by Mike O’Brien
This is going to be a broad-strokes, fast-and-loose affair. Or at least loose. In April I wrote a piece about recent work in the field of animal normativity, a quickly developing area of research that is of interest to me for two key reasons: first, it promises to deepen our knowledge of animal cognition and behaviour, allowing us to better attend to their welfare; second, it promises to fill in the genealogical history of our own normative senses, allowing us to better understand the human experience of morality.
Mostly following the cohort of researchers around Kristin Andrews, who are working on de-anthropocentrized taxonomies and conceptual frameworks for studying animal normativity, I noted that one question of particular interest remains outstanding, viz. “do animals have norms about norms?”. Put another way, do animals think about the (innate, and learned) norms governing life in their communities, and do they (consciously or unconsciously) follow higher-order “meta-normative” rules to resolve conflicts between two or more conflicting norms? The answer still seems to be that they do not, at least not among the higher primates who are the principal focus of study for these questions.
One possible explanation for this apparent absence of recursive or reflexive normativity among non-human animals is a lack of language. It is supposed by some that in order to make norms the object of thought, capable of being analyzed, evaluated, compared and synthesized, some system of external representation is needed, and such a system would fit most definitions of a language. If other species possessed such a powerful cognitive tool, we might suppose that they would use it for all kinds of things, not just resolving normative quandaries. And yet we don’t see much evidence for that kind of abstract, propositional communication among other species. Some tantalizing exceptions come to mind, like enculturated apes using sign language and cetacean communication exhibiting structure and complexity that we have yet to fully understand. But as yet there are no examples of bonobo judges or dolphin sages sorting out the immanent logic of their societies’ rules.
How, then, might pre-linguistic (or, putting it less teleologically, non-linguistic) species access meta-normative cognition? First, a clarification should be made about two distinct lines of investigation on this matter. Existing species are of interest for their own sake, to understand their abilities and experience, and for the sake of understanding how normativity manifests in a plurality of life-forms and in parallel threads of evolution. Since higher primates share a relatively recent common ancestor with humans, they can provide a parallax view for studying our hominid ancestry, but importantly they are not themselves our ancestors. One way in which these distant cousins can inform our self-understanding is by demonstrating capacities that were supposed to require human-specific, or hominid-specific, features such as fine vocal control or recent neo-cortical brain structures. This can dispel notions of humanity as an evolutionary apex, or as a culmination of several brand-new evolutionary adaptations; many of the things that “make us human” may be much older, more widespread, and more diversely instantiated than supposed.
Extinct human ancestors are of interest mostly for the sake of understanding the history of our own experience as normative and meta-normative creatures, although they can also be of more pluralist interest for their own sake, since they were not fated to become us; evolutionary history is full of roads not taken. Since the behaviour and cognition of our hominid ancestors does not fossilize (except in a few forms of physical artifacts), we are not able to study them directly. We can study the traces of conserved genetic and morphological features that carried through to modern humans, but this still involves a lot of guesswork. (Advances in computer-assisted recovery and reconstruction of archaic genetic information may provide some suprising revelations on this front, though.)
So, the search for a bridge from pre-linguistic “naive” normativity to linguistic “meta-” normativity may proceed by several paths. One possible route, of which I gave a hint in the closing of my last column, is the study of non-linguistic communication, specifically in the form of pantomime. This idea first came as I was browsing through Andrews’ earlier works and found two articles on pantomime in orangutans. Following references and recommended literature, I found a trove of research on pantomime’s possible role in language development, mostly from the last 15 or 20 years. A diverse field of work, it draws on theatre, semiotics, psycho-linguistics, early childhood development, anthropology, and primate ethology, among other specializations. There are few recorded observations of pantomime use by primates, but we can imagine all kinds of reasons for this besides the actual absence of the behaviour; time constraints on observation, rareness of the conditions prompting the behaviour, atypicality of the populations under study versus wild populations with more intact life settings, loss of information due to unsuitable practices of recording and categorization of observed behaviours, etc. (This might be criticized as special pleading, but I believe these are ubiquitous issues in animal research and, at the risk of agreeing with Donald Rumsfeld, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.)
Among the various competing definitions of pantomime found in this literature, a few areas of broad agreement exist. Pantomime is non-linguistic, though it may be supplemented with vocal sounds, particularly of the emotive or onomatopoeic sort. It is iconic rather than symbolic, which is to say that the movements and arrangements of the body obviously resemble the referents that they portray (as opposed to the simplified and abstracted motions of a standardized sign language). It is more powerful and flexible than mere ostention, because the latter form of gesture can only refer to things that are actually present in time and space, whereas pantomime can refer to objects and events that are “displaced”, existing somewhere else in time and space. (Pantomime would seem to depend on the familiarity of its audience with the referent portrayed, though, while ostention can refer to anything, however unfamiliar or unintelligible, so long as it is immediately present.) In pantomime the body may be used to portray itself (for instance, performing a swimming motion, representing a body swimming) or to portray other bodies and objects (for instance, using the index and middle fingers of the right hand, pointing downwards, moving along an outstretched, horizontal left hand, to portray the legs of a swimmer moving down a diving board). Brown 2019 (see links below) provides an extensive discussion and proposed taxonomy of the various kinds of pantomime, according to (roughly) whether the mimer is portraying their own body, or other bodies, or inanimate objects or events, and whether they are using their whole body or just certain parts in isolation. (Imagine, for instance, portraying an elephant by walking on all fours and slowly moving one’s head side to side as if swinging a pendulous trunk, versus pointing one’s fingers downwards, with the middle finger slightly raised, portraying four legs and a trunk).
(I don’t wish to get bogged down in all the technical details of pantomime research here, but I must note that it seems fascinatingly rich from my limited review of it, especially regarding the possible precedence or co-development of pantomimic communication with respect to language, both in the individual case such as pre-linguistic infants readily understanding pantomime demonstrations, and in species-level case of human pre-history.)
But we’re not talking about the portrayal of swimmers or elephants, or how unlucky holiday-goers may mime the loss of their luggage to hotel staff in the absence of a shared language. We (the royal “we”, mind you) are talking about how to bootstrap normative reflection non-linguistically. And here is how I think that might work. Because the norms governing community behaviour are at least immanently present to members of the community, they do not need to be represented abstractly as norms to be recognized. It may be sufficient to instantiate a situation governed by a norm, directed to the shared attention of an audience, and thereby elicit a shared norm-sensitive reaction. The action or situation does not really occur, but a copy of it is “performed”, and there is a possible modal distinction in how witnesses process this performance versus a “real” instance. (Some modern hominids fail to make this distinction, as some actors famous for impersonating particularly despicable villains can attest. Maybe the advance of meta-normative and conditional normative cognition in hominid history is merely an increase of degree from “mostly absent” to “mostly present”, if that.)
Such a modal shift provides (I speculate) a parallax view on norm-governed experiences, perhaps not sufficient to bring immanent normativity into full reflective view, but enough to bring aspects of normativity into the scope of attention. This may not go anywhere by itself, though, if the individuals sharing attention lack sufficient cognitive workspace to manipulate normative concepts by themselves. And we may doubt whether individual normative reflection confers an adaptive advantage great enough to offset the various energy, time and social disregulation costs it may incur (and thus, it would likely not emerge or be preserved under selection pressures). This is where the shared attention becomes important, by engaging a larger workspace of social cognition (besides possible advantages like efficiency of communication, and signalling a special modal frame by engaging in an otherwise unusual dynamic of individual-to-group address). By eliciting a shared normative response “on demand” as it were, the pantomime may be able to make the responses themselves, and their relation to the inciting instance, conspicuous to shared attention. (Perhaps because they are attended to under a shifted modal frame, or because a reduced intensity of reaction, proper to the “pretend” character of the instance, leaves spare attention resources free to attend to other features of the whole performer-audience event).
This may have an adaptive advantage for social animals, tending towards evolutionary conservation and development. If all or some of a group respond to the same stimulus together, differences in individuals’ responses also fall under shared attention and may elicit normative responses. The internal or external pressure to adjust one’s response to conform to that of the majority may serve to “tune” the patterns of affective response among the group, increasing the predictability of members’ responses and decreasing friction arising from differing responses to behaviour. Importantly, it can accomplish such tuning at low cost by preempting conflicts and reducing the need for post-transgression enforcement. This testing and tuning mechanism is certainly less fine-grained and flexible than language, but leaps beyond the speed and resolution of Darwinian selection.
I admit that I cannot readily provide an example of any particular behaviour that may be pantomimed to such effect, nor how an individual may come to think of engaging in such a performance, nor how they might prompt their group to engage in shared attention under a shifted modal frame. (I promised broad strokes, not blueprints). I suspect it may start with dissatisfaction, or dissent, or some other friction that makes formerly invisible mechanisms visible as problems (“Thought begins when the runner stumbles”, spake ole’ Freddy Nietzsche). An actor may perform one of two possible but mutually exclusive behavioural options, eliciting a negative response, then perform the other option, eliciting another negative response (assume that the situation does not admit of choosing to do neither). This is a dilemma, manifested by showing that both horns are unacceptable to the group.
(Perhaps an orangutan or early hominid mimes an elephant barrelling down a path on which five fellow primates are sleeping, and the lone awake member of the troop can let its comrades be trampled in their multitude or scare the elephant onto a path where only one fellow primate is sleeping, or perhaps push a particularly hefty member of the group in front of the elephant, stopping its advance. Being relatively simple in their cognitive development, some of these creatures might have trouble identifying the proper course of action, even mulling it over for generations as the rest of their community gets on with things.)
Intuition pumping, by means of narrative, pantomime, or event a single static image, can play a powerful role in bootstrapping moral reflection, and the multiple modalities of such prompts may in principle provide opportunities for reflection even among non-linguistic animals (but not among non-reflective animals, and we may have further doubts about whether such intuition pumping works without prior language-dependent conceptual priming, or without the ability to spontaneously construct narratives in response to non-narrative stimuli). There may yet be something to this idea, though, trading on the ability of pantomime to represent objects and actions, displaced from their original context and brought into conspicuous contrast. Fleshing this thesis out further would probably require a greater degree of folk expertise (another theme of Andrews and friends’ work) both in the expressive and interpretive possibilities of pantomime, and in the communicative and normative-cognitive capacities of species of interest (humans and higher primates for now, antecedent hominids would be nice but their extinction makes things tricky).
I’m trying to figure out how to develop this elaborate hunch further. I’ve been assured by trusted sources that this has the makings of a doctoral project, and I’ve toyed with the idea of returning to graduate studies since completing my Master’s degree. Perhaps the reports of Canada’s academic employment market being a dismal meat grinder are unduly dour (I don’t see how it could have possibly gotten better in the last fifteen years, but let’s ignore fundamental mathematics and labour economics for a moment). There are also opportunities for independent scholarship funded through our Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the sometimes-profitable field of popular science writing is always open. A more concrete community of scholarship would be nice to have, though. If any research directors or deans are reading this, I am not above being swayed by abnormally generous and stable employment proposals.
Here are a few particularly helpful sources that informed this column. It is a very small subset of my own very small subset of existing literature, but should give interested readers an adequate starting point for their own perusal:
Brown et al. 2019, “How Pantomime Works: Implications for Theories of Language Origin”
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00009/full
Gärdenfors 2021, “Demonstration and Pantomime in the Evolution of Teaching and Communication”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0271530921000458
Russon & Andrews 2010, “Orangutan Pantomime: Elaborating the Message”
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2010.0564
Russon & Andrews 2011, “Pantomime in Great Apes: Evidence and Implications”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.4161/cib.4.3.14809
Zywiczynski, Wacewicz & Sibierska 2018, “Defining Pantomime for Language Evolution Research”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-016-9425-9
Also, I haven’t read all the entries in this special issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, nor are they all relevant to the issues at hand, but the whole thing looks fascinating in its own right:
Volume 37, Issue1824, “Reconstructing Prehistoric Languages”
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2021/376/1824