Animal Studies in the Language Sciences

Animal Studies in the Language Sciences

Prisca Augustyn

Biosemiotics ISSN 1875-1342 Biosemiotics DOI 10.1007/s12304-018-9313-3

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Author's personal copy Biosemiotics https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-018-9313-3

Animal Studies in the Language Sciences Prisca Augustyn 1

Received: 1 November 2017 / Accepted: 9 March 2018 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018

Abstract This paper explains how recent changes in the ways we study other animals to better understand the human faculty of language are indicative of changing narratives concerning the intelligence of other animals. Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt as a speciesspecific model of the world is essential to understanding the semiotic abilities of all organisms, including humans. From this follows the view that human language is primarily a cognitive tool for making models of the world. This view is consistent with the basic premises of cognitive linguistics. The rejection of behaviorism in linguistics represents a turning point in the history of animal studies. The resulting criticism of long-term studies with primates illustrates this shift concerning the study of wild animals within the language sciences and beyond. New insights in dog cognition and research on the processing of human language in canines are reflective of a change in focus away from anthropocentrism towards the species-specific semiotic abilities of animals in the twenty-first century. This new orientation away from comparing animal sign-systems to human language and the importance of studying intelligent wild animals in the wild instead of in captivity have lead to an important re-evaluation of our relationship with other animals and our views of their cognitive and semiotic profiles. This leads to questions such as what role non-human organisms can play in the language sciences, and what our limitations are of studying the sign systems of other animals. Recent research on the signifying abilities of wild dolphins, for instance, has identified a new set of characteristics by which to study intelligence in other species. Keywords Animal studies . Linguistics . Semiotics . Umwelt . Non-human intelligence . Animal linguistics

* Prisca Augustyn [email protected]

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Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA

Author's personal copy Augustyn P.

Introduction After opening his aquarium in Hamburg in 1926, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) wrote in a letter to a friend: BAs scientists we know that everything we say about the natural world is inadequate, because human language is no currency to pay for the truths of nature.^ (Gudrun von Uexküll, p. 144 [my translation]). Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt — the subjective species-specific world created by an organism — is central to the ethological approach to human language that underlies both biolinguistics and biosemiotics. Like Peirce, Uexküll approached nature and culture through the analysis of signs and sign processes. The semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce (1935–1966) and Uexküll’s Umweltlehre (e.g. 1920) have therefore become the theoretical and philosophical core of biosemiotics and played an important role in the evolution of Chomsky’s biolinguistics. (Augustyn 2009, 2013). Jakob von Uexküll, regarded a Kantian biologist (Wirth 1928) at his time, was trained as a zoologist and physiologist. He first focused on the sense perception of organisms, mostly of marine animals. Throughout his career, Uexküll applied what he observed in his studies of muscular physiology to the semiotic capacities of the organism as a whole; and his Umweltlehre evolved into a general theory of life as semiosis. Uexküll is, therefore, considered an important forerunner of ethology and comparative psychology. Konrad Lorenz (1941, 1971) owed the foundational insights that informed his experiments with graylag geese, jackdaws, and dogs to Uexküll (G. von Uexküll 1964: 198). Von Uexküll’s radical constructivism is exemplified in his statement that B[no] matter how certain we are of the reality that surrounds us, it only exists in our capacities to perceive it. That is the threshold we have to cross before we can go any further^ (J. von Uexküll 1902: 213 [my translation]). Jakob von Uexküll’s son Thure von Uexküll, a physician and pioneer of psychosomatic medicine, outlined the main aspects of Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory as follows (T. von Uexküll 1982: 4–8): 1. [True] reality (Natur) that lies beyond or behind the nature that physicists, chemists, or microbiologists conceive of in their scientific systems reveals itself through signs. These signs are therefore the only true reality, and the rules and laws to which the signs and sign-processes are subject are the only real laws of nature. […] 2. The methodology of Umwelt-research, which aims to reconstruct this ‘creating’ of [reality] […] means, therefore reconstructing the Umwelt of another living being. […] 3. The aim of Umwelt research is to create a theory of the composition of nature […] [by exploring] the sign-processes that govern the behavior of living subjects. Uexküll understood the limitations of our particularly human ability to experience and interact with the natural world as amplified by the ability to craft narratives about how the world is. This view of the human faculty of language as a species-specific ability to make models of the world is a fundamental principle underlying Uexküll’s work in ethology and his concept of Umwelt. The human faculty of language, according to this view, is foremost a tool with which to construct models of the world. Chomsky’s interest in Uexküll and ethology was a result of discussing alternatives to the dominant paradigms in linguistics and behavioral psychology with Eric Lenneberg

Author's personal copy Animal Studies in the Language Sciences

and Morris Halle in the early 1950s. The biolinguistic program, therefore, derives its general approach to human language from ethology and comparative psychology; and Konrad Lorenz played an important role in its evolution (Jenkins 2000: 10). Eric Lenneberg’s (1967) Biological Foundations of Language Banticipated many themes of the coming decades.^ (Jenkins 2000: 3). This view that language is a tool of thought or modeling system rather than a mere communication system is fundamental to Chomsky’s biolinguistics (e.g. Chomsky 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009; Hauser et al. 2002; Hauser and Bever 2008). Sebeok, the main proponent of biosemiotics, also believed that language served primarily the cognitive function of modeling, and, as the philosopher Popper as well as the linguist Chomsky have likewise insisted […], not at all for the message swapping function of communication. The latter was routinely carried on by nonverbal means, as in all animals, and as it continues to be in the context of most human interactions today (Sebeok 1991: 334).

Models of Nature In Sebeok’s Modeling Systems Theory (Sebeok 1991; Sebeok and Danesi 2000), language is considered a secondary modeling system that augments the human perceptual modeling capacities (cf. Anderson and Merrell 1991). This view of language as a tool of thought is also compatible with research agendas in cognitive linguistics that seek to explain how language can engender cognitive habits and beliefs about the world. According to cognitive linguistics (e.g. Lakoff 2009), the narratives about the world we are exposed to form our habits and beliefs. Or as Lakoff and Johnson proposed decades ago, there are metaphors we live by (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The idea that our beliefs are formed by the metaphors and narratives we grow up with come from insights that crystalized in cognitive linguistics through the work of Goffman (1974), Fillmore (1976), and Lakoff and Johnson (1980) throughout the late twentieth century. The underlying principle is simple: We live by the metaphors and narratives we have been exposed to. The most recent iteration of this argument also includes claims that our beliefs form physical structures in the brain (Lakoff 2009). The basic idea is that the more often you hear, read, or see something, the stronger the neuronal connection, and the more firmly established the associated beliefs. The Uexküllian Funktionskreis as a basic model for all kinds of feedback loops of perception and action, both physiological and cognitive, is one of the most fundamental models of organism-environment interaction established by Uexküll’s animal studies. Like walking on a rocky path requires a constant feedback loop between feeling the surface and placing the next step, all our action is at the same time a constant evaluation of our perception. These and all phenomena of organism-environment interaction can be explained with the basic perception/action model formulated by von Uexküll as the fundamental law of neuromuscular regulation (also sometimes referred to as the principle of negative feedback) that explains how any outside impulse to the body of an organism is received by the muscles and nerves that are already engaged, forming a feedback loop of perception and action, physiological or cognitive.


To give a simple example, imagine growing up hearing that spiders are pests that need to be eradicated and seeing others act accordingly. This is a widespread belief even though spiders do not carry diseases, or otherwise endanger human life. It stands to reason that the behavior of others and the things they say about spiders determine how we react when we encounter them ourselves. When people always react to and talk about spiders with disgust, it is very likely that the narrative SPIDERS ARE PESTS will form a solid belief that will determine how someone thinks and acts when encountering spiders. The belief that SPIDERS ARE PESTS that need to be eradicated exists in people with no adverse experiences with spiders and is, therefore, based not on actual facts about spiders, but primarily on the metaphors we live by. When, instead, someone grows up with people who are fascinated with spiders and look at them with wonder, and become familiar with actual facts about spiders (e.g. that the vast majority of them are harmless) one may be more inclined to live by a different narrative. For instance, considering the fact that spiders often eat other animals that do harm or annoy us, a different narrative of spiders as sentient animals trying to survive as part of a complex network of coexisting organisms may determine how we react. This narrative is connected to other narratives such as the view that all living things have their place in nature and serve a purpose in a complex system of life. This is the narrative of ECOLOGY that originated in the nineteenth century with the biologist Ernst Haeckel (cf. Hinchman and Hinchman 2007). Such metaphors and concepts fit into a complex system of narratives that is characteristic of a particular culture or community of interest. The narrative of ECOLOGY, for instance, originated within a worldview of cultural and biological Romanticism. Narratives only exist in the minds of a community of people who think alike and act accordingly. One can assume that there were more admirers of spiders among nineteenth century Romantic intellectuals and scientists than anywhere else today (with the exception of researchers who study spiders). In a long chain of narratives and cognitive habits passed on from generation to generation, the stories evolve over time. Jakob von Uexküll’s approach to studying animals and his concept of Umwelt are a result of this long chain of cognitive and practical habits that resulted in a general attitude of reverence for the natural world, poetry about nature, looking at plants and animals with wonder, documenting and describing their morphologies. For the sciences in the nineteenth century, this meant focusing on the origins and evolution of all forms of life (languages included) with an attitude of admiration for the perfect form, a general interest in botany, poetry, and art among scientists of all stripes. In the twentieth century, as the focus shifted to atoms and molecules, genes and neurons (and units like phonemes in the language sciences), scientific attitudes changed as the metaphors scientists live by are constantly changing. One important shift in scientific narratives is what Bruno Latour (1993) has described as the modern illusion of a divide between nature and culture that characterizes many scientific approaches today. Cognitive linguistics shares with biosemiotics the basic premises laid out by Jakob von Uexküll that we have our models of the world and so do other organisms. By trying to understand how other organisms model the world, we recognize our own possibilities and limitations of modeling. Predicated on this basic principle, the ideal scientist is one who is always looking for new narratives or is ready to revise existing ones, not the one who clings dogmatically to the old stories.


To realize that language is no currency to pay for the truths of nature (Gudrun von Uexküll 1964, 144) is the basic premise of scientific progress, because we are always caught in a struggle between old and new stories. The challenge is to understand and explicate not only the metaphors people live by, but also – and this is the more difficult part – to determine how the process of crafting a newer, more accurate story, can be facilitated. The goal is to determine how the better, more accurate stories can replace those that may be harmful or even destructive. While animal studies in the language sciences may appear as a very specialized area of interest, the role other animals have played in our efforts to better understand the human faculty of language proves to be complex and rich in insights about our relationship with other animals. In fact, it reveals a particularly positive recent change in our attitudes towards other organisms and their intelligence. This can be attributed to the growing recognition of the concept of Umwelt, even without overt reference. In a paper concerning our stories about the living world, Frans Verhagen (2008) discussed the following metaphors about nature through the ages: Nature as scala naturae Nature as machine Nature as factory/workshop Nature as web Nature as storehouse Nature as mother Nature as measure (Verhagen 2008) These metaphors about the living world are self explanatory, because we all live by many (if not all) of them in different aspects of life. The (bio)semiotician and biologist Kalevi Kull has offered a very similar analysis of basic metaphors in the field of biology throughout the ages as LADDER, TREE, and WEB (Kull 2003); the LADDER emphasizing Linnean hierarchy, the TREE explaining genealogical relations, and the WEB recognizing connectedness. We live by the story of nature as a STOREHOUSE, for instance, in our attitudes towards raising and eating animals. The story of the WEB is connected to the concept of ecology. The story of nature as MACHINE resonates with our stories about atoms and molecules, genes and neurons. We have cognitive or practical habits associated with all of them. Our attitudes towards other animals draw on different narratives depending on the context. The stories we live by determine how we think and act, whether we live with animals or without them, tolerate or eradicate them, use or abuse them, eat or abstain from them, admire or ignore them, protect them or leave them to extinction. The metaphor of HIERARCHY is paramount and depends on our beliefs about the sentience and intelligence of non-human organisms; the key characteristic predominantly being the faculty of language as the feature that sets us apart. Language, the old story goes, makes us different from the rest. The American linguist Charles Hockett (1960) tried to define the differences between human language and Banimal communication^ with a set of design features. The point of the list of features was that the


communication systems of animals do not share most of them. The design features supposedly not shared by other animals, according to Hockett (1982[1960]), were such things as displacement (the ability to refer to things not present at the time and place of signifying), productivity (the ability to create new combinations of signs), cultural transmission (the teaching of particular signs from generation to generation), and learnability (the ability to learn new sign systems). Research in animal communication over the past 50 years has called into question the exclusiveness of some of these features to human language. We know that bees can indicate the location of a food source and the quality of food far away, chimpanzees can learn new vocalizations when they join a new group, and dolphins use the signs specific to their pod and teach them to their offspring. Čadková (2015) recently came to the conclusion that Hockett’s design features of language are inadequate not only because some of them are not exclusive to human natural languages, but because it is inherently unscientific to even expect the sign systems of other animals to have comparable characteristics in the first place. The big mistake made by many researchers in animal communication was precisely the direct comparison with human language. The notion of Umwelt prevented Jakob von Uexküll from such misguided comparisons, because he knew that the capacity to signify and interpret signs varies with the species-specific semiotic abilities of organisms. This insight was also crucial to the biolinguistics of Chomsky and his rejection of behaviorism.

The Cognitive Revolution Chomsky’s critique of behaviorism (Chomsky 1959) that is articulated in his review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (Skinner 1959) is grounded precisely in the argument that language is a species-specific biologically determined behavior. Even though behaviorism was derived from studies with animals (in the famous Skinner box experiments) there was no ethological interrogation of the cognitive/ semiotic capacities of the animals involved, since the Skinner box mechanically delivered the stimulus and the appropriate reward for the desired behavior to the animal in question. To Skinner, it was irrelevant whether it was a rat or a pigeon. It was, in fact, considered the strength of behaviorism that the experiments worked with almost all animals. But the very fact that operant conditioning works with everyone is at the same time indicative of a lack of explanatory power. The Skinner box experiments only focused on the learning mechanisms the behaviorist framework assumed to be universal laws of behavior across species, including humans. Meanwhile, the biologist von Uexküll had long taken a different path. He considered both an anthropocentric perspective on other animals and a purely mechanical approach to their behavior to be inadequate and unscientific. For Uexküll, a universal theory of perception and cognition or learning theory was simply impossible. For Chomsky, a theory of human language acquisition likewise couldn’t be based on the insights gained from behaviorist theories of learning not only because they had been derived from studies with other animals, but also because there are no universal laws of learning; and human language as a species-specific biologically determined behavior warrants a different theory of learning than other behaviors.


First-language acquisition as a biologically determined behavior (similar to walking) requires a theory of acquisition that is different from learned behaviors (e.g. playing tennis or playing a musical instrument) where instruction and positive and negative reinforcement are actually necessary and helpful. This is the chief argument for Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis and the concept of Universal Grammar (the initial state of the human faculty of language). Lenneberg’s (1967) definition of biologically determined behavior is crucial to make this clear: Like walking, acquisition of language is biologically determined, because it requires no instruction and it arises before it is necessary. While Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (Skinner 1959) made no direct reference to the animal studies that established the behaviorist paradigm, the resulting theoretical concepts were incompatible with the theory of acquisition of biologically determined behaviors such as language, and were therefore rejected by (bio)linguists like Chomsky and (bio)semioticians like Sebeok.

Primate Studies In order to challenge Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis, psychologists and primatologists in the mid twentieth century wanted to show that other animals may actually have something like a language faculty and at the same time validate behaviorist models of learning by proving that primates can learn American Sign Language (ASL) or other symbol systems. (cf. Linden 1987). Primate studies on language were based on the fact that primates share most of our DNA and general physiology, but only crucial physiological limitations (of organs used for speech in humans) prevent primates from speech. The assumption that animals that look most like us are closest to us in intelligence resonates with the hierarchical model of the SCALA NATURAE. Several long-term studies, in which primates were raised with ASL or abstract symbol systems in combination with English, were conducted to find out if primates share any of our linguistic competence. In other words, these studies were designed to find out if primates have something like grammar even though they are apparently not using it. While Chomsky and Sebeok were approaching human language from an ethological perspective, the researchers who conducted these studies hung on to the old story of behaviorism and the belief that all behaviors are learned by the same mechanisms across species. This old story about how behaviors are learned (whatever they may be) informed the long-term studies beginning in the 1960s, in which chimpanzees and bonobos where raised in family homes (usually the homes of the researchers) and later, when things went awry, turned over to research labs. The most notable studies were Washoe (e.g. Gardner and Gardner 1984), Nim Chimpsky (e.g. Terrace 1979), and Kanzi (e.g. Savage-Rumbaugh 1986) . Washoe (1965–2007) was a female chimpanzee raised by Allen and Beatrix Gardner from the University of Nevada, Reno. The Gardners raised Washoe with ASL without speaking to her in English from infancy. When Washoe became too big and too dangerous for the Gardners and their children, she was turned over to Roger Fouts at Central Washington University, where she lived until her death at the age of 42 in 2007. Washoe allegedly was shocked to find out she was not human when she was introduced to other chimpanzees. There are many insightful anecdotes that attest to Washoe’s


strong emotional awareness and intelligence. Washoe would sign to herself ‘be quiet’ while playing hide and seek and, upon seeing a swan for the first time, allegedly combined the ASL signs for ‘water’ and ‘bird’, which was taken to be indicative of Hockett’s productivity. Washoe could string together longer ‘sentences’ that did, however, not obey the syntactic rules of ASL. It would have been a triumph over Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis and generative principle, and at the same time validation of behaviorism to prove that primates can form sentences according to the grammar of ASL. While Washoe was most certainly a highly intelligent animal, the confident assessments of her ability to use ASL productively and grammatically were shown to be inflated and unscientific by the primatologist Herbert Terrace. Doubtful of the results from Project Washoe, Terrace decided to work with a male chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky (1973–2000), also initially raised by a family. After having become dangerous to the family he had been raised with, Nim joined Terrace at the Animal Language Acquisition lab at Columbia University. Terrace found that Nim only used ASL pragmatically and showed no signs of grammar. When Nim became depressed and hostile, he was transferred to the Institute for Primate Studies in Oklahoma, where he grew increasingly violent and killed a dog. He was subsequently sold to a pharmaceutical testing laboratory where he died of a heart attack in 2000 at the age of 27. After Terrace’s work with Nim called the results of Washoe with ASL into question, researchers turned to experiments with visual abstract symbol systems. Kanzi (1980 -), a male bonobo, was raised by Susan Savage-Rumbaugh with a system of so-called lexigrams that correspond to human speech. Kanzi apparently also picked up some ASL. His attempts to imitate human speech are allegedly understood by the people who work closely with him. One of his trainers, Bill Fields, has explained in great detail what lead Kanzi to bite him in the hand after Kanzi had warned him. According to Fields, Kanzi had interpreted the behavior of a visitor to the lab as hostile to one of the lab attendants; and he demanded that Fields punish the visitor for it or he would bite Fields for not defending the lab attendant. The backstory of this incident is complex and attests to Kanzi’s strong social awareness and emotional intelligence. Nonetheless, the injury was severe and required Fields to undergo several surgeries to reconstruct his hand. (Wheeler, Radiolab).1 The neglect of species-specific semiotic abilities in all these experiments was obvious to Chomsky and Sebeok who voiced their strong opposition, for instance, in the anthology Speaking of Apes (Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok 1980). At the time, there seemed to be little awareness of ethical considerations when bringing a wild animal such as a chimpanzee or bonobo into a family home. The tragic outcome of project Nim and other animals whose captivity has caused negative public reaction has thankfully evolved the story of our relationship with other animals – especially those we consider to be intelligent. It appears that more often than not, tragedy causes stories to evolve more readily than logic and common sense. While Sebeok and Chomsky considered Terrace’s experiments to adhere to high scientific standards, Sebeok explained that Bthe alleged language experiments with apes divide into three groups: one, outright fraud; two, self-deception; three, those conducted by Terrace. The largest class by far is the middle one.^ (Sebeok quoted by Wade 1980). 1

Wheeler, S. Radiolab – Kanzi. http://www.radiolab.org/story/91708-kanzi/ retrieved February 2018


Chomsky and Sebeok were opposed to these long-term language studies with primates, because they knew that there was nothing to be learned about human language or the cognitive capacities of primates. (Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok 1980) In an interview about his opposition to these experiments, Chomsky explained: Humans can be taught to do a fair imitation of the complex bee communication system. That is not of the slightest interest to bee scientists, who are rational, and understand something about science: they are interested in the nature of bees, and it is of no interest if some other organism can be trained to partially mimic some superficial aspects of the waggle dance. And one could of course not get a grant to teach grad students to behave like imperfect bees. When we turn to the study of humans, for some reason irrationality commonly prevails – possibly a reflection of old-fashioned dualism – and it is considered significant that apes (or birds, which tend to do much better) can be trained to mimic some superficial aspects of human language. But the same rational criteria should hold as in the case of bees and graduate students. Possibly training graduate students to mimic the waggle dance could teach us something about human capacity, though it's unlikely.[…] Would it be of any interest to train grad students to more or less mimic apes? We would learn nothing about apes from the fact that grad students can be trained to more or less mimic them – try to get an NSF contract to study that – just as we learn nothing about humans from the fact that apes can be trained to mimic humans in some respects. Language is a notorious failure, exactly as any biologist and paleo-anthropologist would have expected. But if, say, Nim had succeeded, we would still have learned nothing about language acquisition, gaining neither more nor less wonderment, though we would have a biological problem. Namely, if apes have this fantastic capacity, surely a major component of human extraordinary biological success (in the technical sense), then how come they haven't used it? It's as if humans can really fly, but won't know it until some trainer comes along to teach them. Not inconceivable, but a biological problem, and about the only conceivable scientific consequence of the ape-language experiments, except what they might teach us about ape intelligence by training apes to deal with problems that are outside their normal cognitive range. This is all sentimentality of the worst sort. (Cucchiaro 2007/2008) It took several decades until primate researchers reoriented their focus towards the species-specific sign-systems, vocal and non-vocal, and primates were no longer brought up in the homes of researchers, but instead studied in more speciesappropriate semi-wild habitats (e.g. Halloran 2012). It is unfortunate that Uexküll’s basic premise that each animal species has a specific way of interacting with its environment that is articulated in the notion of Umwelt took so long to permeate into the mainstream sciences. Maybe documentaries like Project Nim (Marsh 2011) or Blackfish (Cowperthwaite 2013) have contributed to the reevaluation of our relationship with other intelligent animals and their own signifying abilities that is commensurate with our own intelligence as a species? The good news is that it appears that some scientists have revised their stories and learned from their mistakes. Animal rights groups have gained momentum pressuring commercial animal programs like circuses and animal parks like Sea World to take


better care of animals in captivity, end breeding programs, or retire animals to sanctuaries. These changes are indicative of rising concern for he rights of non-human organisms and possibly a revision of our stories concerning their intelligence. It may be safe to assume that the new narrative that intelligent animals employ complex sign systems that are different from human language is slowly replacing the old narrative that the ultimate test of intelligence in other animals is whether they can learn something that resembles human language. (Cucchiaro 2007/2008).

Animals Processing Human Language Unlike wild animals, domesticated animals that have evolved with us have long tuned in to human language and other human sign systems. While most dog owners tend to overestimate the role spoken language plays in their interactions with dogs, the ability of domestic dogs to process human speech is significant and certainly deserving of scientific attention. Dogs and humans have evolved together for a long time. In fact, we have created the dogs we live with by selective breeding over millennia. Even though we all know dogs respond to human speech, several dog behaviorists have recently articulated a revised understanding of the semiotic profiles of dogs away from the human tendency to overestimate the role of human vocal commands. (e.g. McConnell 2003, 2009, Bradshaw 2011, Miklosi 2015, etc.) In her bestselling book Inside of a Dog (2009), Alexandra Horowitz attributes her approach to studying dog behavior to the work of Jakob von Uexküll: The scientific study of animals was changed by a German biologist of the 20th century named Jakob von Uexküll. What he proposed was revolutionary: anyone who wants to understand the life of an animal must begin by what he called their Umwelt, their subjective or ‘self world.’ Umwelt captures what life is like as the animal. (Horowitz 2009: 20) Horowitz, in fact, cites Uexküll’s prime example for the concept of Umwelt: Consider, for instance, the lowly deer tick. And you probably consider the tick as a pest, period. Barely even as an animal. Von Uexküll considered, instead, what it might be like, from the tick’s point of view. A little background: ticks are parasites. Members of Arachnida, a class that includes spiders and other eight-leggers, they have four pairs of legs, a simple body type, and powerful jaws. Thousands of generations of evolution have pared their life to the straightforward: birth, mating, eating, and dying. Born legless and without sex organs, they soon grow these parts, mate, and climb to a high perch – say, a blade of grass. Here’s where their tale gets striking. Of all the sights, sounds and odors of the world, the adult tick is waiting for just one. It is not looking around: ticks are blind. No sound bothers the tick: sounds are irrelevant to its goal. It only awaits the approach of a single smell: a whiff of butyric acid, a fatty acid emitted by warm-blooded creatures (we sometimes smell it in sweat). It might wait here for a day, a month, or a dozen years. But as soon as it smells the


odor it is fixed on, it drops from its perch. Then a second sensory ability kicks in. Its skin is photosensitive, and can detect warmth. The tick directs itself towards warmth. If it’s lucky, the warm sweaty smell is an animal, and the tick grasps on, and drinks a meal of blood. After feeding once, it drops, lays eggs, and dies. The point of this tale of the tick is that the tick’s self-world is different than ours in unimagined ways: what it senses or wants; what its goals are. To the tick, the complexity of persons is reduced to two stimuli: smell and warmth – and it is very intent on those two things. If we want to understand the life of any animal, we need to know what things are meaningful to it. (Horowitz 2009: 20) It is from this starting point that Alexandra Horowitz explains the perception and action profiles of dogs for a better understanding of how they signify and interpret human signs. Like other dog behaviorists, Horowitz explains that dogs mostly read our body, and then associate vocal commands with what we communicate with our bodies. It needs to be acknowledged that one of the most important lines of research that has come from Jakob von Uexküll’s institute in Hamburg at the beginning of the twentieth century were methods for the training of guide dogs for the visually impaired. (cf. Magnus 2015). There is no question that dogs, as domesticated animals, respond to verbal commands whether they are guiding the visually impaired or interact with humans in everyday life. The ability in dogs to process human language in addition to the sign system of the human body is indicative of the canine ability to interpret the vocalizations of another species and therefore indicative of high intelligence. (cf. Herzing 2015) But our understanding of exactly how dogs process language is only beginning to be understood. In a recent study, a team of neuroscientists from the Family Dog Project (2016) at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest managed to put dogs in fMRI machines to scan their brains while processing human vocal praise (Andics et al. 2016). Their experiments suggest that dogs process the meaning and affect of human speech separately (in a way that is similar to humans), favoring the left hemisphere of the brain to process word meaning and the right hemisphere to process the emotion expressed in the voice. This means that dogs only get the full benefit of human vocal praise if the utterance is composed of both the word they know as an expression of praise and the intonation of excitement in the human voice. This may not be surprising to anyone who lives and interacts with dogs, but it represents a compelling ethological approach to studying how animals process human language. It stands to reason that there is a certain level of coevolution of cognitive traits in species that have as close a relationship as humans and canines. Alexandra Horowitz (2009:8) points out that some B[researchers] tend to speak of the species as though all members of the species were identical.^ Her view of the individual mind/brain being shaped by the unique signifying abilities of the individual is a shift in the direction of another (bio)semiotic point of view not shared by all in the mainstream scientific community. Horowitz explains: The results of many well-performed experiments may eventually allow us to reasonably generalize to all dogs, period. But even then, the variations among


individual dogs will be great: your dog may be a unusually good smeller, may never look you in the eye, may love his dog bed and hate to be touched (2009:9). While this makes sense to anyone who has lived with more than one dog, it calls into question the confident generalizations made about the minds/brains of all intelligent organisms regarding such fundamental questions as specificity (i.e. a particular parts of the brain associated with particular aspects of language) that has been a central hypothesis in neurolinguistics. There is, nevertheless, enough evidence of plasticity to question many generalizations derived from imaging techniques like MRI. If we look at all animals under the assumption that they construct their own subjective self-world according to the perception/action profile that is specific to their species, and also on their unique experiences, individual brain scans and images immediately loose some of their generality and explanatory power. (cf. Andrews 2011). Still, acknowledging the centrality of the concept of Umwelt in a field as popular as dog behavior studies is indicative of a fortunate shift to studying animals as subjective agents constructing their reality according to their species-specific semiotic abilities. It may not be a coincidence that the same era that has brought us the rediscovery of Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt in a bestselling book on dog behavior more than half a century after Chomsky and Sebeok have discovered his work in the 1950s, has brought the end of many abusive animal programs in theme parks and circuses. Animals, at least for some of us, have advanced in our model of the world from being something to being someone. For instance, Sea World is now phasing out all orca shows and breeding programs by 2019. (Bomey 2016) It is safe to assume that this particular decision was initiated by the wide distribution of the 2013 documentary Blackfish, in which several former Sea World trainers not only express their remorse for participating in the inhumane breeding and training of orcas for commercial purposes that have cost the lives of many whales and humans over the decades. These trainers were painfully aware that the vocalizations and other species-specific semiotic abilities of killer whales were consistently ignored while training them only to follow human commands. If only the people who were interested in orcas as much as these trainers had been given the opportunity to study them in the wild instead of merely contributing to the commercial exploitation of their intelligence. One example of such research in the wild is Denise Herzing’s Wild Dolphin Project at Florida Atlantic University. Recently, Herzing (2014) tested a wearable device that allows her to generate and record dolphin calls to interact with a pod of dolphins she has been following in the Bahamas for many years. This device was developed by Thad Starner, founder of the Animal Computer Interaction Laboratory at Georgia Tech University. Instead of studying dolphins in captivity, Denise Herzing has been able to observe and record the same group of animals and interact with them through computer-generated whistles. (Herzing 2015). It appears that the twenty-first century has finally acknowledged the complexity and systematicity of the signifying abilities of other intelligent animals such as dolphins. At least some scientists have found ways to investigate animal sign-systems with a new attitude that is consistent with the Uexküllian premise that they have ways to make sense of the world that are different from ours. It appears as if at least part of the scientific community is seriously reevaluating our relationships with other species and


is willing to revise the story. Andreas Weber has explained this as a new biology of subjects: It always seemed like as researchers and modern scientists we were overlooking something essential about plants and animals. It is as if we were blind for precisely what drew us to study living organisms in the first place. […] We are overlooking important aspects of nature, because science has presented it to us in a way that has excluded its most beautiful aspect, because it only focused on objective facts instead of seeing organisms as subjects. Science prefers abstractions and excludes all semiotic aspects of life. That is the real cause of all environmental disaster. We are extinguishing life, because we are missing its real character. We can be cruel, because our understanding of life is incomplete. […]. (Weber 2008: 23 [my translation]) This new biology, as Hoffmeyer has explained it does not turn experimental biology to metaphysics but instead replaces an outdated metaphysics – the thought that life is only chemistry and molecules – with a far better, more contemporary, and more coherent philosophy. Life rather than natural law – and signs rather than atoms – must become natural science’s fundamental phenomena (Hoffmeyer 2008: 15). For the language sciences, this new attitude requires zooming out from human language as completely separate from the sign-systems of non-human organisms and at the same time not anthropomorphizing by comparing all sign systems to human language. The inclusion of the sign systems of other species in the field of linguistics may seem questionable to most linguists, especially those who see the field aligned with (human) psychology and the (human) social sciences, maintaining the illusionary separation of culture and nature (cf. Latour 1993). However, there are signs that linguists are interested in applying their tools and methods to better understand nonhuman sign-systems.

Animal Studies Using Linguistics? The University of Wollongong in Australia has recently posted a job description that is Bvery open as to the area of linguistics that the candidate might specialize in, but applications from scholars with strengths in ecolinguistics and especially those who might make a contribution to animal studies using linguistics would be very well received.[…]^ (University of Wollongong 2016). One might ask what type of training a linguist who specializes in other animals may need? For one thing, they need to be researchers who are not dogmatically hanging on to the old stories, but instead have to be open for constant revising. They also need to be ready to be marginalized or even ridiculed in their discipline. One example of experimental linguistics that was marginalized for a long time before it inspired the new field of experimental phonetics is the work of John Ohala. As a research area that has gained considerable momentum in the twenty-first century,


experimental phonetics made room for the ethological perspective in what Ohala called scientific phonetics. Scientific phonetics, according to Ohala (2004) stands in opposition to a mere Btaxonomic phonetics^ that entails the categorizing of speech sounds and their articulatory and acoustic properties. Scientific phonetics is concerned with the phonetic abilities of the human body/mind from an ethological perspective that can yield insights that are relevant to cognitive science. Ohala explains: Besides these typical external differences between taxonomic and scientific phonetics there is a profound philosophical difference. The ‘scientific’ approach implies, as do all other sciences since the Renaissance that any given theory, including whatever one believes most fondly, may be erroneous but that by gathering data in a rigorous way such error may be minimized or avoided. In contrast, taxonomic phonetics thrives through conformity. (Ohala 2004:134) Phonology, generally considered the ‘nuts and bolts’ of linguistics clearly favors taxonomic phonetics, because it derives from it an inventory of abstractions that can then be deployed in phonological theories. While taxonomic phonetics has provided stability and conformity to theoretical phonology throughout the twentieth century, it is in scientific phonetics that real progress has been made in understanding the production and perception of human speech. (cf. Ohala 2004). It is precisely the instability and constant retooling of scientific phonetics that yields progress and new insights into the phonetic abilities of humans. It is this scientific phonetics that also operates from an ethological perspective in Ohala’s approach as he looks beyond the species to identify the semiotic abilities that we actually share with other animals. For instance, in a paper addressing the signaling of emotion in the voice, Ohala (1996:1812) explained that [the] comparative study of the expression of emotions has, in fact, reaped a rich harvest. There are remarkable similarities – both macro- and micro-patterns – in the expression of emotions in humans and various non-human species. This is particularly true among species able to exploit some of the same signaling modalities as humans, i.e. the vocalauditory channel and facial expressions (Ohala 1996:1812). The scientific phonetics originated by Ohala remained in the margin of linguistics throughout the twentieth century even though this work clearly anticipated the outcomes of the Hungarian dog MRI study (Andics et al. 2016). It was unstable as a paradigm, because it had to constantly be revised with every innovation in research tools and methods. Unfortunately, what we find in textbooks still today about phonetics and phonology is the reliable conformity of taxonomic phonetics in the service of phonological theory that made Ohala’s scientific phonetics appear to be outside of the normal range of questions in the field of linguistics for a long time. This marginalization of scientific phonetics is evident in Ladefoged’s review of 50 years of phonology, where Ohala’s work received barely more than an honorable mention. (cf. Ladefoged 2004) While most linguists were discussing Optimality Theory in the 1990s, Ohala’s phonetics lab was an anomaly, because he was studying the human articulatory


apparatus the way Uexküll studied the muscular physiology of a sea urchin. Ohala probed the human speech organs and analyzed the human articulatory capacity in action, often in what seemed like precarious self-experiments. One example of twenty-first century scientific phonetics is a recent study that shows that speech sounds are not always perceived in accordance with their acoustic– phonetic content. For example, an early and automatic process of perceptual repair, which ensures conformity of speech inputs to the listener's native language phonology, applies to individual input segments that do not exist in the native inventory or to sound sequences that are illicit according to the native phonotactic restrictions on sound co-occurrences. (Kharlamov et al. 2011) In other words, our perception of speech sounds is determined by the phoneme inventories and phonotactic rules of the language(s) we speak. The concept of Bperceptual repair^ (Kharlamov et al. 2011) is a cognitive equivalent of physiological perception/action feedback that can be explained with Uexküll’s Funktionskreis, confirming its relevance to all phenomena related to language and cognition. Like playing a string instrument depends on a constant feedback between hearing and making the sound, we hear based on how we speak. The sounds we grow up hearing and producing determine what we hear. This basic law underlies all semiotic abilities, including our perception and production of speech sounds. Likewise, it is consistent with cognitive linguistic theories of metaphor that is articulated in the principle that the stories we hear determine how we think and act. Lakoff’s work on cognitive metaphor, now connected to insights in neuroscience (Lakoff 2009), can be added to the many manifestations of the feedback loop of organism-environment interaction that follow the model of Uexküll’s Funktionskreis.

Exolinguistics In the science fiction film Arrival (2016), a linguist is recruited to study the language of an alien species who have landed on Earth. The film portrayed rudimentary techniques of linguistic field work and language documentation. While it was encouraging to see a linguist entrusted with analyzing the signifying abilities of an alien species, one might ask whether this linguist should not be one with some experience in analyzing the signifying abilities of other intelligent species here on Earth? At a time when Denise Herzing’s Wild Dolphin Project has successfully analyzed dolphin whistles using pattern-discovery algorithms to extract meaningful features with some success in translating dolphin whistles (cf. Hodson 2014), should the linguist studying an alien language not at least have looked beyond human languages? Someone like John Ohala in collaboration with the dolphin researcher Denise Herzing and the computing expert Thad Starner instead of a linguist whose expertise is translating Chinese would have been more compelling. There are other aspects in which the portrayal of the field of linguistics in this film was inadequate, but the producers have to be commended for not giving the alien species human-like anatomy. In a recent paper on how to analyze non-human types of intelligence, dolphin researcher Herzing explains that


[intelligence] has historically been studied by comparing nonhuman cognitive and language abilities with human abilities. Primate-like species, which show humanlike anatomy and share evolutionary lineage, have been the most studied. However, when comparing animals of non-primate origins our abilities to profile the potential for intelligence remains inadequate. (Herzing 2014:676; Berreby 2014) Based on her research on the signifying abilities of wild dolphins, Herzing proposed a new approach to profile a variety of organisms along multiple dimensions including EQ – Encephalization Quotient, CS – Communication Signal complexity, IC – Individual Complexity, SC – Social Complexity and II – Interspecies Interaction. Because Earth species are found along a variety of continuums, defining an intelligence profile along these different trajectories rather than comparing them only to human intelligence, may give us insight into a potential tool for quickly assessing unknown species. The application of profiling nonhuman species, out of world, will be both observational and potentially interactive in some way. Using profiles and indicators gleaned from Earth species to help us develop profiles and using pattern recognition, modeling and other data mining techniques could help jump start our understanding of other organisms and their potential for certain Btypes^ of intelligence. (Herzing 2014:676) It is safe to assume that any understanding of extraterrestrial species will have to be preceded by a better understanding of the signifying abilities of other intelligent species on Earth. This means our story about other intelligent species and how we study them has to always use the Uexküllian concept of Umwelt as a starting point. At the time of preparing this article for publication, a recent paper (Abramson et al. 2018) about an orca imitating human speech has gained widespread media attention. Almost simultaneously, strong criticism of the research project at a French theme park came from animal rights activists and orca experts like Ingrid Visser, who interpreted imitating sounds in captive orcas as a sign of loneliness and boredom. (Owens 2018) It appears that while the scientific community is still divided on the merits of teaching animals to imitate human language, the media and the general public seem ready to reject anthropocentric approaches to animal studies. It is safe to assume that Uexküll’s Umwelt will be the guiding principle for successful future research on sign systems in other animals here on Earth or elsewhere. Compliance with Ethical Standards Conflict of Interest

The author declares that she has no conflict of interest.

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