Pointing holds the secret of language, maybe.
The last several posts have been diving down, trying to find what foundation language requires. By the time I got to the end of last week's post it was clear that I was going to need to really understand the difference between human and ape pointing if I was going to get the distinguishing basis of speech. After all, apes point but don’t talk. What’s the difference? I've passed the week checking out that question.
The answer turns out to be that humans alone point because they are interested in the world beyond themselves and want to share it. Without that interest and that desire, you get the world of very intelligent apes. It all reminds me of the lyrics to an old song that began,
I saw her standing on the corner / (oooh ooh ooh) / a yellow ribbon in her hair / I couldn’t keep myself from callin’ / looky there / looky there
I’ve always been unjustifiably fond of that tune (full lyrics here), but I never suspected it voiced the key to human nature. Male ape nature too, of course, is to take note of striking females, but sharing the observation makes no sense. Why invite competitors? Yet the singer in this song “couldn’t keep myself” from pointing out beauty to others.
The definitive report on ape gesture appears to be an article published in 2005 in Current Directions in Psychological Science, “Understanding the Point of Chimpanzee Pointing,” by David A. Leavens, William D. Hopkins, and Kim A. Bard. (Abstract here.) It opens:
A defining characteristic of the human species is our capacity to rapidly establish topics for mutual contemplation. [p. 185]
It then goes on to identify the attentional triangle so often cited on this blog:
An act of pointing, thus, creates a referential triangle that incorporates distant objects into the relationship between a signaler and the recipient of the gesture. [p. 185]
Pointing has almost never been observed among wild apes. There is only one detailed description of pointing by apes in the wild. A bonobo pointed out some human observers hiding in a bush. However, among captive apes, pointing is a commonplace. Typically, caged chimpanzees point to something they want their human captors to give them. Their signal can be translated as gimme.
The fact that chimpanzees in captivity frequently point but those in the wild almost never do is not merely a trivial consequence of raising chimpanzees in bizarre, captive environments. Rather, it suggests that pointing by humans is written neither in our genes nor in our anatomy, but in the functional characteristics of our social and physical environments. The harder argument to make is that pointing emerges in similar circumstances in two very closely related species with similar body plans and hand anatomies, yet derives from completely unrelated psychological processes. When chimpanzees in captivity point to unreachable food, the overt meaning is obvious. It would be unfortunate if we failed to grasp the implicit meaning of this gesture: Pointing is not uniquely specified by the human genome. [p. 188]
Leavens et. al. are arguing that pointing arises not from our genes, but our circumstances. In a field so dominated by nativists like Noam Chomsky and Stephen Pinker, it is good to find a strong behaviorist case, but in this instance it does not quite work. If you take a look at that What Came First? post, you will find a survey of an article by Susan Goldin-Meadow that shows where the Leavens team overstated its case. Humans do not point only or even mostly for the reasons captive chimpanzees do. Chimpanzees mean gimme, humans usually mean looky there.
If we go back to the opening of the Leavens piece, we find that its observations still hold. Establishing “topics for mutual contemplation” remains a defining human characteristic, if, by contemplation, you mean contemplation rather than interaction. Chimpanzees don’t point to a banana to encourage you to contemplate it; they want you to give them the banana. Mutual contemplation of the sort seen in infants:
BABY: Aak [points]
MAMA: Yes, it’s the cat [without giving the cat to the baby]
This kind of mutual contemplation is routine among humans of all ages and unknown in both ape worlds, wild and captive.
Another article I examined in an effort to understand chimpanzee pointing was a review study by Ádam Miklósi and Krisztina Soproni ,”A Comparative Analysis of Animals’ Understanding of the Human Pointing Gesture” (Abstract here).
Their survey looked at many animals besides apes. Dogs do pretty well at understanding human pointing. In part, this success may be a result of selection. Dogs that do well at understanding their masters are favored over those that do not, but the reverse selection has probably gone on as well. People prefer to work with dogs over other species because dogs are good at understanding what people want. This latter point turns out to be crucial when considering our nearest relations and their inability to get beyond gimme-pointing to looky-pointing.
Apes have not been successfully domesticated. Even those chimpanzees raised in circuses and human homes become too strong and fierce when they are grown to make satisfactory performers, pets, or companions. Partly, this history reflects ape intelligence and independence. They want what they want and don’t care what you want. But not caring is the issue. Looky-pointing demands caring.
Which brings us to an article available online by Michael Tomasello, “Why Don’t Apes Point?” (available here.) This article asks:
If chimpanzees have the ability to gesture flexibly [and they do] and they also know something about what others do and do not see—and there are certainly occasions in their lives when making someone see something would be useful—why [don’t they] sometimes attempt to direct another’s attention to something it does not see by means of a pointing gesture or something equivalent? [p. 2]
The prose is a little verbose for my tastes, but it gets at the central question of this blog. Why do humans enjoy joint attention while apes do not? And what happened to make us mutually attentive?
Tomasello makes the same distinction between gimme-pointing and looky-pointing this blog makes, although he call it imperative and declarative pointing. (That difference pretty well summarizes the distinction between academic and blog prose.) They come from two different motives. Gimme-pointing asks for help; looky-pointing tries to share. The article by Leavens et al. found that captive chimpanzees ask humans for help; they do not ask other chimpanzees for help. So we can accept Tomasello’s statement, “Apparently, other apes species do have these same motivations to help and share with others” (p. 10).
The article does not insist on a hereditary explanation for human pointing, leaving room for the Leavens team’s behaviorist approach. Pointing varies from culture to culture, suggesting that it is learned; although the universality of it suggests something more fundamental lies at the bottom of the story.
Tomasello lists five impediments to ape pointing:
- They do not understand communicative intentions.
- They do participate in joint attentional engagement as common communicative ground within which deictic [contextually referential] gestures are meaningful.
- They do not have the motives to help and to share.
- They are not motivated to inform others of things because they cannot determine what is old and new information for them (i.e., they do not really understand informing per se).
- They cannot imitatively learn communicative conventions as inherently bidirectional coordination devices with reversible roles. [They cannot learn that speakers and listeners are reversible roles.] [p. 14]
Put more basically, apes cannot form a community whose members work together toward shared goals. Teamwork, a.k.a. collaboration (or if you want to get postmodern about it, synergy) are unknown psychological states for them and cannot be learned.
This blog has argued that point before, but the Leavens team has forced me to expand that a bit. Apes are not interested in topics, except in their ability to make use of them. We too are a practical species and make use of what we know, but we begin by just being interested in the world for interest’s sake.
Helping, sharing, wondering: these are the required elements if there is to be any speech at all.
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