Example research essay topic: Human Beings Rhetorical Question - 1,747 words

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We human beings may not be the most admirable species on the planet, or the most likely to survive for another millennium, but we are without any doubt at all the most intelligent. We are also the only species with language. What is the relation between these two obvious facts? Before going on to consider that question, I must pause briefly to defend my second premise. Don't whales and dolphins, vervet monkeys and honey bees (the list goes on) have languages of sorts? Haven't chimpanzees in laboratories been taught rudimentary languages of sorts?

Yes, and body language is a sort of language, and music is the international language (sort of) and politics is a sort of language, and the complex world of odor and olfaction is another, highly emotionally charged language, and so on. It sometimes seems that the highest praise we can bestow on a phenomenon we are studying is the claim that its complexities entitle it to be called a language -- of sorts. This admiration for language -- real language, the sort only we human beings use -- is well-founded. The expressive, information-encoding properties of real language are practically limitless (in at least some dimensions), and the powers that other species acquire in virtue of their use of proto-languages, hemi-semi-demi-languages, are indeed similar to the powers we acquire thanks to our use of real language.

These other species do climb a few steps up the mountain on whose summit we reside, thanks to language. Looking at the vast differences between their gains and ours is one way of approaching the question I want to address: How does language contribute to intelligence? I once saw a cartoon showing two hippopotami basking in a swamp, and one was saying to the other: "Funny -- I keep thinking it's Tuesday!" Surely no hippopotamus could ever think the thought that it's Tuesday. But on the other hand, if a hippopotamus could say that it was thinking any thought, it could probably think the thought that it was Tuesday. What varieties of thought require language? What varieties of thought (if any) are possible without language?

These might be viewed as purely philosophical questions, to be investigated by a systematic logical analysis of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the occurrence of various thoughts in various minds. And in principle such an investigation might work, but in practice it is hopeless. Any such philosophical analysis must be guided at the outset by reflections about what the "obvious" constraining facts about thought and language are, and these initial intuitions turn out to be treacherous. We watch a chimpanzee, with her soulful face, her inquisitive eyes and deft fingers, and we very definitely get a sense of the mind within, but the more we watch, the more our picture of her mind swims before our eyes. In some ways she is so human, so insightful, but we soon learn (to our dismay or relief, depending on our hopes) that in other ways, she is so dense, so uncomprehending, so unreachable cut off from our human world. How could a chimp who so obviously understands A fail to understand B?

It sometimes seems flat impossible -- as impossible as a person who can do multiplication and division but can't count to ten. But is that really impossible? What about idiot savants who can play the piano but not read music, or children with Williams Syndrome (Infantile Hypercalcemia or IHC) who can carry on hyper fluent, apparently precocious conversations but are so profoundly retarded they cannot clothe themselves? Philosophical analysis by itself cannot penetrate this thicket of perplexities. While philosophers who define their terms carefully might succeed in proving logically that -- let's say -- mathematical thoughts are impossible without mathematical language, such a proof might be consigned to irrelevance by the surprising discovery that mathematical intelligence does not depend on being able to have mathematical thoughts so defined! Consider a few simple questions about chimpanzees: could chimpanzees learn to tend a fire -- could they gather firewood, keep it dry, preserve the coals, break the wood, keep the fire size within proper bounds?

And if they couldn't invent these novel activities on their own, could they be trained by human beings to do these things? I wonder. Here's another question. Suppose you imagine something novel -- I hereby invite you to imagine a man climbing up a rope with a plastic dustbin over his head. An easy mental task for you. Could a chimpanzee do the same thing in her mind's eye?

I wonder. I chose the elements -- man, rope, climbing, dustbin, head -- as familiar objects in the perceptual and behavioral world of a laboratory chimp, but I wonder whether a chimp could put them together in this novel way -- even by accident, as it were. You were provoked to perform your mental act by my verbal suggestion, and probably you often perform similar mental acts on your own in response to verbal suggestions you give yourself -- not out loud, but definitely in words. Could it be otherwise? Could a chimpanzee get itself to perform such a mental act without the help of verbal suggestion?

Endnote 1 I wonder. 2. "Cognitive closure": comparing our minds with others These are rather simple questions about chimpanzees, but neither you nor I know the answers -- yet. The answers are not impossible to acquire, but not easy either; controlled experiments could yield the answers, which would shed light on the role of language in turning brains into minds like ours. I think it is very likely that every content that has so far passed through your mind and mine, as I have been presenting this talk, is strictly off limits to non-language-users, be they apes or dolphins, or even non-signing Deaf people. If this is true, it is a striking fact, so striking that it reverses the burden of proof in what otherwise would be a compelling argument: the claim, first advanced by the linguist Noam Chomsky, and more recently defended by the philosophers Jerry Fodor and Colin McGinn (1990), that our minds, like those of all other species, must suffer "cognitive closure" with regard to some topics of inquiry. Spiders can't contemplate the concept of fishing, and birds -- some of whom are excellent at fishing -- aren't up to thinking about democracy.

What is inaccessible to the dog or the dolphin, may be readily grasped by the chimp, but the chimp in turn will be cognitively closed to some domains we human beings have no difficulty thinking about. Chomsky and company ask a rhetorical question: What makes us think we are different? Aren't there bound to be strict limits on what Homo sapiens may conceive? This presents itself as a biological, naturalistic argument, reminding us of our kinship with the other beasts, and warning us not to fall into the ancient trap of thinking "how like an angel" we human "souls, " with our "infinite" minds are. I think that on the contrary, it is a pseudo-biological argument, one that by ignoring the actual biological details, misdirects us away from the case that can be made for taking one species -- our species -- right off the scale of intelligence that ranks the pig above the lizard and the ant above the oyster. Comparing our brains with bird brains or dolphin brains is almost beside the point, because our brains are in effect joined together into a single cognitive system that dwarfs all others.

They are joined by one of the innovations that has invaded our brains and no others: language. I am not making the foolish claim that all our brains are knit together by language into one gigantic mind, thinking its transnational thoughts, but rather that each individual human brain, thanks to its communicative links, is the beneficiary of the cognitive labors of the others in a way that gives it unprecedented powers. Naked animal brains are no match at all for the heavily armed and outfitted brains we carry in our heads. A purely philosophical approach to these issues is hopeless, I have claimed. It must be supplemented -- not replaced -- with researches in a variety of disciplines ranging from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to evolutionary theory and paleo-anthropology. I raised the question about whether chimps could learn to tend a fire because of its close -- but treacherous! -- resemblance to questions that have been discussed in the recent flood of excellent books and articles about the evolution of the human mind (see Further Reading).

I will not attempt on this occasion to answer the big questions, but simply explain why answers to them will hinge on answers to the questions raised -- and to some degree answered -- in this literature. In the terms of the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins (1976), my role today is to be a vector of memes, attempting to infect the minds in one niche -- my home discipline of philosophy -- with memes that are already flourishing in others. At some point in prehistory, our ancestors tamed fire; the evidence strongly suggests that this happened hundreds of thousands of years -- or even as much as a million years (Donald, p. 114) -- before the advent of language, but of course after our hominid line split away from the ancestors of modern apes such as chimpanzees. What, if not language, gave the first fire-taming hominids the cognitive power to master such a project? Or is fire-tending not such a big deal? Perhaps the only reason we don't find chimps in the wild sitting around campfires is that their rainy habitats have never left enough tinder around to give fire a chance to be tamed. (The neuro biologist William Calvin tells me that Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's pygmy chimps in Atlanta love to go on picnics in the woods, and enjoy staring into the campfire's flames, just as we do. ) 3.

Need to know vs. the commando team: two design types If termites can create elaborate, well-ventilated cities of mud, and weaverbirds can weave audaciously engineered hanging nests, and beavers can build dams that take months to complete, couldn't chimpanzees tend a simple campfire? This rhetorical question climbs another misleading ladder of abilities. It ignores the independently well-evidenced possibility that there are two profoundly different ways of building dams: the way beavers do and the way we do. The differences are not necessarily in the products, but in the control structures...

Research essay sample on Human Beings Rhetorical Question