Sometimes I could swear that my cat is a human trapped in an animal’s body. She loves to cause mischief; she drinks water nearly exclusively out of (explicitly human) glasses that we accidentally leave lying around. And when she knows she’s in trouble, she looks at me with those glassy feline eyes and I find myself wondering: What’s the difference between my cat and me, really?
I recently undertook a Coursera entitled Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics, and the very first topic was an effort to address this question. When your cat is outside your bedroom door at three AM, scratching and meowing to be let in, she’s demonstrating intelligence and communicative faculties. She knows exactly what to do to communicate a certain desire and elicit a certain response.
Sometimes, animals demonstrate an uncanny resemblance in their behaviour to humans. But to the best of our current knowledge, there are actually some key differences marking the cognitive disparities between humans and other animals. The most common area where these differences manifest? Language. As it turns out, there are three main “dimensions” of difference separating human language and animal forms of communication.
1. Displacement
This one is pretty straightforward. In order to understand it, all you have to do is ask yourself a few questions:
What’s for dinner tomorrow?
When you picture the future, do you see jetpacks or hoverboards?
Would you rather fight 100 chicken-sized zombies or 10 zombie-sized chickens?
Now, ask yourself whether your cat would be able to a) ask this question of another cat and b) receive a coherent answer in return.
Well, maybe. But all of the evidence we have points to the contrary.
Human language can express displacement, which refers to our ability to communicate about things that aren’t happening right this very moment. That could mean something happening elsewhere in time, elsewhere in space, or not at all. Which is to say, displacement refers to the human imagination—the ability to grasp the abstract and the hypothetical. Without displacement, watching TV or reading books wouldn’t really be much fun. You’d never be able to follow the story.
2. Joint Attention
Joint attention is defined as the ability to collaborate by anticipating the consciousnesses of others.
That group project you’re working on for online school? That requires joint attention. You have to keep up communication with your group members and consider their thoughts when making decisions about what Slidesgo template to use for your powerpoint, which semi-relevant chemistry meme to stick on the “Thank you” slide, and who gets to read out the title slide and byline in an overly dramatic P.T. Barnum voice when it comes time to present.
Language allows humans to collaborate on a massive global scale. Government requires joint attention. International organizations like the UN, the EU, or the WHO? Also require joint attention. And thanks to the internet, humans are pushing the boundaries of what it means to collaborate.
On the other hand, animals lack this ability. Sure, wolf packs work together to take down prey and in fact lots of animals manage to form some semblance of a society out in the wild, but you’ll never see any number of omega wolves from different packs unionizing to demand rights and fair pay.
3. Discrete Infinity
“I never said she stole my wallet.” Maybe you’ve seen this sentence before, floating around the interwebs or tossed about as a conversation starter. You can read the sentence in seven different ways by switching out the word you emphasize. Each way of reading the sentence yields a different implication; this is one aspect of discrete infinity.
Language is a discrete entity; there are a finite number of symbols in any alphabet, for example. There’s no such thing as 3% of the letter ‘a’—or at least, you also can’t intuitively pick up on what 3% of the letter ‘a’ means or sounds like, because the alphabet is discrete and not continuous. But in the case of human language, these symbols can be arranged in an infinite number of ways to convey an infinite number of contexts. That’s discrete infinity, something which animal communication styles lack. Animals have a finite number of symbols and a finite number of goals to express with those symbols. Conversely, humans are limited only by their imaginations.
In conclusion, there’s actually a lot that separates us from our furry/scaly friends. Studying language helps demonstrate this. But that’s not to say that animals don’t communicate! They do, and often loudly (my cat is a testament to this). And even if they can’t comprehend ideas like love or hatred or any piece of fiction ever, they still have the capacity to love you (my cat… well, we’re working on it). Make sure you show them lots of love in return!