The way people come to report private stimulation arising within their own bodies is not well understood. Although the Darwinian assumption of biological continuity has been the basis of extensive animal modeling for many human biological and behavioral phenomena, few have attempted to model human communication based on private stimulation. This target article discusses such an animal model using concepts and methods derived from the study of discriminative stimulus effects of drugs and recent research on interanimal communication. We discuss how (...) humans acquire the capacity to identify and report private stimulation and we analyze intra- and interspecies differences in neurochemical mechanisms for transducing interoceptive stimuli, enzymatic and other metabolic factors, learning ability, and discrimination learning histories and their relation to psychiatric and developmental disabilities. (shrink)

This paper develops the hypothesis that languages may be learned by means of a kind of cause-effect analysis. This hypothesis is developed through an examination of E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's research on the abilities of chimpanzees to learn to use symbols. Savage-Rumbaugh herself tends to conceive of her work as aiming to demonstrate that chimpanzees are able to learn the "referential function" of symbols. Thus the paper begins with a critique of this way of viewing the chimpanzee's achievements. The hypothesis that (...) Savage-Rumbaugh's chimpanzees learn to use symbols by means of cause-effect analysis is then supported through a detailed examination of the tasks they have learned to perform. Next, it is explained how language-learning in humans might be conceptualized along similar lines. The final section attempts to explain how the pertinent cause-effect analysis ought to be conceived. (This paper was published with a reply by Savage-Rumbaugh. See the same issue, pp. 55-76.). (shrink)

Alan Turing devised his famous test (TT) through a slight modificationof the parlor game in which a judge tries to ascertain the gender of twopeople who are only linguistically accessible. Stevan Harnad hasintroduced the Total TT, in which the judge can look at thecontestants in an attempt to determine which is a robot and which aperson. But what if we confront the judge with an animal, and arobot striving to pass for one, and then challenge him to peg which iswhich? (...) Now we can index TTT to a particular animal and its syntheticcorrelate. We might therefore have TTTrat, TTTcat,TTTdog, and so on. These tests, as we explain herein, are abetter barometer of artificial intelligence (AI) than Turing's originalTT, because AI seems to have ammunition sufficient only to reach thelevel of artificial animal, not artificial person. (shrink)

Common folks “have” emotions and talk to others; and sometimes they make “their” emotions the topic of such talk. The emotions seem to be “theirs,” since they can be conceived of as private states ; and they can be topicalized, because we seem to be able to attribute or lend a conventionalized public form to some inner state or event. This is the way much of our folk-talk and folk-thinking about emotions, the expression thereof, the role of language in these (...) expressions, and communication in general are organized. However, as we have shown, such talk serves the purpose of communicating effectively and reaching mutual understanding. (shrink)