Communication abilities of humans

The argument

Humans have created over 6,500 languages to communicate with one another. The number alone marks a difference in kind rather than degree: unlike animals, we have constructed thousands of different communication methods, each internally complete and each learnable by anyone born into it. The sophisticated grammatical structure of our languages is the second and deeper separation between animal and human communication. Animals like dogs and dolphins have been capable of understanding simple human words, so the boundary is not vocabulary — it is what can be done with vocabulary. They are unable to understand the complex sentence structure that humans can create. The human language has the unique ability that allows people to communicate with varying sentence structures and synonyms, so that the same idea can be expressed in many forms and new ideas assembled from parts that have never been combined before. Animals may alert one another, signal submission, or attract potential mates, but each of those is a fixed message tied to an immediate situation; they cannot communicate with the complexity that humans can. What that structure buys is the ability to speak about what is not present. Humans can communicate about the past, future plans, opinions, and absolute nonsense — none of which is in front of the speaker, and none of which a warning call or a mating display can carry. Everything built on that capacity follows from it: we use this skill to debate, write poetry and perform plays, and we have used language to construct complex, unique cultures that outlast the people who made them. Animals cannot do any of these things. Since behaviour of that kind rests entirely on a linguistic capacity no other species has, it is clear that humans are different from animals due to language.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Research has shown that animals are capable of complex language acquisition. This means that animals are capable of understanding more complex communication like humans. Even though animals may not have a complex grammatical sentence structure, they are still capable of understanding more than researchers initially thought. There are also examples of animals learning human languages, such as Koko the gorilla learning sign language. Therefore, language does not separate humans from animals.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Counting languages measures cultural diversity, not a capacity. The features that would matter — displacement, recursion, open-ended recombination — are precisely the ones under active dispute, with versions of some reported in the signalling of other species. [Rejecting P2] The premise rests on the limits of what has so far been observed, which is weak ground. Animal communication is studied from outside, with human instruments, and the systems of cetaceans and some birds are still being described. [Rejecting P3] Even granting a linguistic difference, it marks a difference of degree in one behaviour rather than a separation in kind. How much grammar trained apes actually acquired remains contested, but the boundary is narrower and blurrier than the premise assumes.