This is too much of a digression from 206D to make a big deal out of—but on the subject of empirical reasoning, and what might be “essentially” or “universally” human, consider this bit of spiral-shaped scientific rancor around the life of a little dog and the words he knows.
In relation to the debate narrative you find in these very short basic articles (and their supplementary materials), consider one important question that hovers in the background, but isn’t fully stated:
If dogs aren’t quite like humans, what are humans like?
In other words: how, exactly, do we get to describing ourselves right out of the limits of dogs (or dolphins, or parrots, or non-human apes)? This is an open question… don’t read the phrase “how do we get to” as “how dare we” or “isn’t it silly that we.” I want to know more literally how we do it, and what kind of sense of it makes or doesn’t make.
You will need access as a UCSC student to the library’s portal, in order to read these articles.
1. Word Learning in a Domestic Dog: Evidence for “Fast Mapping” Juliane Kaminski, Josep Call, Julia Fischer. Science 11 June 2004: Vol. 304 no. 5677 pp. 1605-1606, in html text or pdf.
2. Can a Dog Learn a Word? Paul Bloom Science 11 June 2004: Vol. 304 no. 5677 pp. 1605-1606, in html text or pdf. Here’s a the supplemental video for this article.
3. Differential Sensitivity to Human Communication in Dogs, Wolves, and Human Infants. József Topál, György Gergely, Ágnes Erdőhegy, Gergely Csibra, and Ádám Miklósi. Science 4 September 2009: Vol. 325 no. 5945 pp. 1269-1272. There are also six videos that supplement the article, available here under the headings “Movies” (S1 to S6).