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The Mind Of An Ape
''The Mind of an Ape'' is a 1983 book by David Premack and Ann James Premack. The authors argue that it is possible to teach language to (non-human) great apes. They write: "We now know that someone who comprehends speech must know language, even if he or she cannot produce it."Premack, David & Premack, Ann James. ''The Mind of an Ape'', p. 13. . The authors David Premack, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and Ann James Premack, a science writer, began teaching language to apes in 1964. Premack started his work at the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology in Orange Park, Florida, a program at the University of Florida, continued it at the University of Missouri, then at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Pennsylvania. The apes The subjects of the program, nine chimpanzees, were reared in a laboratory environment specifically designed to stimulate their intellect, as animals raised otherwise fail to thrive. This wa ...
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David Premack
David Premack (October 26, 1925 – June 11, 2015) was an American psychologist who was a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He was educated at the University of Minnesota when logical positivism was in full bloom. The departments of Psychology and Philosophy were closely allied. Herbert Feigl, Wilfred Sellars, and Paul Meehl led the philosophy seminars, while Group Dynamics was led by Leon Festinger and Stanley Schachter. Research Premack started in primate research in 1954 at the Yerkes Primate Biology Laboratory at Orange Park outside Jacksonville, Florida. His first two chimpanzee subjects, Sarah and Gussie, started at the University of Missouri and traveled with him to the University of California, Santa Barbara, and then to the University of Pennsylvania, where he had nine chimpanzee subjects. Premack's first publication (1959) was a new theory of reinforcement (which became known as Premack's principle). It argued that the more probable response ...
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Kanzi
Kanzi (October 28, 1980 – March 18, 2025), also known by the lexigram (from the character 太), was a male bonobo who was the subject of several studies on great ape language. According to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a primatologist who has studied the bonobo since the 1990s, Kanzi exhibited advanced linguistic aptitude. Biography Kanzi was born to Lorel and Bosandjo at Yerkes Field Station at Emory University in 1980. Shortly after birth, Kanzi was stolen and adopted by a more dominant female, Matata, the matriarch of the group. In 1985, Kanzi was moved to the Language Research Center at Georgia State University. He was later relocated, along with his sister, Panbanisha, to the Great Ape Trust, in Des Moines, Iowa. The ill-fated facility, founded in 2004 by local businessman, Ted Townsend, closed after losing funding, experiencing allegations of neglect, and a flood. In 2013, the Ape Cognition and Conservation Initiative (ACCI), under the direction of Jared Tagl ...
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Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel (; born July 4, 1937) is an American philosopher. He is the University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University, where he taught from 1980 until his retirement in 2016. His main areas of philosophical interest are political philosophy, ethics and philosophy of mind. Nagel is known for his critique of material reductionist accounts of the mind, particularly in his essay " What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to liberal moral and political theory in ''The Possibility of Altruism'' (1970) and subsequent writings. He continued the critique of reductionism in '' Mind and Cosmos'' (2012), in which he argues against the neo-Darwinian view of the emergence of consciousness. Life and career Nagel was born on July 4, 1937, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), to German Jewish refugees Carolyn () and Walter Nagel. He arrived in the US in 1939, and was raised in and around New York. He had no religious upbringing, but regard ...
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Primate Cognition
Primate cognition is the study of the intellectual and behavioral skills of non-human primates, particularly in the fields of psychology, behavioral biology, primatology, and anthropology. Primates are capable of high levels of cognition; some make tools and use them to acquire foods and for social displays; some have sophisticated hunting strategies requiring cooperation, influence and rank; they are status conscious, Psychological manipulation, manipulative and capable of deception; they can recognise Family, kin and conspecifics; they can learn to use symbols and understand aspects of human language including some relational syntax, concepts of number and numerical sequence. Studies in primate cognition Theory of mind Theory of mind (also known as mental state attribution, mentalizing, or mindreading) can be defined as the "ability to track the unobservable mental states, like desires and beliefs, that guide others' actions". Premack and Woodruff's 1978 article "Does the chi ...
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Lexigram
Yerkish is an artificial language developed for use by non-human primates. It employs a keyboard whose keys contain ''lexigrams'', symbols corresponding to objects or ideas. Lexigrams were notably used by the Georgia State University Language Research Center to communicate with bonobos and chimpanzees. Researchers and primates were able to communicate using lexigram boards made in up to three panels with a total of 384 keys. Context The Yerkish language was developed by Ernst von Glasersfeld and used by Duane Rumbaugh and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh of Georgia State University while working with primates at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Primates were taught to communicate by means of a lexigram board, a computerized array of keys labeled with lexigrams. Von Glasersfeld coined the term "lexigram" in 1971, created the first 120 of them, and designed the grammar that regulated their combination. This artificial language was called ...
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Matata (bonobo)
Kanzi (October 28, 1980 – March 18, 2025), also known by the lexigram (from the character 太), was a male bonobo who was the subject of several studies on great ape language. According to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a primatologist who has studied the bonobo since the 1990s, Kanzi exhibited advanced linguistic aptitude. Biography Kanzi was born to Lorel and Bosandjo at Yerkes Field Station at Emory University in 1980. Shortly after birth, Kanzi was stolen and adopted by a more dominant female, Matata, the matriarch of the group. In 1985, Kanzi was moved to the Language Research Center at Georgia State University. He was later relocated, along with his sister, Panbanisha, to the Great Ape Trust, in Des Moines, Iowa. The ill-fated facility, founded in 2004 by local businessman, Ted Townsend, closed after losing funding, experiencing allegations of neglect, and a flood. In 2013, the Ape Cognition and Conservation Initiative (ACCI), under the direction of Jared Tagliala ...
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Kanzi (bonobo)
Kanzi (October 28, 1980 – March 18, 2025), also known by the lexigram (from the character 太), was a male bonobo who was the subject of several studies on great ape language. According to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a primatologist who has studied the bonobo since the 1990s, Kanzi exhibited advanced linguistic aptitude. Biography Kanzi was born to Lorel and Bosandjo at Yerkes Field Station at Emory University in 1980. Shortly after birth, Kanzi was stolen and adopted by a more dominant female, Matata, the matriarch of the group. In 1985, Kanzi was moved to the Language Research Center at Georgia State University. He was later relocated, along with his sister, Panbanisha, to the Great Ape Trust, in Des Moines, Iowa. The ill-fated facility, founded in 2004 by local businessman, Ted Townsend, closed after losing funding, experiencing allegations of neglect, and a flood. In 2013, the Ape Cognition and Conservation Initiative (ACCI), under the direction of Jared Taglial ...
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Scale Model
A scale model is a physical model that is geometrically similar to an object (known as the ''prototype''). Scale models are generally smaller than large prototypes such as vehicles, buildings, or people; but may be larger than small prototypes such as anatomical structures or subatomic particles. Models built to the same scale as the prototype are called '' mockups''. Scale models are used as tools in engineering design and testing, promotion and sales, filmmaking special effects, military strategy, and hobbies such as rail transport modeling, wargaming and racing; and as toys. Model building is also pursued as a hobby for the sake of artisanship. Scale models are constructed of plastic, wood, or metal. They are usually painted with enamel, lacquer, or acrylics. Model prototypes include all types of vehicles (railroad trains, cars, trucks, military vehicles, aircraft, and spacecraft), buildings, people, and science fiction themes (spaceships and robots). Methods M ...
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Indicative Conditional
In natural languages, an indicative conditional is a conditional sentence such as "If Leona is at home, she isn't in Paris", whose grammatical form restricts it to discussing what could be true. Indicatives are typically defined in opposition to counterfactual conditionals, which have extra grammatical marking which allows them to discuss eventualities which are no longer possible. Indicatives are a major topic of research in philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and linguistics. Open questions include which logical operation indicatives denote, how such denotations could be composed from their grammatical form, and the implications of those denotations for areas including metaphysics, psychology of reasoning, and philosophy of mathematics. Formal analyses Early analyses identified indicative conditionals with the logical operation known as the material conditional. According to the material conditional analysis, an indicative "If A then B" is true unless A is true and ...
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Experiment
An experiment is a procedure carried out to support or refute a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of something previously untried. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when a particular factor is manipulated. Experiments vary greatly in goal and scale but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results. There also exist natural experimental studies. A child may carry out basic experiments to understand how things fall to the ground, while teams of scientists may take years of systematic investigation to advance their understanding of a phenomenon. Experiments and other types of hands-on activities are very important to student learning in the science classroom. Experiments can raise test scores and help a student become more engaged and interested in the material they are learning, especially when used over time. Experiments can vary from personal and informal natural comparisons ...
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Causality
Causality is an influence by which one Event (philosophy), event, process, state, or Object (philosophy), object (''a'' ''cause'') contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (an ''effect'') where the cause is at least partly responsible for the effect, and the effect is at least partly dependent on the cause. The cause of something may also be described as the reason for the event or process. In general, a process can have multiple causes,Compare: which are also said to be ''causal factors'' for it, and all lie in its past. An effect can in turn be a cause of, or causal factor for, many other effects, which all lie in its future. Some writers have held that causality is metaphysics , metaphysically prior to notions of time and space. Causality is an abstraction that indicates how the world progresses. As such it is a basic concept; it is more apt to be an explanation of other concepts of progression than something to be explained by other more fun ...
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Question
A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammar, grammatical forms, typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are interrogative in form but may not be considered wiktionary:bona fide, bona fide questions, as they are not expected to be answered. Questions come in a number of varieties. For instance; ''Polar questions'' are those such as the English language, English example "Is this a polar question?", which can be answered with yes and no, "yes" or "no". ''Alternative questions'' such as "Is this a polar question, or an alternative question?" present a list of possibilities to choose from. ''Open-ended question, Open questions'' such as "What kind of question is this?" allow many possible resolutions. Questions are widely studied in linguistics and philosophy of language. In the subfield of pragmatics, questions are regarded as illocutionary acts whi ...
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