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VOLUME 27, NUMBER 19 DECEMBER 4, 1980

Letter

More on Monkey Talk

By Jean Umiker-Sebeok, Thomas A. Sebeok
In response to GORILLA TALK (OCTOBER 9, 1980)
To the Editors:
Francine Patterson's letter, inherently chaotic enough, complicates
matters in that it seems to be addressed, pell-mell, to Herbert Terrace
and the two undersigned, whose books are being reviewed, and to
Martin Gardner, who reviewed them. Her letter contains scattered
quotations, as in her opening paragraph, ascribed to "the Sebeoks," but
some of these are not, in fact, from our book; they are the words of Mr.
Gardner. Her complaint also features a number of bizarre denials of
dramatic assertions which, to our knowledge, no one has ever made
certainly not the two of us. An example of the latter is Patterson's
indignant rejection: "To say that the gorilla's use of sign language is
virtually identical to that of the human child is wrong." The contrary
has never been asserted by any scholar, not even the most enthusiastic
scribbler.
Patterson's repeated whimper, "They have not examined my data," is
counter-factual. Indeed, we have checked over every scrap of
informationsuch as it isthat she has disclosed through normal
scientific outlets, and have also surveyed all available vulgarizations of
her data, presuming that it was she who authorized their public
circulation. Her dissertation, long delayed, became accessible to us only
after Speaking of Apes was typeset; it will, accordingly, be critically
dealt with in our forthcoming article, "Clever Hans and Smart Simians,
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and Kindred Methodological Pitfalls," now
in press and due to appear, early in 1981, in a leading anthropological
journal. To anticipate, however, we must point out here that there are
basic and very disturbing discrepancies between her data as reported in
her thesis and as published in her scattered articles.
Patterson argues in her letter that "Non-verbal cues are omnipresent in

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human communication as well as in ape-human communication.

Contrary to the Sebeoks' assertion, it is easy to control for cues such as
eye-pupil sizeby wearing sunglasses." In fact, Sebeok says virtually
the same thing, on p. 420 of Speaking of Apes. Patterson has not,
however, previously troubled to report this form of control and still
neglects scores of other sources of leakage, many of which we
enumerated in our study. In Patterson's reports, the precise training
methods or test situations she employed are not usually described, and
we are asked to accept her assertions about her apes' performances on
faith. When experimental conditions are specified, controls are often so
feeble as to defy belief. Her facile statement about the importance of
nonverbal cues belies her continual treatment of the Clever Hans effect
as a minor methodological irritation instead of recognizing itin the
face of the vast amount of scientific evidence attesting to its pervasive
influenceas a global application of the self-fulfilling prophecy, even
in situations where experimenters are not as emotionally committed to
their experimental subjects as Patterson is, by all accounts, to her
gorillas.

atterson censures us for our "ignorance of sign language structure,"

but the shoe is on the other foot. She has never produced a shred of
evidence that her apes' gestures are, in fact, signs, in the technical
acceptation of this basic semiotic unit, as tellingly put forth by Petitto
and Seidenberg (Brain & Language 8:162-83, 1979). Terrace's findings,
which have now been supplemented by a discourse analysis of the data
presented in Patterson's dissertation, fully confirm our long-held
suspicion that the roughly duplicative gorilla gestures that she persists in
calling signs are scarcely more than "signifiers" without any
"signification" in the human sense.
Patterson's repeated overinterpretations of her subjects' behavior as
jokes, apologies, puns, and now English rhymes (!) are clear examples
of the Pathetic Fallacy, with which we have dealt at length in our study.
In the case of the sign for drink, which she focuses on in her letter, we
would still like to know what other locations were used by Koko with
the hand configuration in question. Assuming that, as Patterson reports,
the trainer had been trying for some time to persuade Koko to make this
sign, we may guess that the ape in fact moved her hands in various
directions during the session, and with various accompanying facial
expressions. How were all of these other "signs" and expressions
interpreted? The possibilities, given the lack of the kind of information
any thoughtful person would demand, are limitless. Patterson would

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profit immensely from mastering the principles of biologynotably the

writings of Jacob von Uexkll and his Umweltlehreand the best of
contemporary linguistic theorye.g., Noam Chomsky's Rules and
Representations, ch. 6not to mention a number of classic circus
training manuals.
Patterson complains that there are "numerous" erroneous remarks in our
introductory chapter. In her letter, she offers but one example, which
happens to be false. We cannot repeat here our detailed critique of the
cautionary method of the so-called "double-blind" test, a magic device
in which Patterson seems to place touching faith, but which, as we and a
number of others have demonstrated, is all too often embarrassingly
inadequate. To take a single example from Patterson's work,
descriptions and illustrations in her published articles show that the box
she used for double-blind testing was sufficiently small so that Koko
could have moved it around at will. Patterson's experimental design for
such tests by no means rules out certain guessing strategies on the part
of ape and the "blind" experimenter, given the small universe of stimuli
which was available for use and the familiarity of both ape and human
with these materials, as well as with one another's facial expressions,
body movements, and the like. It should be said, finally, that these
double-blind tests have been used only rarely by Patterson. We have
found published reports of only one series, administered to Koko in
September, 1975. Koko, Patterson has admitted in print, was extremely
reluctant to perform under these conditions.
Patterson claims that "One cannot trace the evolution of language from
an armchair in Indiana." Our view is that, to the contrary, a
Gedankenexperiment can never be separated from its technical
realizations in any field of science, since an understanding of nature can
only be obtained by the informed and careful application of both.
Patterson's lack of methodological sophistication is precisely traceable
to her innocence of fundamental theoretical advances in fields adjacent
to her own. Her fellow psychologists who are knowledgeable about such
issues will have to judge the extent to which she is a victim of selfdeception and why, when some of the more prominent "pongists" have
publicly renounced this line of investigation, she persists, against the
weight of versant opinion and the laws of probability, in pursuing the
will-'o-the-wisp that apes are capable of language-like performances.
Those who are ignorant of the millennial history of the Clever Hans
Phenomenon are doomed to replicate it endlessly with one animal form
or another, whether embodied in birds, horses, pigs, porpoises, the great
apes, or, most recently, the wondrous tortoises of Milwaukee.

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Jean Umiker-Sebeok
Thomas A. Sebeok
National Humanities Center
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina

Copyright 1963-2007 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.

Nothing in this publication may be reproduced without the
permission of the publisher.

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