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VOLUME 27, NUMBER 19 · DECEMBER 4, 1980

Letter

More on Monkey Talk

By Jean Umiker-Sebeok, Thomas A. Sebeok

In response to GORILLA TALK (OCTOBER 9, 1980)

To the Editors:

Francine Patterson's letter, inherently chaotic enough, complicatesmatters in that it seems to be addressed, pell-mell, to Herbert Terraceand the two undersigned, whose books are being reviewed, and toMartin Gardner, who reviewed them. Her letter contains scatteredquotations, as in her opening paragraph, ascribed to "the Sebeoks," butsome of these are not, in fact, from our book; they are the words of Mr.Gardner. Her complaint also features a number of bizarre denials ofdramatic assertions which, to our knowledge, no one has ever made—certainly not the two of us. An example of the latter is Patterson'sindignant rejection: "To say that the gorilla's use of sign language isvirtually identical to that of the human child is wrong…." The contraryhas never been asserted by any scholar, not even the most enthusiasticscribbler.

Patterson's repeated whimper, "They have not examined my data," iscounter-factual. Indeed, we have checked over every scrap ofinformation—such as it is—that she has disclosed through normalscientific outlets, and have also surveyed all available vulgarizations ofher data, presuming that it was she who authorized their publiccirculation. Her dissertation, long delayed, became accessible to us only

after Speaking of Apes was typeset; it will, accordingly, be criticallydealt with in our forthcoming article, "Clever Hans and Smart Simians,The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and Kindred Methodological Pitfalls," nowin press and due to appear, early in 1981, in a leading anthropologicalournal. To anticipate, however, we must point out here that there are

basic and very disturbing discrepancies between her data as reported inher thesis and as published in her scattered articles.

Patterson argues in her letter that "Non-verbal cues are omnipresent in

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human communication as well as in ape-human communication….Contrary to the Sebeoks' assertion, it is easy to control for cues such aseye-pupil size…by wearing sunglasses." In fact, Sebeok says virtuallythe same thing, on p. 420 of Speaking of Apes. Patterson has not,however, previously troubled to report this form of control and still

neglects scores of other sources of leakage, many of which weenumerated in our study. In Patterson's reports, the precise trainingmethods or test situations she employed are not usually described, andwe are asked to accept her assertions about her apes' performances onfaith. When experimental conditions are specified, controls are often sofeeble as to defy belief. Her facile statement about the importance ofnonverbal cues belies her continual treatment of the Clever Hans effectas a minor methodological irritation instead of recognizing it—in theface of the vast amount of scientific evidence attesting to its pervasiveinfluence—as a global application of the self-fulfilling prophecy, even

in situations where experimenters are not as emotionally committed totheir experimental subjects as Patterson is, by all accounts, to hergorillas.

Patterson censures us for our "ignorance of sign language structure,"but the shoe is on the other foot. She has never produced a shred ofevidence that her apes' gestures are, in fact, signs, in the technicalacceptation of this basic semiotic unit, as tellingly put forth by Petittoand Seidenberg ( Brain & Language 8:162-83, 1979). Terrace's findings,

which have now been supplemented by a discourse analysis of the datapresented in Patterson's dissertation, fully confirm our long-heldsuspicion that the roughly duplicative gorilla gestures that she persists incalling signs are scarcely more than "signifiers" without any"signification" in the human sense.

Patterson's repeated overinterpretations of her subjects' behavior asokes, apologies, puns, and now English rhymes (!) are clear examples

of the Pathetic Fallacy, with which we have dealt at length in our study.In the case of the sign for drink, which she focuses on in her letter, we

would still like to know what other locations were used by Koko withthe hand configuration in question. Assuming that, as Patterson reports,the trainer had been trying for some time to persuade Koko to make thissign, we may guess that the ape in fact moved her hands in variousdirections during the session, and with various accompanying facialexpressions. How were all of these other "signs" and expressionsinterpreted? The possibilities, given the lack of the kind of informationany thoughtful person would demand, are limitless. Patterson would





profit immensely from mastering the principles of biology—notably thewritings of Jacob von Uexküll and his Umweltlehre—and the best ofcontemporary linguistic theory—e.g., Noam Chomsky's Rules and

Representations, ch. 6—not to mention a number of classic circustraining manuals.

Patterson complains that there are "numerous" erroneous remarks in ourintroductory chapter. In her letter, she offers but one example, whichhappens to be false. We cannot repeat here our detailed critique of thecautionary method of the so-called "double-blind" test, a magic devicein which Patterson seems to place touching faith, but which, as we and anumber of others have demonstrated, is all too often embarrassinglyinadequate. To take a single example from Patterson's work,descriptions and illustrations in her published articles show that the boxshe used for double-blind testing was sufficiently small so that Koko

could have moved it around at will. Patterson's experimental design forsuch tests by no means rules out certain guessing strategies on the partof ape and the "blind" experimenter, given the small universe of stimuliwhich was available for use and the familiarity of both ape and humanwith these materials, as well as with one another's facial expressions,body movements, and the like. It should be said, finally, that thesedouble-blind tests have been used only rarely by Patterson. We havefound published reports of only one series, administered to Koko inSeptember, 1975. Koko, Patterson has admitted in print, was extremelyreluctant to perform under these conditions.

Patterson claims that "One cannot trace the evolution of language froman armchair in Indiana." Our view is that, to the contrary, aGedankenexperiment can never be separated from its technicalrealizations in any field of science, since an understanding of nature canonly be obtained by the informed and careful application of both.Patterson's lack of methodological sophistication is precisely traceableto her innocence of fundamental theoretical advances in fields adjacentto her own. Her fellow psychologists who are knowledgeable about suchissues will have to judge the extent to which she is a victim of self-

deception and why, when some of the more prominent "pongists" havepublicly renounced this line of investigation, she persists, against theweight of versant opinion and the laws of probability, in pursuing thewill-'o-the-wisp that apes are capable of language-like performances.Those who are ignorant of the millennial history of the Clever HansPhenomenon are doomed to replicate it endlessly with one animal formor another, whether embodied in birds, horses, pigs, porpoises, the greatapes, or, most recently, the wondrous tortoises of Milwaukee.





Jean Umiker-Sebeok

Thomas A. Sebeok

National Humanities Center

Research Triangle Park, North Carolina

Copyright © 1963-2007 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.Nothing in this publication may be reproduced without thepermission of the publisher.


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