The meaning of rationality

The meaning of rationality - Part V

It is thought that while many animals can roar, sing, grunt or otherwise make noise, linguists believe that the key to language skills is basic grammar. Sentences containing explanatory clauses are something that humans can recognise, but not animals

CJ: Vinod Anand

Thu, Nov 05, 2009 17:03:48 IST

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Rationalism India :

TAMARIND MONKEYS and Song birds: The parallel between humans and non-humans is also demonstrated in a study in terms of the simplest grammar which is historically regarded as one of the skills that separates humans from the animal kingdom.

It is thought that while many animals can roar, sing, grunt or otherwise make noise, linguists have contended for years that the key to distinguishing language skills is basic grammar. Sentences that contain an explanatory clause are something that humans can recognise, but not animals. In other words, it means that ‘recursive grammar is uniquely human.’ as maintained by Noam Chomsky. To establish this, he had performed an experiment a few years ago on ‘tamarind monkeys’ that, despite thorough training, failed to recognise the most basic of grammar in terms of differentiating between a regular sentence and one containing a clause of another sentence.

A similar experiment was recently done with about 15,000 training attempts on songbirds for about a month by a psychology researcher, Tim Gentner and the result was surprisingly different from that of Chomsky, as after training, nine out of the 11 songbirds picked out the bird song with inserted phrases about 90 per cent of the time, whereas two didn't. This experiment shows that although language and animal cognition is a lot more complicated, yet it can be achieved.

Hirshleifer and Glazer, while discussing optimising behaviour, gave an illustration to show that biologists have discovered that the decisions of animals can often be interpreted in marginal terms.

Consider a bird foraging for seeds or insects that are distributed in patches. The bird must decide when to leave its current patch and fly off to look for another. As it continues to exploit the current patch, food becomes sparser and sparser there, the bird’s marginal “revenue” (energy intake) per unit of time spent in the patch is falling. But, if it abandons its current patch, it loses energy intake in the dead time before it locates a fresh patch.

Bio-economic reasoning in this situation says that the bird should continue to exploit its current patch until the marginal “revenue” per unit of time spent there falls to equality with the average “revenue” it can attain elsewhere, allowing for the dead time between patches. They further mention that foraging birds do indeed behave as if they solve this economic problem.

Hirshleifer and Glazer mention another example revolving around the law of demand. In the case of 18 animal experiments, it has been found that the law of demand was supported in 15 (83. 33 per cent) experiments, contradicted in one (5. 55 per cent) and there were mixed or uncertain results in two (11.11 per cent) experiments. This is just indicative of the fact that the law of demand is also applicable in its own way amongst the non-humans.

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