Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Apes, Language, and the Human Mind by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Stuart G. Shanker, Talbot J. Taylor ISBN: 0-19-514712-X Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Brilliant and Original
Comment: This brilliant and original book demonstrates that symbolic representation is the basic substance of language, and shows once and for all that language is not an exclusively human achievement. Savage-Rumbaugh's serendipitous discovery that the critical period for language acquisition in bonobos is in early infancy renders all earlier language experimentation with apes obsolete. Contrary to Chomsky and Pinker, grammar is a high level embellishment to language, rather than the foundation of communicative skill. The philosophical commentaries on Savage-Rumbaugh's work by Shanker and Taylor bring out the revolutionary implications of her findings, and provide a new and more sophisticated point of view on the continuities and discontinuities between ourselves and our nearest relatives. It's good to see contemporary science finally replacing the 17th century perspective of many linguists.
Rating: 5
Summary: There's nothing 'personal' here!
Comment: I wonder if the reader from Austin, Texas, read the same book as I did! I could find no trace of any personal attacks (nor personal glorifications, for that matter) in this highly original, provocative and exceptionally well-argued book. Interdisciplinary collaborations on complex themes are notoriously difficult to pull off, but this team has succeeded admirably. The philosophical analysis of the significance of the bonobo ape research for our currently dominant ways of thinking about language, communication and animal capacities is strikingly original. Certainly, these authors do not hold back from exploring the wider significance of their proposed interpretations, but there is a wealth of well-documented and rigorous argument here to support their contentions, and not a shred of evidence of -animus- against those whose views they dispute. A serious and significant book for everyone interested in animal cognition.
Rating: 4
Summary: thought-provoking and compelling
Comment: This is a rewarding book, especially in its middle two chapters. After the scene-setting of ch. 1, in which we learn just what the Bonobo ape Kanzi can do as far as communicating with a human is concerned, ch. 2 gives us a protracted survey of the Cartesian tradition of thinking about the 'mental' and hence communicative lives of animals, showing the degree to which writers like Pinker, and indeed many of us, are, largely due to an outmoded view of ourselves, caught up in a fallacy about the status of animals vis-à-vis humans which needs to be replaced with a saner outlook. In ch. 3 we are given an insight into the rhetorical strategies of those who perpetuate the Cartesian view, and shown to what extent such strategies may be motivated less by a search for truth than by the socio-politico-economic imperative of our exploitation of the animal world. The authors then proceed to show that arguments which have been used to bolster the 'existential gap' view in fact are incapable of supporting the notion that humans themselves have the exclusive and proprietary capacities which Cartesian thinkers have attributed to them. That is, (a) the evidence which such thinkers use purportedly to prove the existence of various capacities in humans is shown to be equally in evidence in at least one kind of animal, but (b) the evidence which is used purportedly to disprove these capacities in animals is shown in fact to be inadequate to prove the existence of those capacities in humans. In other words, as is further suggested in the final chapter, we have no logical or evidential basis for maintaining the Cartesian view, and the implications for our own human behavior are accordingly far-reaching.
 |
Title: Kanzi : The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Roger Lewin ISBN: 047115959X Publisher: Wiley Pub. Date: September, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
 |
Title: Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees by Roger Fouts, Stephen Tukel Mills ISBN: 0380728222 Publisher: Quill Pub. Date: 01 September, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
Title: Significant Others: The Ape-Human Continuum and the Quest for Human Nature by Craig Stanford ISBN: 046508172X Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: July, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
 |
Title: Committed to Memory by Rebecca Rupp ISBN: 0965576590 Publisher: Crown Publishers/random House |
 |
Title: Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us About Human Social Evolution by Frans B. M. De Waal ISBN: 0674010043 Publisher: Harvard University Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
