By FRANS de WAAL: refuted (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, November 12, 2016, 12:40 (2932 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: ALL organisms have their own form of language. Sign language and body language are language. It is absurd to suggest that chimps are not intelligent because their language is not like ours.
DAVID: I've never said chimps don't have a degree of intelligence. Why did you bring it up? Of course they do. Just because we disagree as to the importance of the differences?

My criticism initially was of the arguments put forward by the reviewer, who tries to rubbish de Waal because apes do not spontaneously behave like humans and do not spontaneously begin a conversation in human language. You have headed this thread: Frans de Waal: refuted, and you say that the review refutes “his claims of animal intelligence”. Of course you don’t mean that animals have no degree of intelligence, so what do these arguments refute? Does de Waal claim that apes spontaneously behave or talk like humans, or that they have the same degree of self-awareness as humans?

DAVID: Don't you see that de Waal over interprets their innate intelligence. That doesn't translate into 'they have none'!

I haven’t read his book, so I don’t know what degree of intelligence he ascribes to them or how he or the reviewer measures the degree, enabling you to say he over interprets it. I can only comment on the information given in the article. But perhaps you can tell us what de Waal has written that is “refuted” by the above examples.

David’s comment: I have no idea why these researchers are so surprised. They have assumed in advance that he did not have this capacity […] The usual point is the research folks are trying to disprove how different we are. They failed.
dhw: I am also surprised at their surprise and at your conclusion. The fact that you knew they shared this ability with us means you knew how similar they are to us, not how different.
DAVID: "Sharing" requires interpretation. Of course we share. I've never said otherwise. We are arguing about degree of sharing: an interpretation that we are different in kind.

I have no difficulty with a varying “degree of sharing”. But if we and our fellow animals have the same ability to do something, I would argue that this suggests similarity, not difference.