Folk Physics for Apes: The Chimpanzee's Theory of How the World Works

412 Pages·2003·4.62 MB·English

by  Daniel J. Povinelli

folk physics
for apes
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folk physics
for apes
The chimpanzee’s theory of how the world works
 . 
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
in collaboration with
 . ,  . 
  
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1
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First published 2000
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To Ted and Joan
‘Honored Members of the Academy!
You have done me the honor of inviting me to give your Academy an account of the life I
formerly led as an ape.
I regret that I cannot comply with your request to the extent you desire. It is now nearly
five years since I was an ape, a short space of time, perhaps, according to the calendar, but
an infinitely long time to gallop through at full speed as I have done, more or less
accompanied by excellent mentors, good advice, applause and orchestral music, and yet
essentially alone…
In revenge, however, my memory of the past has closed the door against me more and
more. I could have returned at first, had human beings allowed it, through an archway as
wide as the span of heaven over the earth, but as I spurred myself on in my forced career,
the opening narrowed and shrank behind me; I felt more comfortable in the world of
men…’
from Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy
FOREWORD
In his parable Penguin Island, Anatole France relates how the old, blind monk, Saint
Maël, inadvertently baptized a group of penguins, mistaking them for human beings.
When the news reached heaven, it caused, so we are told, neither joy nor sorrow but
extreme surprise. The Lord himself was embarrassed. He gathered an assembly of
clerics and doctors, and asked them for an opinion on the delicate question of whether
the birds must now be given souls. It was a matter of more than theoretical importance.
‘The Christian state,’ Saint Cornelius observed, ‘is not without serious inconveniences
for a penguin…. The habits of birds are, in many points, contrary to the command-
ments of the Church.’ Penguins, once burdened with a soul, would surely get into
unforseen—and undeserved—moral difficulties. Saint Augustine concurred: ‘If, Lord,
in your wisdom you pour an immortal soul into them, they will burn eternally in hell in
virtue of your adorable decrees.’
The learned assembly, being unable to resolve the matter satisfactorily among them-
selves, decided to consult Saint Catherine. ‘This is what was usually done in such cases,’
France notes, ‘Saint Catherine while on earth had confounded fifty very learned
doctors. She knew Plato’s philosophy in addition to the Holy Scriptures, and she also
possessed a knowledge of rhetoric.’ And, indeed, when it came to it, her solution was
certainly a neat one: she recommended that the baptized penguins should be granted an
immortal soul–‘but one of small size’. So it was decided. And the rest of France’s book
tells the tragicomic history of how these small-souled beings made out over the next
millenium.
Daniel Povinelli, too, knows philosophy in addition to the scriptures of comparative
psychology. Anyone who has heard him lecture will recognise his mastery of rhetoric.
And he has, besides, a capacity that, so far as I know, even Saint Catherine never aspired
to: he is a first rate observer and experimenter, empirically careful almost to the point of
obsession, while methodologically ingenious to the point of poetry. Had the assembly
gone to Povinelli, instead of Catherine, for advice about what to do about those
awkward penguins, I would trust him to have come forward with a rather different and
better solution. Having put the birds to the experimental test, he would have proposed
that the answer lay not in quantity of soul but quality. Let the penguins be given souls,
not of a smaller size but, as befits their nature, souls of a different type and shape.
Folk Physics for Apes is a plea to the scientific community to think again—on the basis
of the new evidence that Povinelli and his colleagues have accumulated in the last
decade—about one of the most cherished assumptions of contemporary psychology:
namely, that ape minds and human minds are in fact basically of the same type and
shape, that there is no great qualitative gulf between human ways of construing the

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world and apes’ ways, that apes are in effect just like us, only less so. Through a series of
cleverly linked experiments, Povinelli and his team have slowly but surely undermined
this conventional wisdom. And here, in a thrilling exposition of both the evidence and
the theoretical speculations it has prompted, they set out their stall.
When this book was first published in 2000, predictably its arguments were met by
certain critics with a mixture of anxiety and outrage. This was not—and still is not—
what many people wanted to hear. As Saint Gal complained of the man originally
responsible for baptizing the penguins, ‘Maël has created great theological difficulties
and introduced disorder into the economy of mysteries.’ No less a charge was and is lev-
elled in certain quarters against Povinelli.
Yet, as this book enters a new edition, here’s a chance to celebrate not just its courage
and originality but its scientific integrity. No one, including Povinelli, can think that this
is the last word. Nonetheless there can be no question that he has recast the terms of the
debate. From now on, these are the arguments that must be addressed on their own evi-
dential and theoretical terms by those who still want to insist that apes see the world the
way that human beings do (or, since this in the end is the more important lesson, that
human beings see the world the way that apes do). It has taken a large soul to pursue
these lines of research to where they have led—and a large soul to write this book. Every
reader, soul for soul, will want to match it.
Nicholas Humphrey
February 2003
Anatole France (1904/1925) Penguin Island.Trans. A.W. Evans. pp. 30–32.Bodley Head
London.
an initial word about
‘folk physics’
phys.ics(fiz’iks) n1. (used with a sing. v.)The science of matter and energy and of
interactions between the two, grouped in traditional fields such as acoustics, optics,
mechanics, and thermodynamics, as well as modern extensions including atomic and
nuclear physics, cryogenics, and particle physics.1
Physicsis the most basic of the sciences, concerning itself with the interactions of
energy, matter, space, and time, and especially with questions of what underlies every
phenomenon.2
Surely chimpanzees and other apes do not possess scientific theories about matter and
energy, let alone group them into academic sub-disciplines. Indeed, the idea that they
have any kind of science at all seems a bit preposterous. So, why have we invoked the
term ‘physics’ in the title of this book?
The reason is simple: chimpanzees, like us, must confront the world of matter and
energy every moment of their waking lives. And so, like us, they must possess some kind
of understanding or knowledge about the movements and interactions of the objects
that surround them. This knowledge may not constitute a science, of course, but it may
well be a body of knowledge that is, to some extent or another, organized and coherent.
To make the point clearly, think for a moment about our own infants and children.
Modern psychological research has revealed that they know a surprising amount about
how and why the physical world works the way it does. Indeed, from a very early age
infants and children are already constructing quite sophisticated ideas about concepts
such as gravity, force, mass, and shape. And yet we would not want to say that these
infants and children have developed a science of physics. Of course, there may be strik-
ing parallels between how children come to discover the regularities of the world and
the methods that scientists use (observation, experimentation, revising one’s ideas in
the light of new evidence, etc.), but to describe this as a formal science of physics may be
too far a stretch for most readers.
On the other hand, we might be perfectly comfortable talking about infant’s and chil-
dren’s ‘folk physics’, that is, their common-sense understanding of how the world works,
as well as why it works in the way that it does. Likewise, chimpanzees and other nonhu-
man species may possess a kind of folk physics as well. However, short of simply guess-
ing, there is no principled way of knowing ahead of time how similar or different the
ape’s folk physics is to our own.
1 The American Heritage College Dictionary, (3rd edn, 1993), p. 103 1. Houghton Mifflin,
Boston.
2 Paul Peter Urone (1998), College physics. Brooks/Cole, Pacific Grove.