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The "Zeitschrift für Semiotik":
Paul Bouissac
Michael Fleischer
Horst M. Müller
Irene M. Pepperberg
Göran Sonesson
Günter Tembrock
Günther Witzany
Semiotic arms race: the evolution of trans-species communication Paul Bouissac, University of Toronto Summary. When one biological species improves its survival equipment
as a direct consequence of an improvement in the survival equipment of
another (say, predator) species, then these two species enter an arms race.
Once the storage and selective sharing of vital information become rewarding
survival strategies, semiotic warfare starts. The evolutionary response
to the deciphering of an intraspecific code by the members of another species
is concealment and deception, and the evolutionary response to this is
in turn mind-reading, i.e. the accurate prediction from subliminal cues
of what the members of another species will actually do. Mind-reading applied
to allospecific communication requires metacommunication, i.e. the capacity
to represent a communication process independently of the given situation.
According to the author, true symmetrical interspecific communication can
only be conducted when the members of two different species are both endowed
with metacommunicative competence. The analysis of a variety of cases in
the interaction between species leads to the result that, on Earth, only
humans have metacommunicative competence. Mankind’s efforts to engage in
communication with other animal species therefore seems to rely on selfdeception.
Dialogue or duet? Child or parasite? Communication or manipulation? Paul Bouissac, University of Toronto Summary. The author scrutinizes the protocol of a case of interaction
between a trainer, an investigator, and the parrot Alex. He concludes that,
following the hypothesis that this is a meaningful dialogue for the parrot,
this animal must be assumed to have a complex grammatical and pragmatic
competence far transcending the simple capacity to correlate sounds and
concepts of which Pepperberg speaks. The extraordinary sensibility of the
parrot concerns more the sound patterns than the semantic structures, and
his interactive utterances make use of two-part sound patterns and presuppose
the presence of a cooperative partner as well as a rival. The author
therefore favors the hypothesis that, for the parrot, the interaction under
investigation is nothing but a form of duetting, possibly cued through
low frequency sounds unwittingly produced by the trainer. Viewed from an
ethological perspective, the trainer treats the bird as a child schooled
in a foreign language and to be scolded or rewarded according to its performance.
Turning round the question of the ethological pattern within which the
laboratory situation makes sense to the bird, the author points out that
it behaves like a parasite, which obtains food, social attention and protection
from its natural predators by imitating their young. According to the author,
Pepperberg’s work supplies no evidence that the parrot acquired cumulative
knowledge through the teaching to which it was submitted; it rather improved
its capacity to manipulate, just as a wild parrot might do in the wilderness.
The ethological perspective thus shifts the emphasis in the explanation
of Pepperberg’s remarkable data from hypotheses on communication and cognition
to hypotheses on the animal’s capacity for situation-specific manipulation.
Communication between humans and dogs Michael Fleischer, Ruhr-University, Bochum Summary. Humans and dogs can be compared with respect to their behavioral
systems, environments, channels of sign production and reception as well
as to their learning abilities, sign repertories and world views. Like
humans, dogs are capable of turning objects and behavior types into signs,
as is documented in the present-creating and the throw-games syndromes.
In communication among themselves, dogs use the optical, acoustic, tactile
and olfactory channels in specific ways to produce and receive signs and
supersigns. There is also communication between dogs and humans; however,
the differences in the preferred channels of sign production and reception
require mutual adaptation and the creation of a shared repertory in mutual
interaction. As regards the cultural dimension of human-dog interaction,
the use of dogs as instruments of defence and search, which is based on
their aggression and game drives, has to be distinguished from their function
as image signs of humans, which is based on requirements of human society
alone. In conclusion, a list of criteria determining the quality of interaction
and communication between humans and dogs is presented.
The development of interaction, semiose and language Horst M. Müller, University of Bielefeld Summary. This article offers a model for the phylogeny of the three
types of interaction that can so far be found in Nature: interaction of
material objects, semiosis of organisms, and human language. The problem
of how abiotic matter developed into plants and animals and finally into
complex organisms such as hominids can be considered solved, as far as
the anatomical properties are concerned. However, the origins of semiosis
and basic cognition processes are still a matter of debate. The same applies
to the emergence of verbal communication. These questions can only be answered
satisfactorily if formulated on the basis of Evolutionary Epistemology.
This article describes the evolutionary preconditions for the emergence
of consciousness and shows how it can be related to properties of inanimate
matter.
Communication between humans and birds: a case study on the cognitive abilities of a parrot Irene M. Pepperberg, University of Arizona, Tucson Summary. An African Grey parrot has been taught to use the sounds of
English speech to identify, request, refuse, categorize, and quantify more
than 100 different objects. He has also learned the presence or absence
of particular categories of similarity and difference between objects.
When shown collections of exemplars of various combinations of shapes,
colors, and materials (subsets of 7 taken from 100 possible objects), he
can provide, vocally, specific information about a single designated object
in the collection (e.g., the color of the sole object that is wooden).
His accurate performance (75–85%) on these tasks indicates that he understands
all the elements of the question that he is asked and the labels that he
produces. His behavior is discussed in the context of the prerequisites
for, and the importance of, studies of interspecies communication.
The semiotics of pictures: the state of research at the beginning of the 90s Göran Sonesson, University of Lund Summary. In present-day Western cultures iconic and/or visual communication
prevails, but one cannot say that these cultures are regressing to the
mythical stage before the introduction of language. The paradox of modernity
lies in the increasing standardization of seemingly unique visual objects,
and is manifested by the growing number of picture types, the multiplication
of picture tokens, the increasing differentiation of picture categories,
the ever-widening reach of picture circulation, and the intensified activation
of pictures through channels such as television and magazines, which leads
to an adaptation of the pictorial medium to the naive communication model
formulated within information science. The present article gives a critical
review of the various attempts within the semiotics of pictures of the
last 20 years to account for the pictorial character of pictures. Pictures
are treated as pictorial texts, which can be subjected to the methods of
experiment, text analysis, systems analysis and text classification. The
ways of modeling pictures developed by Greimas, Saint-Martin and the Group
µ are critically compared with respect to their results in the description
of selected pictures. The article ends with a discussion of basic concepts
such as those of the plastic and iconic levels of pictures and the indexicality
of photos.
Behavior programs, imperceptible messages and procedural learning Günter Tembrock, Humboldt University, Berlin Summary. The author emphasizes the importance of semiotic approaches
within socio- and psychobiology and discusses Pepperberg’s research design
in this context. (1) He questions the linguistic character of the vocal
contacts between the grey parrot and the humans conducting the experiment
and claims that the use of nonverbal stimuli would have been more efficient.
(2) He argues that the methods of exceptional learning developed within
social psychology are neither required nor useful for the parrot’s acquisition
of an interspecific code. (3) He criticizes the hypothesis that being hungry
involves activating a concept of absence which could be commented upon,
and claims that hunger directly triggers a behavioral program that consists
in various procedures of food search and functions without conceptualization
of any kind. (4) He problematizes the controllability of vocal contacts
in these experiments, arguing that they would need to be replicated using
voices of unknown persons and transmitting them with a loudspeaker. In
conclusion, he argues for the application of Occam’s razor to the explanations
given by Pepperberg and for explaining the remarkable results of her experiments
without assuming communication in the strong sensae, but on the basis of
conceptual, discriminatory, and processual learning. For semiotics there
remains the challenge to clarify the social and ecological prerequisites
of human-animal interaction.
Sign processes as conditions for the possibility of life and evolution: the necessity of molecular pragmatics Günther Witzany Summary. The author argues the position that life is only possible on
the basis of semiotic processes. He claims that Nature is semiotically
organized and that evolution is semiotically controlled, and justifies
these claims by elaborating and generalizing the tenets of action-theoretically
oriented pragmatics and discussing them with respect to recent research
results in biological taxonomy, molecular biology, biochemistry, sociobiology,
and the theory of evolution. Particularly compelling evidence for the claim
that elementary life processes would be impossible without sign processes
is found in intraorganismic semioses. From this perspective, evolution
itself no longer appears to be a result of mutation and selection, but
of generative semioses and their successful trials within the horizon of
Nature as a "universally interacting community".
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Research Center for Semiotics, Institute for Linguistics, Fac. 1, Technical University Berlin, Berlin, Germany |
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