(4) and (5) don't strike me as being particularly distinctive. Don't lots of animals have object permanence, form expectations based on what's familiar, and experience corresponding emotions? I'd note that 2 year olds have not traditionally been thought to have reached the age of reason.

More generally, there is a methodological question about what the significance of these results are. This was a parrot who lived with an animal psychologist, who was keen to get him to approximate human language as closely as possible, for... thirty years. It learned to discriminate... 50 objects, quantities up to... 6, 7 colors, 5 shapes, ... keys.

It's far more impressive than most other animals, but I don't really see why it gives us reason to believe that more has happened than that, over a long period of time, a parrot learned to form a number of associations and responses.

There's no problem using words like "concept," "know," "believe," "understand" in the case of non-human animals (including animals far less intelligent than Alex was), just as there is no problem using them in the case of human children. But they are, I think, being used on analogy to our own case, with some distance, even here.

People who have young children will sometimes say things like, "She knows over a dozen words now." But these ascriptions are somewhat generous. To take an example from Stanley Cavell, we will say that a child knows the word "kitty" when she identifies her family's kitty, when she identifies kitties in bedtime stories, etc. But then she might go outside and call the neighbor's dog a kitty. Does she know what a kitty is? The bar for concept possession is, shall we say, considerably lower for toddlers and for parrots than it is for adults. A peer-reviewed article on developmental psychology might say that by age n a child typically knows 50 words; but in such a case it may be that the child knows zero words, however much the sounds he makes resemble those of his parents. It is one thing to be able to fetch something blue when told to do so, but plausbily one cannot possess color concepts without also knowing what are the ordinary conditions for color observation, one's being able to distinguish something's being red from looking red--and this, in turn, will differ from merely being able to say "is red" when the lighting is normal and "looks red" when it is not, which is an association which could be learned without one's understanding what lighting has to do with color observation. One might be able to pick out key-shaped objects, but one doesn't know what a key is unless one knows what a lock is, what a door is, what safety is. You don't have the concept of "same" if you can only apply it to fruit, blocks, and color samples. "Understanding a sentence means understanding a language," as Wittgenstein said.

aftermathemat wrote:

Is having a real intellect a requirement to be able to ask a question (in this case, Alex asking what color he was and him learning it was gray after the word gray was repeated 6 times)? And even to answer questions with further questions of one's own making?

I don't see why it should be. The points I made about concepts apply to the practice of asking questions too.

aftermathemat wrote:

Is an intellect necessary in order to understand the turn taking of communication and to be able to manipulate verbal syntax so as to designate names for new objects in one's own perception without even being prompted to do so, as with Alex's calling an apple a  "banerry"  by using parts of banana and cherry which have similarities to the apple that Alex could see ...?

Again, why would it be? I don't deny that these are impressive feats, given that other animals can't do them (well). And when one thinks that there is a difference in kind between human and animal intelligence, one is inclined to think that any impressive linguistic feats by animals are threatening to that thesis. But worrying that it is so doesn't make it so.

(My argument doesn't ride on the following, but on the face of it, Alex's calling an apple a "banerry" is not at all an indication that he has a suble understanding of bananas, cherries, or English syntax. In English, things which resemble other things are typically not named after those things. Why not just say that he was not sure what to say in response to something that resembled both a banana and a cherry so he blurred two words together, failing to identify that it was neither, and lacking the ability to ask what it was? In asking this, I am not suggesting that he would have had an intellect if he could identify it as something which he wasn't familiar, or if he managed to ask what it was. But those would be closer to intelligent responses than what he did. That he blurred the two words together is kind of neat and funny. We laugh when our children do such things. But it wasn't especially intelligent.)

aftermathemat wrote:

So what you are saying is that Alex need not have any clear intellectual understanding of what the concepts of bigger, smaller, same and different are in order to (more primitively, without intellect) understand and use them practically, and that he could have simply learned this via perception and sound-association?

No, I'm not saying that Alex is using our concepts of bigger, smaller, same, and different, only "practically" and without true understanding. I am just saying that he does not in fact have our concepts, though he makes the same sounds we do in a small subset of the circumstances in which we would apply those concepts.

aftermathemat wrote:

How would then that explain, says, him asking what color he was? He clearly had a desire to know since he asked the question. And it seems the right way to go would be to say that Alex was accustomed to associating the sound  "color" and "what"  with perceptual experiences associated with how colored an object was.

Did you read what I wrote about the criteria for ascribing a concept to someone in my first post?

I suppose I should say that I don't find syntactical manipulation in general to require intellect.

But I should also say that so far the situation is underdescribed. He has presumably been asked questions before like "What color?", "What shape?". He has presumably also been asked questions like "Same or different?", "Bigger or smaller?". We would need to say more to know what sort of syntactical manipulations could be ascribed to him.

One way of getting him to answer questions about colors would be the following. Say words like "blue", "red", "green", etc. when around him, irrespective of context, until he starts saying them. Then start presenting him with objects and saying "What color?" and reward him for certain responses. Over time he can "answer" these questions. But so far we have not said anything that requires the 'question' to be formulated as "What color?" rather than "whatcolor". One might do the same thing with "What shape?", but still that would not be enough to distinguish "What shape?" from "whatshape".

We'd be able to infer that more syntactic manipulation were going on if he showed competence generally with the words "shape" and "color" generally. For instance, if he understood ostensive definitions of colors ("This color is blue") or if he knew to ask about color or shape in response to generic ostensive definitions; that is, if he responded "Color or shape?" to the ostensive definition "This is violet", so that the teacher could respond "color" and that would suffice for his being able to respond with "violet" to questions of "What color?".

Without some background like this, I don't think there is even grounds to ascribe syntactic structure to his question. All we need to say so far is that he has, as it were, inferred from his own tendency to utter certain sounds in response to "whatcolor" that if he made the sound "whatcolor" he might learn a new association.

Of course some of this background might be in place; I don't know. I am saying all this to emphasize that you could have these results even if it were not in place, and yet you are still tempted to describe what he is doing in very anthropomorphic terms.

If this background were in place, then I would think that there is some syntactic structure to his question. But I would still think understanding is lacking, for much else is as well. (For instance, the notion of standard observation features for colors. Or a comprehension of what the response "Neither" would mean to the question "Color or shape?")

To put these points another way, you could teach a parrot to respond with color words whenever you say "muffin" and to respond with shape words whenever you say "algebraic topology". Maybe he will go on to look in a mirror and say "muffin" or "algebraic topology". That wouldn't be enough to ascribe an ability to ask what something is to him.

aftermathemat wrote:

His word  "banerry"  is actually pronounced as rhyming with some pronounciations of  "canary", so I don't know how that would affect your argument.

I mean, it either bears some relation to "banana" and "cherry" or he was making up a new word whole cloth for apples. I think the latter would be slightly more impressive but is probably not what happened.

aftermathemat wrote:

And as for his lacking the ability to ask what a thing is, again, he not only asked what color he was once when he looked into the mirror (recognition of oneself in the mirror is itself sometimes posed as evidence of intellect)

But again, someone who can only ask what color something is does not have the general ability to ask what a thing is. Someone who can only ask one question does not understand himself to be asking a question. (This is obviously not a point about the number one. It would not make a difference if he could ask three questions or five questions, or things which would be questions if they were asked by a human adult. You can't ask questions at all unless you understand questions as a characteristic response to uncertainty.)

aftermathemat wrote:

but even asked Pepperberg's questions with his own questions.

What examples do you have in mind?

aftermathemat wrote:

So what do we make of all this?

I make very little of it.

aftermathemat wrote:

If you don't mind, would you explain exactly why this isn't impressive to you? Especially as it relates to Alex asking what things are (Quid est?), and being able to generalise color and shape succesfully, which is the closest thing to abstraction and most important development Pepperberg et al. claim he has done?

Again, the parrot lacks concepts:

Greg wrote:

People who have young children will sometimes say things like, "She knows over a dozen words now." But these ascriptions are somewhat generous. To take an example from Stanley Cavell, we will say that a child knows the word "kitty" when she identifies her family's kitty, when she identifies kitties in bedtime stories, etc. But then she might go outside and call the neighbor's dog a kitty. Does she know what a kitty is? The bar for concept possession is, shall we say, considerably lower for toddlers and for parrots than it is for adults. A peer-reviewed article on developmental psychology might say that by age n a child typically knows 50 words; but in such a case it may be that the child knows zero words, however much the sounds he makes resemble those of his parents. It is one thing to be able to fetch something blue when told to do so, but plausbily one cannot possess color concepts without also knowing what are the ordinary conditions for color observation, one's being able to distinguish something's being red from looking red--and this, in turn, will differ from merely being able to say "is red" when the lighting is normal and "looks red" when it is not, which is an association which could be learned without one's understanding what lighting has to do with color observation. One might be able to pick out key-shaped objects, but one doesn't know what a key is unless one knows what a lock is, what a door is, what safety is. You don't have the concept of "same" if you can only apply it to fruit, blocks, and color samples. "Understanding a sentence means understanding a language," as Wittgenstein said.

To add a bit more, I think it is (to put it this way again) generous to say that he is asking what things are and "generalizing" color and shape. As Pepperberg says in the video, distinguishing colors and telling when two berries look the similar enough is something lots of animals do, quite competently. I once read that cats regard their owners as big cats. I don't know whether that is true. But clearly lots of animals can distinguish different types of food, different types of foe, perhaps human beings if they live around them, trees, water, etc. Over and above other things, Alex has names for some of those and other things, and he has been taught to ask for names. But there is a difference between knowing what something is called and knowing what something is.* As Wittgenstein also said, "naming is something like attaching a name tag to a thing." It is not as though an animal has a deeper knowledge of what blueness is once it is taught to utter a certain sound in the presence of blue things, in response to certain other sounds; the animal already could recognize the color and (if needed) respond accordingly.

*Cavell actually argues that these are very tightly related, and there's something to that. But that is because really to "know what something is called" is to have a great deal of skill in applying the word for it, which will involve also, for colors for example, the possession of the concept of standard observation conditions.

As for syntactic manipulation, if you think that suffices for intellect then you ought to be far more worried about computers than parrots.