1. Three Dimensions

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Three Dimensions Discrete Infinity Discrete means limited or countable. A discrete

system is a system with a limited number of things in it. The alphabet for example. With these limited items, you can make many different

words, and with those you can make many different sentences.

How many? I can also prove that there are infinitely many sentences,

because if there would be finitely many, there would be one sentence which would be the longest of

these finite sentence. Now I could take that sentence and say, ‘Pete says,’ and then that sentence would

already be longer. And I could repeat that procedure. I could say ‘John says that Pete says that’, and

then our longest sentence. Mark says that Pete says that John says and so on. They would be longer and longer and longer, infinitely

long, as a matter of fact.

This is not so for animals. Apes also have a discreet set system of calls, a limited

number of calls, but they cannot combine them to make more and more complicated systems. They only

have a limited number of combinations.

Displacement We

humans can talk about our here and now, but also about things far away in

the past, on the moon or even about completely abstract things, which we

have never seen and will never see. Most animals don't have that. Bees can

communicate about space, because they can dance and wiggle and show

other bees where to find their honey. It's a lovely system, but it's very limited.

They can only talk about honey they have really seen. They cannot talk about

some abstract honey on the moon.

Joint Attention Finally, there's a notion of joint attention, and shared intentionality. We work as a team where we

have a shared goal and each has their own role in achieving that goal. In

order to be able to do that, it means we have to read each other’s minds a

little bit. We have to see what the other person is trying to do so that we can

help that other person in achieving that goal. Language helps in that.

Language is inherently cooperative.

But for animals this is very different. Some apes have joint

attention, that means that they can look at the same thing and maybe be aware that they look at the

same thing, but they don't work together in this very complicated way in which we humans can do so.

Conclusion We have now seen that animals do have systems of communication. But that they are always different in certain key aspects from human language. These key

aspects are first:Humans can make an infinite amount of messages with this limited set of building

blocks.

Humans can talk about things other than the here and now.

Language is a

fundamentally cooperative tool for humans.