h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

While I agree with your statement that only humans have culture, I disagree with your example of the dog and the fire.

The argument over nature versus nurture is an old one, and it has been applied to human beings and animals. It is now generally accepted that some behaviors are instinctive and some are learned, for animals as well as people. Many animals teach their young. Watch a bird learning to fly - the parent is always there, just beyond where the baby can get without flying. Even bird song is learned.

And as Benjamin Franklin said, a cat that sits on a hot stove plate will never sit on a cold one again. Animals do not instinctively know that heat, or anything else, is bad for them. Until they get burned (although most animals are cautious and never get burned - they presumably get uncomfortable when too close to the flame, so they stop).

You are absolutely right when you talk about language and perception of past, present, and future. Even there some people will disagree and say that animals have these too, so it may be important to differentiate the type of information that humans pass along through language - history, myth, fiction, hopes, plans - in short both knowledge and art.

It's a good entry.

I'll take up some issues with you.
If I took a baby bird away from it's batch and kept it isolated, I could bind it's wings. When the others in its batch flew, I could unbind it. By then end of the day it would fly as well as they could, without learning.
If I took a whole nest full of baby birds and hand reared them, the moment I played them a recording of an adult bird's danger signal, they would crouch down in the nest. No learning.
Yes, a long time ago these things were learnt. But think what has happened to the ones that did not learn. They perished before they had a chance to pass on their genetic material.
Humans are afraid of heights and drops. What has happened to the ones that didn't have this? Thousands of years ago they fell off cliffs before they had the chance to reproduce.
I am oversimplifying things here.
Animals communicate. Humans have language.

Oh Coelacanth! Tell me you didn't kidnap a baby bird and bind its wings!

I suppose my example was a poor one too, but then the dividing line between nature and nurture will probably never be known for sure, if it even exists. I think there is probably a big, blurry, demilitarized zone between the two, where "knowledge" is not fully inherited nor fully learned. And where it is hard to tell the difference between knowledge and behavior (does a bird "know" how to fly? Did I "learn" how to ride a bike, or did I use my natural proclivity to balance?).

Accordingly, a kitten taken from it's mother early on, when grown, will pounce on a mouse and tease the thing to death, but never realize that it can eat the mouse. The hunting instinct is there, but not the skill to kill it quickly, or the association of the furry-running-thing with food.

Even the distinction between communication and language is blurry. Do dolphins speak? Do politicians communicate? We may never know the answers to these questions.

We do know that an animal would never be able to have this kind of dialogue, and language is key to that. I have to maintain that culture is language plus the nature of the communication.

"Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume.... thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal..."

Let's see a dog say that! (or edit it as badly, or even choose another quotation as completely unrelated to the topic?)

*Puts away his Bartlett's*

*no baby birds were harmed during the formation of this thread*
Instead of the 'dividing line' why draw a line at all? Take what is knon as the interactioninst position. For everything to work well, the narure v nurture argument is suspended in favour of it being an interaction between the two.
So, do we learn language? (Skinner) Well, not all of it, because children universally use phrases they they could never have heard "I wented to the shops"
So, is the predisposition to it already there? (Chomsky) Also not all of it, because this would ignore the part played by interaction with others.
So, is it a combination? Much more likely, along with all the social contexts that we find ourselves in to which we must use language as a tool. As you say, 'culture is language _plus_ the nature of the communication.'

A very clear cut distinction between language and comunication has been made, by the drawing up of a set of criteria. If a communication system meets all of the criteria, it is called 'language'. So far, only human speech has met this (and of course it's very easy to draw up a list to prove a point. My criteria for tall is anyone over 5'1" therefore I am a tall person!) Dolphins, as far as we can tell, probably fall down on the "displacement" criteria (communicating about events remote in time and space from that situation) and the "productivity" criteria (the infinite capacity to express and understand meaning).
According to Chomsky, we can't help using language. Fish are born to swim, moles are born to burrow, silworms make silk, sheep wool and we are born to talk (and talk and talk sometimes. Sorry!).
*feeling sorry for the kitten, but not the politician.*