evolutionary psychology

[Angrboda]

Rereading what Britannica wrote about Alex makes me realize something. I had thought that training primates to use language didn't really address their native capacity for language, but in hindsight I think that is wrong. Humans do not learn language without exposure and encouragement, so it would be a bit of a double standard to expect primates to learn language without those things. In that, I'm reminded of Chomsky's view that humans must come "language ready" in some sense, or else they could not realistically translate their experience of language from others into a comprehensible thing that they can use and understand. The search space of language is just too vast. And if that is the case, that primates and other animals exposed to language pick up skills in use and comprehension, then they must have in some sense been "language ready." This strongly suggests that there is good reason to believe that the continuity hypothesis, that language comprehension forms a continuum in the animal kingdom rather than an abrupt transition to humans, is likely correct. Those arguing otherwise seem to be relying on incidental facts such as differences in form between different animal's communication or the fact that an animal by design has preferred means of communication and preferred uses of communication that don't mirror those of humans. This all seems like a pathetic tempest in a teapot given the similarities between and apparently rich cognitive resources that animals besides humans possess in the domain of communication.