Folk Physics for Apes: The Chimpanzee's Theory of How the World Works PDF
Preview Folk Physics for Apes: The Chimpanzee's Theory of How the World Works
folk physics for apes This page intentionally left blank folk physics for apes The chimpanzee’s theory of how the world works . University of Louisiana at Lafayette in collaboration with . , . 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Kolkata Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Daniel J. Povinelli, 2000 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2000 Reprinted (with corrections) 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloging in Publication Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 ISBN 0 19 857219 0 Typeset by EXPO Holdings, Malaysia Typeset in Minion by 10/13 pt Printed in Great Britain To Ted and Joan ‘Honored Members of the Academy! You have done me the honor of inviting me to give your Academy an account of the life I formerly led as an ape. I regret that I cannot comply with your request to the extent you desire. It is now nearly five years since I was an ape, a short space of time, perhaps, according to the calendar, but an infinitely long time to gallop through at full speed as I have done, more or less accompanied by excellent mentors, good advice, applause and orchestral music, and yet essentially alone… In revenge, however, my memory of the past has closed the door against me more and more. I could have returned at first, had human beings allowed it, through an archway as wide as the span of heaven over the earth, but as I spurred myself on in my forced career, the opening narrowed and shrank behind me; I felt more comfortable in the world of men…’ from Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy FOREWORD In his parable Penguin Island, Anatole France relates how the old, blind monk, Saint Maël, inadvertently baptized a group of penguins, mistaking them for human beings. When the news reached heaven, it caused, so we are told, neither joy nor sorrow but extreme surprise. The Lord himself was embarrassed. He gathered an assembly of clerics and doctors, and asked them for an opinion on the delicate question of whether the birds must now be given souls. It was a matter of more than theoretical importance. ‘The Christian state,’ Saint Cornelius observed, ‘is not without serious inconveniences for a penguin…. The habits of birds are, in many points, contrary to the command- ments of the Church.’ Penguins, once burdened with a soul, would surely get into unforseen—and undeserved—moral difficulties. Saint Augustine concurred: ‘If, Lord, in your wisdom you pour an immortal soul into them, they will burn eternally in hell in virtue of your adorable decrees.’ The learned assembly, being unable to resolve the matter satisfactorily among them- selves, decided to consult Saint Catherine. ‘This is what was usually done in such cases,’ France notes, ‘Saint Catherine while on earth had confounded fifty very learned doctors. She knew Plato’s philosophy in addition to the Holy Scriptures, and she also possessed a knowledge of rhetoric.’ And, indeed, when it came to it, her solution was certainly a neat one: she recommended that the baptized penguins should be granted an immortal soul–‘but one of small size’. So it was decided. And the rest of France’s book tells the tragicomic history of how these small-souled beings made out over the next millenium. Daniel Povinelli, too, knows philosophy in addition to the scriptures of comparative psychology. Anyone who has heard him lecture will recognise his mastery of rhetoric. And he has, besides, a capacity that, so far as I know, even Saint Catherine never aspired to: he is a first rate observer and experimenter, empirically careful almost to the point of obsession, while methodologically ingenious to the point of poetry. Had the assembly gone to Povinelli, instead of Catherine, for advice about what to do about those awkward penguins, I would trust him to have come forward with a rather different and better solution. Having put the birds to the experimental test, he would have proposed that the answer lay not in quantity of soul but quality. Let the penguins be given souls, not of a smaller size but, as befits their nature, souls of a different type and shape. Folk Physics for Apes is a plea to the scientific community to think again—on the basis of the new evidence that Povinelli and his colleagues have accumulated in the last decade—about one of the most cherished assumptions of contemporary psychology: namely, that ape minds and human minds are in fact basically of the same type and shape, that there is no great qualitative gulf between human ways of construing the viii world and apes’ ways, that apes are in effect just like us, only less so. Through a series of cleverly linked experiments, Povinelli and his team have slowly but surely undermined this conventional wisdom. And here, in a thrilling exposition of both the evidence and the theoretical speculations it has prompted, they set out their stall. When this book was first published in 2000, predictably its arguments were met by certain critics with a mixture of anxiety and outrage. This was not—and still is not— what many people wanted to hear. As Saint Gal complained of the man originally responsible for baptizing the penguins, ‘Maël has created great theological difficulties and introduced disorder into the economy of mysteries.’ No less a charge was and is lev- elled in certain quarters against Povinelli. Yet, as this book enters a new edition, here’s a chance to celebrate not just its courage and originality but its scientific integrity. No one, including Povinelli, can think that this is the last word. Nonetheless there can be no question that he has recast the terms of the debate. From now on, these are the arguments that must be addressed on their own evi- dential and theoretical terms by those who still want to insist that apes see the world the way that human beings do (or, since this in the end is the more important lesson, that human beings see the world the way that apes do). It has taken a large soul to pursue these lines of research to where they have led—and a large soul to write this book. Every reader, soul for soul, will want to match it. Nicholas Humphrey February 2003 Anatole France (1904/1925) Penguin Island.Trans. A.W. Evans. pp. 30–32.Bodley Head London. an initial word about ‘folk physics’ phys.ics(fiz’iks) n1. (used with a sing. v.)The science of matter and energy and of interactions between the two, grouped in traditional fields such as acoustics, optics, mechanics, and thermodynamics, as well as modern extensions including atomic and nuclear physics, cryogenics, and particle physics.1 Physicsis the most basic of the sciences, concerning itself with the interactions of energy, matter, space, and time, and especially with questions of what underlies every phenomenon.2 Surely chimpanzees and other apes do not possess scientific theories about matter and energy, let alone group them into academic sub-disciplines. Indeed, the idea that they have any kind of science at all seems a bit preposterous. So, why have we invoked the term ‘physics’ in the title of this book? The reason is simple: chimpanzees, like us, must confront the world of matter and energy every moment of their waking lives. And so, like us, they must possess some kind of understanding or knowledge about the movements and interactions of the objects that surround them. This knowledge may not constitute a science, of course, but it may well be a body of knowledge that is, to some extent or another, organized and coherent. To make the point clearly, think for a moment about our own infants and children. Modern psychological research has revealed that they know a surprising amount about how and why the physical world works the way it does. Indeed, from a very early age infants and children are already constructing quite sophisticated ideas about concepts such as gravity, force, mass, and shape. And yet we would not want to say that these infants and children have developed a science of physics. Of course, there may be strik- ing parallels between how children come to discover the regularities of the world and the methods that scientists use (observation, experimentation, revising one’s ideas in the light of new evidence, etc.), but to describe this as a formal science of physics may be too far a stretch for most readers. On the other hand, we might be perfectly comfortable talking about infant’s and chil- dren’s ‘folk physics’, that is, their common-sense understanding of how the world works, as well as why it works in the way that it does. Likewise, chimpanzees and other nonhu- man species may possess a kind of folk physics as well. However, short of simply guess- ing, there is no principled way of knowing ahead of time how similar or different the ape’s folk physics is to our own. 1 The American Heritage College Dictionary, (3rd edn, 1993), p. 103 1. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. 2 Paul Peter Urone (1998), College physics. Brooks/Cole, Pacific Grove.
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