X-Message-Number: 29828
From: "Basie" <>
Subject: Alex the Parrot  died
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 13:42:06 -0400

Alex the Parrot


By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: September 12, 2007
Thinking about animals - and especially thinking about whether animals can 
think - is like looking at the world through a two-way mirror. There, for 
example, on the other side of the mirror, is Alex, the famous African Grey 
parrot who died unexpectedly last week at the age of 31. But looking at 
Alex, who mastered a surprising vocabulary of words and concepts, the 
question is always how much of our own reflection we see. What you make of 
Dr. Irene Pepperberg's work with Alex depends on whether you think Alex's 
cognitive presence was real or merely imitative.

A truly dispassionate observer might argue that most Grey parrots could 
probably learn what Alex had learned, but only a microscopic minority of 
humans could have learned what Alex had to teach. Most humans are not truly 
dispassionate observers. We're too invested in the idea of our superiority 
to understand what an inferior quality it really is. I always wonder how the 
experiments would go if they were reversed - if, instead of us trying to 
teach Alex how to use the English language, Alex were to try teaching us to 
understand the world as it appears to parrots.

These are bottomless questions, of course. For us, language is everything 
because we know ourselves in it. Alex's final words were: "I love you."

There is no doubt that Alex had a keen awareness of the situations in which 
that sentence is appropriate - that is, at the end of a message at the end 
of the day. But to say whether Alex loved the human who taught him, we'd 
have to know if he had a separate conceptual grasp of what love is, which is 
different from understanding the context in which the word occurs. By any 
performative standard - knowing how to use the word properly - Alex loved 
Dr. Pepperberg.

Beyond that, only our intuitions, our sense of who that bird might really 
be, are useful. And in some ways this is also a judgment we make about 
loving each other.

To wonder what Alex recognized when he recognized words is also to wonder 
what humans recognize when we recognize words. It was indeed surprising to 
realize how quickly Alex could take in words and concepts.

Scientifically speaking, the value of this research lies in its specific 
details about patterns of learning and cognition. Ethically speaking, the 
value lies in our surprise, our renewed awareness of how little we allow 
ourselves to expect from the animals around us. VERLYN KLINKENBORG

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