Deanna in OR]

Thanks for clarifying the category of the flash cards, Melanie. I'm learning a lot from this thread.

 

I figured the flash cards are just another kind of visual signal to tell the dog we want him to perform a particular behavior.

 

but the really interesting thing in this ADI story is how the dogs could demonstrate an understanding that the icon images of the stick figure dogs meant to copy the behavior shown, and that they could see a relatively primitive image and translate that to its meaning, without the verbal association.

 

This seems to be related to the earlier story about Denise's dog Mick, who seemed to recognize sheep in images on the wall, not just photos but also drawings. An interesting question to study, if I were independently wealthy -- how much can dogs (or other mammals) recognize from 2D representations of something? Since they can't talk, how could we tell for sure?

 

Deanna

[Bill Fosher]

42

[Denise Wall]

Deanna wrote:

 

"The more recent article, which I just read last night, talked about how she created iconic flash cards that showed a stick figure dog performing various actions--"Sit", "Turn around", etc. The really interesting thing that she discovered was that after the dog learned a couple of these stick-figure iconic commands, by pairing the known spoken command with the flash card, she showed another one that the dog hadn't seen before-- and the dog performed the behavior shown by the stick figure dog, after looking at the figure, without hearing the associated verbal command first. In other words, the dog learned to associate the visual image showing what to do, and that the iconic flash card should be taken as a "command" or instruction to copy the posture shown on the card."

 

Frankly, if it can be repeated, I think this is the most amazing thing I've read in this entire thread. One, I'm impressed that a dog could extrapolate a posture to assume from something as abstract as a stick figure drawing. Two, I'm doubly impressed the dog could figure out the "command" by looking at a picture without pairing of the specific verbal command.

 

Penny, I suppose the Mick/sheep drawing thing is not so impressive in light of this above. However, to me it was not so much that he was responding to representations but how much interpretation was needed for these "icons" to be likened to real sheep. And also, why in the world would a dog be walking around the house looking at what was in pictures anyway? It's not even eye level.

 

Denise

 

PS Joan, like Rip, Mick looks at the pictures in my vets office also

[PennyT]

Denise, I am impressed by Mick's recognition. I think it shows an understanding of symbols, which if not linguistic nevertheless shows impressive visual and reasoning skills. In addition, there are Mick's formidable skills as a stock dog, so in sum I'm feeling a bit wistful about not having bred Jordan to him if you would have countenanced the mating.

 

When I said something on the order of "dismissed as a collection of icons," I was trying to indicate how biased linguistic ranking is in terms of telling us much about what is understood.

 

Guess I did not do much of a job of expressing that.

 

And so on for the implications of that failure.

 

Penny

 

Edit a day later: I got into a terminological jumble above. Here is what I meant:

 

Mick likely turns his head and exhibits riveted attention on actual sheep located 800 yards away when you ask him to. Also when you don't, sure. However, you likely can get him to do so on request. He also likely does so when sheep are closer are as well and on request. He recognizes sheep in videos. You have told us that he recognizes sheep in diverse types of actual icons (photo, stylized but cutesy drawing). If you wanted to add more actual icons, it would be easy to add sheep slippers (I can't ever even wear the ones I got as a present) or sheep toys that have baa squeakers (I never buy these because I don't want gripping to be generalized into an always acceptable practice).

 

Anyway, that means Mick attends to the idea of sheep for real, sheep on t.v., sheep photos, and cutesy print of sheep at a minimum. Mick's unerring fixation on that untidy collection of icons demonstrates symbolic understanding. He can put an arbitrary group of ways of graphically illustrating sheep, filming them, and the reality of sheep into one broader category. That is a sophisticated and symbolic understanding of a noun.

[J.E.S]

Just a few observations of my own dogs.

Meg watches tv. She will watch with no sound on. She likes herding videos the best. She knows her own videos and can anticipate what happens next in the video of the ones she has watched more than once. She heels the cows. Heads the sheep and goes spastic with the ducks and will jump at the screen. She does not show as much interest in other things on the tv but will sometimes watch a bit. She knows sheep in pictures on the wall. She knows sheep on the computer, which have no movement. She also was very interested in my plastic sheep which were on the window sill about 4 feet above her head. There are 4 with the Breyer Border Collie in the rear. She fixated on them the first time she saw them. I have other things on the same window sill, she pays no attention to.

Tonight I brought in Seth to the kitchen. I asked him to come-bye. First he just looked at me, I asked again and he ran into the living room in a come-bye direction. When I said Away, he ran off into the bedroom. This only proves that he thought there were sheep here somewhere and now he won't trust me that when I say these commands that there will be sheep.

In learning words in children. My son, from about age 3 to about 10 used the word "darning" for hammering in a nail.He called the hammer a darn and when speaking of the nail going into the wood, it was darn it. I am thinking at one point when he was learning to speak I must have hit my thumb with the hammer and said "darn it". It took me about 5 years to undo what he learned in a few seconds time. Also he passed along this word to his younger sister and while she caught on quicker than him that the word was not darn it, but hammer. she obviously learned it from him.

Joan

[PennyT]

Melanie said on flash cards: Dog upon seeing card: Sit.

Child upon seeing card: "That is a card that tells dogs to sit."

 

It is not indisputably certain that on seeing the card, the dog does not know that is a card that tells him to sit or after learning to sit on seeing the card and seeing other dogs sit after seeing the card, that the card tells dogs to sit (as a visual cue not as reading). If a word is spoken, the same applies. The distinction about what the dog understands in terms of being indexical or symbolic is a built-in, definitional assumption.

[Pearse]

Originally posted by J.E.S:

I am thinking at one point when he was learning to speak I must have hit my thumb with the hammer and said "darn it". Joan

How fortunate for you that you aren't given to using more "colourful" language under such circumstances. Imagine the horror when your so goes to school for the first day and, having passed a building site on the way, proceeds to tell the teacher that he saw 20 carpenters &*#$ing on the roof of a house!

 

Come to think of it "darn" good job border collies can't speak.

 

Pearse

[PennyT]

Mindreading and intentions human to dog, dog to human:

 

Melanie pointed out and asserted (quite a while ago in thread years): I

think that Border Collies understand human communications, especially when

working stock, on a very subtle and complex level, but I don't think it is

necessary to invoke human-style language capabilities to explain their

understanding....

 

Penny: And what would you say they are understanding on so very subtle and complex a level?

[Denise Wall]

Penny wrote:

 

"Anyway, that means Mick attends to the idea of sheep for real, sheep on t.v., sheep photos, and cutesy print of sheep at a minimum. Mick's unerring fixation on that untidy collection of icons demonstrates symbolic understanding. He can put an arbitrary group of ways of graphically illustrating sheep, filming them, and the reality of sheep into one broader category. That is a sophisticated and symbolic understanding of a noun."

 

I can see how this might be true. I've read these links over and over and I'm still having trouble extrapolating some of the definitions to these individual situations. Any help appreciated.

 

In thinking about this some more, I came up with another possibility. See how likely this seems:

 

Dogs don't see detail as well as we do (here you go Julie: http://www.50connect.co.uk/index.asp?main=...sp?article=4184 ). Once they have extended from real sheep to some 2D representation, perhaps it's not a stretch for them to see a sheep drawing as the same shape as, say, a sheep in a photo. Maybe they're all just undetailed shapes to start with for them due to their visional limitations.

 

I've always assumed dogs made up for lack of visual acuity with their hearing, sense of smell, feeling vibrations, etc. Clearly, in IDing these sheep pictures, none of that is coming into play. Could it be that they just aren't that discriminating in identifying sheep shapes? Could it be that untidy collection of icons all look pretty much the same to Mick?

[PennyT]

Denise: Could it be that untidy collection of icons all look pretty much the same to Mick?

 

Penny: Maybe they do. They have to look enough alike that he recognizes them as sheep (similarly to the way we do) or he wouldn't be showing you he recognizes the images.

 

The issue is whether Mick discriminates within that group and is grouping them because they look somewhat alike but are not necessarily the same as live sheep.

 

Mick knows what the image of a sheep is with lots of variation and what live sheep are, and thus what sheep as a category inclusive of live sheep and icons (read pictures and other representations) thereof are. Moreover, he does not necessarily think the word "sheep" means "bring the sheep," which is more than indexical and by definition beyond the reach of nonhuman (or at least most nonprimate) animals.

[Eileen Stein]

Okay, I'm back. I read the Peirce references, the Kaminski article, and the Bloom article. Here's what I got out of them.

 

1. Peirce pretty clearly believed that all or nearly all words are symbols, because they are an abstract, arbitary designator of an object which is understood by the hearer as designating that object even when the object is absent (i.e., apart from any space-time connection). He says, "A symbol is a representamen which fulfills its function regardless of any similarity or analogy with its object and equally regardless of any factual connection therewith, but solely and simply because it will be interpreted to be a representamen. Such for example is any general word, sentence, or book," and "The third and last kind of representations are symbols or general representations. They connote attributes and so connote them as to determine what they denote. To this class, belong all words and all conceptions." Thus, IMO he would consider the word "sheep" as a symbol, because it is an arbitrary sound which is used to denote an object, and is understood by an auditor (either human or canine) as denoting that object even when there are no sheep present.

 

It might be said that I'm begging the question of whether a dog really does understand the word "sheep" as referring to a sheep when used in your living room. I suppose most of us have seen indications that they do, but it has not been scientifically tested. However, if I understand the Rico experiments correctly I think it would be fair to say that Rico was tested in this regard, since he was in a room with his owner separate from where the objects were that he was asked by his owner to fetch, and he went to another room to get them. I think that would make the words for those objects symbols in Peirce's terminology.

 

2. Is the term "symbol" used more narrowly today? The icon/index/symbol definition pages that Melanie cited also equate words with symbols; icons are never words, and indices are only words where they are "pointers" such as I, you or here, there. Nouns are always symbols, even though they may have originally been learned indexically. But there is a presumption expressed that "No living nonhuman animals are able to use word-like symbols," so nouns (symbols) are only discussed in terms of how humans use them.

 

We, of course are not concerned here with dogs using words, but with dogs understanding words, and these definition pages are not concerned with interspecies communication, so it's not easy to fit what's said there to our issue. But the definition there adds certain characteristics of how humans use words to the Peirce definition (raising the bar?). It concludes, "In summary, symbols like most words in a human language are (a) easily removable from their context, and ( are closely associated with large sets of other words." Peirce's definition included (a), but said nothing about (.

 

I have no experimental evidence for this, and don't know how one could get any, but I suspect that a sheepdog is quite likely to think of words he's heard associated with sheep when he hears the word "sheep." These would include the commands used to direct his physical behavior in relation to sheep, and would sometimes include (or could be made to include) simple attributes of interest to him like "wool" or "poop." But certainly dogs don't have the rich variety of words that humans, as they grow up, come to associate with and elaborate the meaning of sheep, such as large, light, white, spotted, lustrous, lambchops, and so forth.

 

This raises two questions. First, at what age or stage of development of a child would you say that the child had learned the word "sheep"? (I am harking back here to the closing sentence of Bloom's article, ". . . it is too early to give up on the view that babies learn words and dogs do not.") Would you say it when a child could recognize a sheep when he saw one, and could pick out which of his toys was a sheep? Or would you say it only when he had developed a lot of collateral word associations with "sheep"? I don't know when a linguist would say it, or indeed whether there's any consensus among linguists about when it should be said, but I would say of a dog or a child that when they demonstrate a knowledge of the concept of sheep, such that they recognize the word apart from the object, and in response to the word will seek and find the object (leaving aside the possibility that they could recognize the word as referring to both a "real" sheep and to a stuffed or even 2D representation of a sheep!), then they have learned the word "sheep." Regardless of the fact that at some later stage of their development the child will be able to do a lot more with the word "sheep" than the dog will.

 

In this connection I think there's a lot to Penny's point that if we want to reserve the ability to learn words to humans alone (and unquestionably our society in general, as well as scientists in particular, are heavily invested in seeing a great divide between humans and other animals), we can do so definitionally -- by saying, for example, that dogs and other primates don't understand words as symbols, and then defining "understanding words as symbols" as consisting of things that only humans can do (use them in combination with many other words, use them in abstract discussions over brandy and cigars before the fire, write them down, etc.) This seems to me to be a failure to acknowledge what's really happening.

 

3. Judging from the questions Bloom poses in his article, it seems to me that he is setting the threshold for determining if Rico has learned a word lower than Melanie is. He doesn't seem to require the same level of abstraction or diversification before he will acknowledge that a subject has learned a word. Of course, he doesn't specifically say that if the questions he poses were answered experimentally in the right way, he would then accept that Rico had learned words. It could be that if they were, he would raise the bar. But what he's looking for seems to be generally more basic, less sophisticated. Maybe Melanie is talking about something different -- whether dogs can "learn our language," or "use words to express abstract thoughts," rather than whether they "learn words"?

 

If I'm understanding Bloom's article correctly, he considered there to be two possibilities to explain Rico's behavior: Rico might be learning words just as a two-year-old does, but not as copiously, or he might not be learning "sock" and "fetch" as separate concepts, but only "fetch-the-sock," a behavior. But the Kaminski article says that Rico can be instructed to put the sock in a box, or to give it to a specific person, though no formal tests were run for these commands. Assuming Rico could be shown under experimental conditions to be able to perform these tasks on command (and I have no trouble assuming that), it seems to me that pretty much disposes of "fetch-the-sock," since it would separate the word for the object from the word for the behavior (and in fact add a word for a second object--"box" or "Gerhard"), and it seems improbable Rico could execute the command without understanding each conceptually.

 

*****

And on a separate subject, I too am blown away by the stick figure flash cards. I would never have guessed that a dog could do that. I hope someone will follow up on it.

[Eileen Stein]

Denise wrote:

 

>

 

Could be, but they have to be able to see well enough to distinguish sheep from non-sheep, or they would be looking at your horse pictures the same way. And what I think is so remarkable about Mick looking at the sheep drawing is not that the sheep itself looks so different from a photographed sheep, but that the context is so different from any real sheep he would ever have seen -- the writing, the apples, no open land around the sheep, a rooster standing on its back. I think it's incredible that he can pick the sheep out from the clutter. And if dogs really can't see red or green . . . !