It seems to me that really only the languages of science and math are responsible for our advancement past other animals. Hayakawa seems to reason that most of the other uses of language are reports, inferences, snarl-words, etc. Most animals can express feelings such as “I am hurt and I can’t get up” or “Get out of the way”, but they cannot express laws of nature or mathematical theorems.
Also, I don’t really understand Hayakawa’s chimpanzee driving example. The red light doesn’t really mean stop, it means come to the white line and stop. If you could teach a chimpanzee to stop at a red light, I don’t believe that it would be too difficult to get a chimpanzee to understand that it should slowly advance to the car stopped in front of it and then stop. Though Hayakawa argues that the chimpanzee does not account for the other drivers, I am relatively certain that after a chimpanzee gets in a few accidents, it would learn to drive fairly well. I doubt these concepts were easy for even humans to get used to when they first started.
(Arvind Kalidindi)
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Though I understand the value of the languages of science and math and would never belittle their importance I have to disagree that they are the only reason we have advanced past other animals. If one reflected on the talking they did over the course of a day I believe most people would find that less than half of their conversations are reports of extensional knowledge. We talk about books, history, movies and other people, and analyze these things in a manner far above animal understanding. Additionally, to say that we have only advanced beyond animals due to science and math ignores both literature and the complex relationships between human beings. Animals obviously have interspecific relationships as well but I don't think it is simply human conceit that makes me think that the relationships between humans are typically much more developed. -Molly Dunbar
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