[MD] Alex the Parrot

[MarshaV]

"Most humans are not truly dispassionate 
observers. We’re too invested in the idea of our 
superiority to understand what an inferior quality it really is."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/opinion/12wed4.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Alex the Parrot

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: September 12, 2007

Thinking about animals — and especially thinking 
about whether animals can think — is like looking 
at the world through a two-way mirror. There, for 
example, on the other side of the mirror, is 
Alex, the famous African Grey parrot who died 
unexpectedly last week at the age of 31. But 
looking at Alex, who mastered a surprising 
vocabulary of words and concepts, the question is 
always how much of our own reflection we see. 
What you make of Dr. Irene Pepperberg’s work with 
Alex depends on whether you think Alex’s 
cognitive presence was real or merely imitative.

A truly dispassionate observer might argue that 
most Grey parrots could probably learn what Alex 
had learned, but only a microscopic minority of 
humans could have learned what Alex had to teach. 
Most humans are not truly dispassionate 
observers. We’re too invested in the idea of our 
superiority to understand what an inferior 
quality it really is. I always wonder how the 
experiments would go if they were reversed — if, 
instead of us trying to teach Alex how to use the 
English language, Alex were to try teaching us to 
understand the world as it appears to parrots.

These are bottomless questions, of course. For 
us, language is everything because we know 
ourselves in it. Alex’s final words were: “I love you.”

There is no doubt that Alex had a keen awareness 
of the situations in which that sentence is 
appropriate — that is, at the end of a message at 
the end of the day. But to say whether Alex loved 
the human who taught him, we’d have to know if he 
had a separate conceptual grasp of what love is, 
which is different from understanding the context 
in which the word occurs. By any performative 
standard — knowing how to use the word properly — Alex loved Dr. Pepperberg.

Beyond that, only our intuitions, our sense of 
who that bird might really be, are useful. And in 
some ways this is also a judgment we make about loving each other.

To wonder what Alex recognized when he recognized 
words is also to wonder what humans recognize 
when we recognize words. It was indeed surprising 
to realize how quickly Alex could take in words and concepts.

Scientifically speaking, the value of this 
research lies in its specific details about 
patterns of learning and cognition. Ethically 
speaking, the value lies in our surprise, our 
renewed awareness of how little we allow 
ourselves to expect from the animals around us. VERLYN KLINKENBORG


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/science/10cnd-parrot.html?em&ex=1189828800&en=4d8227f251ee7d38&ei=5087%0A


Marsha