Distributed Disconfirmation: Refute This Animal Interrogatives Hypothesis!

“the philosophy of science doesn’t employ ‘question’ as a key term. Explanation? Only a bazillion papers on that one. Questions? Not so much.”

Van Fraassen’s “The Pragmatics of Explanation”, ch. 5 of “The Scientific Image”, gives an account of explanations as answers to why-questions (following Aristotle). That seems like something you should look at.

On the empirical question: Kanzi requests particular tools and foodstuffs, and in general is pretty clever in what all he can do. I’m not sure what, empirically, you are looking for when asking “Do beasts ask questions?” but if any of them will satisfy you, I’d guess Kanzi might. Lloyd’s “Kanzi, Evolution, and Language” is a very interesting discussion of his case.

Can’t help you on the ethology, but there’s an interesting pop culture treatment of this. “Arrival” is a movie about humans learning to communicate with bizarre aliens. Eventually they manage to talk to each other in simple sentences. But thinking it over, I don’t remember the aliens ever asking a question. It’s not confined to this movie, either. “Contact”, “Close Ecounters” – humans ask questions, aliens answer.

As already mentioned, cats might be a good candidate. “asking to do” is very evident in cat behavior: asking humans to make them breakfast, asking humans to open the door so they can go out… I agree “asking to tell” is different. There is some research that cats are one of the few animals that can track human gaze direction (its uncontroversial that dogs can do this; the research question was whether cats can too). So: do cats ever ask “where is it?”

Why cats? (Or dogs) They’re domestic animals, and so are evolved/selected to understand human beings.

Hi Holbo,

Van Fraassen is indeed building on Bromberger; both towers and flagpoles cast shadows in chapter five.

“Maybe I should distinguish ‘asking to do’ from ‘asking to tell’.” — This does seem profitable. I’m not sure how cleanly asking to be told something comes apart from asking for other things to be done, though. If a young child asks “Where’s momma?” then sometimes no information will satisfy them; only momma herself will. Any other response will merely stall for time while waiting for momma. And then sometimes you can just tell them where momma is, and that will satisfy them. Though perhaps I am just raising an old puzzle about what satisfies desires (“He asked for water and she gave him milk”), and the question-asking business can be given a clean account apart from that.

It’s been a while since I looked at epistemology of testimony stuff, but I know at least Richard Moran makes a big deal about telling as a special kind of epistemic activity, e.g., in “Getting Told and Being Believed”. Telling in Moran’s sense involves giving your word, asking for trust and having it given, then the hearer being able to appeal to your authority as a justification for what they think, etc. If telling in Moran’s sense is required for the relevant sort of questioning to happen, then it seems that only humans can ask questions; telling is a human practice that’s tied in with the rest of the game of giving and asking for reasons, and we’re the only ones in that line of work.

If you haven’t already, you might want to look at the work of Stephen Anderson

https://cowgill.ling.yale.edu/sra/

Or, perhaps better yet, email him and ask him.

–Rob Chametzky

So let me get this straight, John: not only are you asking us to prove a negative, you are more or less asking us whether Great Apes possess the nature of the Interrogative Buddha. ç„¡ is appropriate as ever, I think.

Well, I’m going to rise to the challenge and risk a definitive answer. Have language-trained non-human primates demonstrated the ability to ask questions? No, they haven’t, and I feel confident to state this because of the following proof by contradiction.

The main and most famous Great Apes Language projects had the scientific ambition to settle the question of whether Great Apes could learn some form of human syntactic constructions. Within the paradigm of human language that was presupposed (and potentially argued against) in these studies, questions are thought to be much more involved than for instance simple transitive or even passive constructions. As a consequence, had any of these projects yielded even a semblance of a question, that would have been a huge deal and a more relevant finding (by far) than the boilerplate “X understands n numbers of signs/words/symbols” article on the topic. I have read countless articles of the latter form and can find countless more in a 5 minutes of browsing while I have never even heard a claim of the first sort (considering I maintain a semiprofessional interest in linguistics), I am confident that no such claims were ever made.

This brings us to your refined observation that “interrogative is a syntactical category […]. Then again, it’s a pragmatic category.” The above of course applies only to the syntactical category side of the question. I think addressing the other side requires exceptions clarity in distinguishing the two sides. In my line of trade, we consider the syntactic side of a question as quite devoid of intrinsic interrogative force or meaning: the structures pre-exist, it acquires question-like features (that is to say the property of requesting a missing piece of information) only subsidiarily, and then again not always (think for instance of how embedded interrogative construction gained quantificational force in Japanese, or if you master a more exotic language, how “what” functions equally well as relative pronoun in English).

If that theory is anywhere near correct, then it follows that there are in fact two quite independent phenomena at play: the request of missing information and the use of certain syntactic structures to accomplish such requests. In this more precise framing, I am 100% confident that no Great Ape has ever demonstrated the ability to learn the construction of the relevant syntactic structure (not surprisingly) but I am at the same time reasonably confident that some may have exhibited information-seeking behavior (for instance showing an object to a more knowledgeable ape in order to learn how to use it) though I admit no clear-cut example of relevant studies immediately comes to my mind. Whether you want to consider information-seeking behavior questions is… an interesting question (I would say no, but YMMV).

Next, my son (why not? he’s 15 months, very cute, and asks many questions but purely through rising pitch onomatopoeia or meaningless syllables). Questions, or not? I would say yes, because I dispute that these utterances are entirely without syntax. I could give a long theoretical account based on the interaction between prosodic phases and syntax, but I’ll pass and just declare that I believe that MRI should be able to identify syntactic processes going on when a toddler says “Da?” while pointing at an unfamiliar animal.

But you were crowd sourcing, and I like to brag, so here goes. Tomorrow, I’m meeting Noam Chomsky. Yep. I’ll ask him a variant of your question (if I get the chance), and I’ll report. How’s that for crowdsourcing?

I see that Z went over much of this- strike my comment above if you wish.

Michael:

I spent much of my adult life studying culture. Your definition is both idiosyncratic and ignores decades of intellectual work by anthropologists, sociologists, folklorists, etc – this is of course fine (in theory), but I’d suggest finding another word instead of culture to avoid confusion.

I was trained a folklorist, not an zoologist, but in the case of orcas, we are not simply talking about a set of skills passed down (which is nonetheless culture): we are talking about food preferences, recreational preferences, methods of education of offspring, and preference/presence of greeting ceremonies, all different amongst differing clan groups in the same geographical area. At least one group in history – in Eden, Australia – formed a pact with local human whalers to hunt cooperatively.

The case of dogs and ‘questions’ is an interesting one, given that dogs have been a course of convergent evolution with humans for tens of thousands of years. My dog is incredibly smart (herding breed) about many things, incredibly daft about others. She’s perfectly capable of indicating a preference for a door to be opened, alerting me to danger, reading minute changes in body language and hopefully/fearfully anticipating what will come next, but while I put money down that she has a theory of mind (me as an autonomous individual – studies have been done that support this) nothing in her behavior has ever struck me as particularly questioning. Questions to her, I think, would be superfluous to the way she interacts with other animals:

1. Desire something (play/food/affection).
2. Read other animal to see if possibility exists.
3. Begin desired action and read subject. If Other reacts negatively (yells/bites/etc), cease.

I would guess questioning begins as a refinement of 2, as a way to further refine the social read you get of a situation, to avoid possible censure in 3. Censure that, by the way, most dogs don’t hold grudges about. Getting bit on the ass for a bad social read seems to be an understood risk of interaction, so long as the bite can be contextualized as flowing justly and logically from the circumstance.

Questioning, to me, presupposes advanced language and strong social structures. It would not surprise me that humans are the only ones capable of questions. But it would also not surprise that other mammals with advanced languages – orcas, say, who show regional linguistic variation (more culture!) but also the ability to learn other cetacean languages – have the ability as well.

I’m asking whether you can prove a positive (and I would be very shocked to learn I am asking you whether Great Apes possess the nature of the Interrogative Buddha!)

Ah, for my defense I’ll remark that Michael simultaneously and independently picked up the Zen thread (but the rest was just being humorous).

The hypothesis is the negative: No X’s are Y’s. That’s the hard one to prove. I’m asking for a positive disconfirmation: An X that is a Y.

Well sure, but that you are not going to get for the reasons I mentioned: it would be a huge deal. So huge, I tell you.

I think any line of trade that took the syntactic side has having intrinsic interrogative force should probably find another line of trade! That would be nuts, yes.

You are making Jonathan Ginzburg and Ivan Sag very sad (they wrote 460 pages on interrogative constructions arguing just what you dismissed). But I see we agree on the syntactic side.

I would be interested in studies of this sort, especially something like showing an object to learn how to use it. In a general sense, I’m interested in modes of information transfer between animals.

As you know very well, the principal mode of information transfer is imitation, and great apes at least purposefully elicit imitation (that is to say they draw the attention of a youth and perform an action, even meaninglessly, in order to trigger imitation). Young dogs and wolves (and I believe other carnivorous mammals) sometimes bring unusual preys to the group. When dogs do it and you look straight at them, it is impossible not to think that they are asking you “What am I supposed to do with this?” But, and here the syntax comes back with a vengeance, isn’t it the case that comparable information transfer among humans are thought as very distinct from questions, effectively because they lack the linguistic support, and that we may recast them as questions more metaphorically than actually?

I would say no, too.[…] a question might be anything that triggers information release. But that is inevitably going to be too broad – at any rate, it will include things that we wouldn’t call questions. But it’s not obvious how to narrow it in a non-arbitrary way.

Yeah, precisely. I would say the linguistic input is the non-arbitrary way.

I think I know what Noam will say: no. He’s been a bit fixated on the syntax side of it for some years now. But thanks for asking!

Oh, about your original question, of course he will say no. But I intend to press on (along the lines that you dismissed as nuts above, it is of course quite technical but even Noam does not deny that there is a question-like syntactic feature in pure syntax and within his line of inquiries, it is far from clear why and how this feature should have emerged, whereas other syntactic features like person, number or case have natural explanations).

One of the old Zen guys, talking about the method, said “The thing is to let down a hook for questions.” That is, like bizzaro Socrates, they want the student to be questioning them. “It is probable that one can induce questions by purposefully removing key elements from a familiar situation” there you go.

Also not a primatologist, but: asking a question implies that you are ready to give credence to the answer. So in a suitably advanced social/cognitive situation, asking a question is an invitation to be lied to; spying-out is superior strategy. Seems relevant somehow: primates typically sex in public and eat in secret.

“I don’t much like the frame Jordania puts around his idea: Man, the Interrogative Beast! I think, in general, it’s a hazardous temptation – borderline unscientific – to be looking for the thing humans do which no other species can. We don’t, a priori, assume every species has some one thing it can do that no other species can do.”

Maybe it’s unscientific, but I think it’s a very important question. I come from the view that only sentient (i.e. conscious) beings have natural rights, and also accept the postulate that humans are sentient. So a major issue in philosophy as I see it is: what is it to be sentient? How do we detect sentience in others? Are humans the only sentient beings on Earth? Is artificial sentience possible? These are all, I think, very salient questions.

I’ll note that so far only one generally accepted test for sentience exists, that is the Turing Test, but what is really interesting about the line of thought that you pose is that the Turing Test is all about testing a subject by asking questions. In every incarnation that I have heard of, the subject is free to ask questions of its own but that is not required. If the ability to ask questions is indeed bound up somehow with sentience, that suggests other ways of testing for sentience and possibly turning the Turing Test on its head, which is a very exciting idea.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

The first question!

What an interesting topic. Thanks, John! I’ll sure follow up some of the references. I don’t have any positive information about the main question re: animals. But reading through the comments, there’s a fair amount of top-down reasoning apparent, of a type I’m starting to be inclined to classify as a fallacy, or at best a heuristic device: “In my theory of how X works, it requires questioning. Beings of class/species A engage in X. Therefore they must have questioning.”

When I went back to graduate school four years ago I didn’t anticipate what would be easy and what would be hard. As it turned out, and is glaringly obvious, now that I’m getting to the “write up results” phase, the hardest part for me as someone with her own scientific research credentials is the development of good — clear, effective, complex-enough-to-be-interesting, but simple-enough-to-be-answerable — research questions. In my case, it’s hard to overcome being driven by methodology (“hey, this is a neat method! i’m sure if I apply it to THIS problem area, I can find out something new and interesting”) . What helps is, other than just growing into better mastery of a sub-field and thus having a more holistic view of it, to encounter people from outside the field, or even outside science, who have a problem they need solved. Obliquely, this, and your post, make me think of the bit from studying Charles S. Pierce years back and discovering abductive reasoning to generate hypotheses (“All balls in this urn are red. These two balls are read. Maybe they come out of this urn”).

MisterMr @ 24
2) or suppose that I want to know if my cat likes chocolate, I then give him a piece of chocolate and watch what happens. Now I’m actively researching some information but I’m not asking, more like testing, and the cat respose is not really an “answer”.

Whether your cat will understand you, or believe you, could be the subject of further lengthy philosophical debate, but anyway don’t give your cat chocolate because he might be tempted to actually eat it, in spite of perhaps in a ‘state of nature’ not doing so, because he may believe that what you give him must be good for him, even though it’s not (which could also raise many philosophical questions)
http://www.petmd.com/cat/emergency/poisoning-toxicity/e_ct_human_food_poisoning

Hearsay report: dogs trained to search for specific things (drugs, cadavers) as instructed by spoken commands, will sometimes detect something there is a command for after being told to search for something else, and will pause and look back at their trainer as if to inquire, “Are you sure you don’t want me to find Y instead of X? (Because I can do that.)”

When we humans do these sorts of things, we may explain it in terms of ‘inner questioning’. All the gaze-cuing stuff. It’s as-if I am questioning. But plausibly that has it backwards. Questioning, proper, is a thing that only comes later.

I think that and the doggy mentales stuff (“I think we can imagine how problem-solving – ‘putting Nature to the question’ – can go on, cognitively, without having to imagine the animal formulates an inner question, as it were.”) is precisely correct.

Regarding Jordania’s

“I propose that hominid responsorial singing (through the question intonation) together with increasing complex social interactions in hominid groups were the main factors that prepared the way for the emergence of the human ability to ask questions.”

I have a much higher tolerance for sweeping grand theories of Humanity than most so I am not at all unsympathetic to the proposal, yet in that particular case and with my emphasis I am totally unconvinced. This kind of explanation falls directly onto why I would call Chomsky’s objection, that is to say: if he is right and questions originally occurred in complex social interactions of singing hominids, then why is it the case that all man languages allow “I like John and Belle” and no human language allows the question “Who do you like John and?” (and a million others)? The meaning is quite transparent and there clearly is a range of social interactions in which the question is very natural and useful, so why not?

I would be quite open to a theory in which the syntactic apparatus appeared in the brains of some Sapiens and was first put to use to produce adversarial choral singings then subsequently for communication between peers (and indeed perhaps I would discover that this is exactly what Jordania precisely means with “prepared the way” if I actually read what he did).

John, two links that are not directly related to your question but touch a little on some of the issues raised in this thread.

The first touches on questions of how groups of primates might learn to carry out coordinated activities of various kinds (and notably proposes dancing/moving in time with each other, not the choral singing you cite from Jordania, as a basic organizing ritual).

The second is more general, and covers how there is a continuum of culture across a broad swath of the animal world.

Neither book addresses your central question of whether or not any primates have ever been known to ask questions.

(1) Keeping Together in Time (Dance and Drill in Human History) by William H. McNeill
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674502307

(2) The Evolution of Culture in Animals by John Tyler Bonner
https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Culture-Animals-Tyler-Bonner/dp/0691023735/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1469747148&sr=8-4&keywords=the+evolution+of+culture+in

(blurb:)

Animals do have culture, maintains this delightfully illustrated and provocative book, which cites a number of fascinating instances of animal communication and learning. John Bonner traces the origins of culture back to the early biological evolution of animals and provides examples of five categories of behavior leading to nonhuman culture: physical dexterity, relations with other species, auditory communication within a species, geographic locations, and inventions or innovations. Defining culture as the transmission of information by behavioral rather than genetical means, he demonstrates the continuum between the traits we find in animals and those we often consider uniquely human.

Two points:

1) Interrogation is certainly a semantic category rather than, or over and above, a syntactic one. This is shown by the reversal of the roles of the actors, if nothing else.

2) Irene Pepperberg ought to be asked about this, with reference to her far-reaching work on semantic communication with parrots.

Thanks so much for a great post, John, and to all the commenters for thoughtful and provocative answers/responses to the specific question, viz. “have language-trained non-human primates demonstrated the ability to ask questions?”

Speaking from the standpoint of a language teacher/applied linguist rather than that of a theoretical linguist or a philosopher of knowledge/language now.

Question: What makes it possible for a human being to ask a question?
I would suggest as starting-points:
a) the ability to consciously recognize an information gap and zero in on it. So: conscious realization of the unknown + focused attention on the specific unknown (and its salient feature(s)).
b) a presumption/hypothesis that an other can supply this gap in information.
c) a communicative mechanism for conveying the specific gap that entails very low cost (in biological terms, i.e. “low energy consumption”) for both questioner and respondent.

b) seems to me to require at least a primitive TOM (“I don’t know; Mommy knows”), but this isn’t at all my area, so I won’t continue this line of thought.
c) requires a higher level of symbol manipulation than that required for declarations of fact. In English, it presupposes the ability to understand that symbols can stand in for other symbols, including interrogatives (Who-what-when-where-why) and deixis (this, that), and pronouns (he, her, it), and to manipulate them even in rudimentary fashion to elicit the specific response sought.

Starting from ZM’s comment @48, that Koko expressed questions through eye contact and facial expressions (a means of questioning that seems to me at least somewhat comparable to that used by infants in their pre-language stages of preparation for language deployment), my answer to your original question would be a qualified “no”.

We are certainly not the only curious species on the planet, but the ability to acquire massive amounts of information through asking directed questions seems to be, well, human. And the cognitive costs of this, in terms of energy consumption, are sufficiently low as to make it a highly efficient means of learning.

The really interesting question to me is what feature(s) of the human neo-cortex made this evolutionary cognitive-linguistic achievement possible. Clearly it is associated with the language function, but since we know that chimps can understand questions very well, but do not spontaneously ask them by manipulating language symbols, there may be other areas of the neocortex involved.

Another area one might look into is the field of expressive aphasia (aka “Broca’s” aphasia). Some patients lose the ability to ask Wh-questions (a basic question form), which suggests to me that the questioning faculty is piggy-backed onto the core language faculty, and can be lost through brain trauma while other faculties (naming, declarative statements) remain to some extent intact.

Profoundly fascinating stuff.

Having lived with animals for all my 44 years, it has become apparent that they do indeed try to communicate with us, but unfortunately most of the time we are unaware of it. Household pets and horses have become closer to us humans because of the constant interaction and this probably helps them to determine how they should be communicating with us.

Unfortunately, in today’s modern world we are so busy and focussed on a myriad of things at once that we don’t pick up on the animals signals. I have found when you bring your mind into a relaxed state, if we are with an animal there are times when we can pick up a lot more of their signals.

I know almost nothing about linguistics but will share a cat observation. Two of my cats were trapped as ferals, one a kitten of 6 months, the other its mother of unknown years. Momcat took 10 years to learn to “meow” to humans. She is tightly bonded to her offspring, Uncle Spook. Momcat knows that I bring Uncle Spook in and out of the house (she is indoor only). If she can’t find him in any of his usual spots in the house she comes to me, meows and follows me until I bring Uncle Spook to her. Is this a question (where is he?)? Or is it a command (go get him!)? Either way, I obey.

“the properly human components of question-complete with syntactic form-is probably first and foremost an internal mode of organization of thoughts, and that communicative modes of information request are only peripherally linked to it.”

I think something like this is true. There’s a profound difference between ‘asking a person’ and ‘asking a question.’ The first- no matter how polite- is an imperative. The second is more mysterious.

You can ask a person for a thing (forgiveness, permission, spare change, directions, etc), and this is just a gentle command or entreaty: “Please give me forgiveness/permission/your spare change/directions to Fenway Park.” Note that imperatives have their own grammatical structures (in the languages I know).

You can even ask a person to tell you the answer to a question- or, as we say, ask them a question. This is the ‘information request’ mentioned often above. But this is still an imperative: “Please tell me if you will forgive me/where Fenway Park is.”

But to ask a question is something else. It is necessarily embodied by no particular grammatical structure. It’s parasitic on ‘having a question’ or ‘wondering’: “Will he forgive me? Where is Fenway Park?” It calls for that unutterable question-mark, or that unwritable question-tone. When spoken, this sort of question is just as likely to be involved in an ‘ignorance transfer’ as an information transfer, as happens when we ‘plant a question’ in someone’s mind. Serpent: “Did God really say….?” Eve (to self): “Hmm, well…did he?”