How children pick up a language: new review of Wolfe (Humans)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 02, 2016, 13:09 (2942 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Thank you. Human are different in kinds, not degree.

I always feel a bit guilty when you raise this issue, because it is so central to your concept of evolution and it is so unimportant in my own. Forget kind versus degree just for a moment. I acknowledge the vast mental gap between us and all other species, and in my evolutionary hypothesis (theistic version), I can even allow for divine dabbling. What I cannot allow for is the claim that your God specially designed all other forms of life and natural wonders extant and extinct for no other purpose than to pave the way for humans. That seems to be the only reason for your preoccupation with the distinction, and that is our sticking point.

My more direct answer would have to be: humans, chimps, chickens, dolphins and ants are all different in kind. So are their languages, and so are their consciousnesses, unless you believe a chimp thinks like a chicken like a dolphin etc. etc. However, although all of these are conscious in their own different ways, I believe humans have additional degrees of consciousness which make them almost incalculably more aware of themselves and of the world around them than any other organism. Similarly a dog’s sense of smell is vastly more sensitive than a human’s. “More aware”, “more sensitive” are terms that denote degree, but the degree can be part of the difference in kind that distinguishes all species (broad sense). In materialist terms, if the human brain is different in kind from the dog’s brain, the dog’s nose is different in kind from the human nose. For me, your (Adler’s) attempted distinction between degree and kind leads nowhere.