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Comment by throwawaymaths | Hacker News Reader

My dog can push buttons to let me know what he wants. Those buttons speak in English. Is that language?

"Language" in the sense of "the thing only humans have been shown to do" requires a bit more than just one to one correlations between signifiers and objects (or a "sentence" of signifiers with the same meaning as all of the words added together independently). For a system of symbols to be "language" there must be a difference between "what the cat ate" and "what ate the cat". No animal communication has been shown to have a grammar to it, and thus the ability to express exponentially many unique ideas with each additional word.

I feel like there are human languages where the symbolic distinction between "what the cat ate" and "what ate the cat" are nil and the understanding is achieved contextually.

Is there a grammar? ie. a set of rules to form valid sentences in the language

Is there linguistic creativity? ie. you can generate new words to describe things never encountered

Is there metalinguistic reflexion? ie. can you use the language to talk about the language itself?

Can the language allow displacement? i.e. talking about things that are not in the current spacetime point

These are some of the core requirements for a system of communication to be considered a language.

1. Buttons don't "speak"

2. You don't need to understand the words to push the buttons. You could replace the English words with gibberish and it would still work as long as you always give the same thing when the same button is pressed. Many animals can do this. It is called positive reinforcement. Nothing to do with language

I think it only counts if he can express that he wants you to urinate on the same fire hydrant after he does.

That’s the minimum level of complexity science will accept.

I think most dog owners would tell you that their adult dogs can communicate things like this, but that the language is unfortunately siloed into a very personal relationship that is difficult for even the human part of the pair to demonstrate, making it difficult to do science about

Sometimes at bedtime my cat will go to the door and scream nonstop. I don't know why he does it. Maybe it is for food or attention. But the only way I have found to get him to stop is to pick him up, put him on his special pillow, squish him, and have my partner join me in telling him "we are going to bed, it's bedtime".

I'd say about 80% of the time he listens. So he is capable of understanding what we want him to do, and capable of supressing his own personal desires in order to maintain harmony in our group. Funny enough, he won't go to bed unless both me and my partner tell him it is bedtime, so maybe he is only obeying because there is some majority consensus?

Because of this, I find it easy to believe that a cat or dog could be taught something as abstract as "self" if they can understand commands and intent and group dynamics. It's just difficult to tell what is "understood" and what is just conditioned behavior. Hell, I can't even answer that question for myself as a human.

If your cat could do most of the below:

- use arbitrary links between signifier and signified

- generate new linguistic tokens (new signifier and signifieds as well as links between them)

- refer to events and times beyond the current ones

- talk about the system of communication itself using the system itself

Then, you would have grounds to think that your cat uses a language in the linguistic sense. But until, then it is just a communication system no matter how sophisticated.

Your cat being a extremely well oiled operant conditioning system does not mean that it is able to think the way you can even if they are likely more intelligent than what we give them credit for because, as much as we would like to believe we do, we don't know what they think and any patterns that we see are just good old human pareidolia. Like hearing voices in the wind, faces on rocks, etc. Your feeling is real but the belief that feeling induces does not have grounds in reality as far as we know so far.

It is possible to over-select on skepticism about other species. Imho, the simplest explanation is that it is far more likely that there is nothing special about us, and a mere quirk of say, the combination of tool-use, foresight, and social cohesion that makes humanity special.

Or is it special? We are just a well oiled operant conditioning system, it does not mean that we are able to think the way cats can.

Laymen think of language the same way they do about theory and then try to apply that to an academic context. Different meaning. A system of communication is not necessarily a language even if all languages are systems of communication. If your dog could use arbitrary linguistic tokens, generate new ones, describe things that it has not seen before, talk about the past, the future or places other than the current one, then I would be more willing to entertain the idea that your dog has a language

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