Koko, le gorille qui parle (1978)'s comments

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St. Gloede

Slightly preachy, but still one of the best documentaries I've ever seen.

12 years 5 months ago

nbats

https://ok.ru/video/3458093812345

1 year 8 months ago

1.) Outdated science

What at first stroke me the most, was that it was oftentimes unclear, whether Koko was really talking or simply imitating. To me, it often looked liked imitating, except in those cases where he wanted something like food.
Also I saw few instances of "proposition making" which is at the the heart of human language. Instead, Koko was mostly sending "food cues", he was rarely playing with the "words" or combining and recombining them to make phrases or sentences, or even paragraphs.
Also, in human language, a word meaning ( https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/word-meaning/ ) is actually quite complex. A name has for example both a sense and a reference (Spider-Man's sense is true as we can talk about him, but his reference is false because he doesn't exist in the real world).

On the other side, my pug understands maybe 30 "words" (an average dog can be made to understand 165 "words" and the top 20% even 250).
Why do I put the word word in "cramps" here? Because they aren't really words. When uttered by the human, and in his brain, the are words. But as the they enter the animals body, they become more or less simple cues, still having reference but lacking sense. Maybe the term proto-word could be applied).

That's a little bit about what nagged me on the scientific side. But we should not forget that this documentary is 42 years old. We should also not forget that for millenia the Christian Religion, as well as the agricultural state demanded that animals be dumb creatures who don't have any feelings and are far below us. It's only natural that with the scientific breakthrough of the 18th and 19th centuries the pendulum swings in the other direction. Since 1979 ever new attempts have been made to bring chimpanzees (though [yet] not Gorillas) to combine "words" to create new meanings. Apparently (I didn't read the papers myself), some experiments, in this millenia have succeeded, which is incredibly interesting, although the combinations were rather easy.

2) Unethical
But then I became aware of a more troublesome aspect of the experiment. When I read about Koko and others on paper years ago, I was noticed about ethical issues, but I didn't take it seriously.
This is different if you actually see the animal and the sometimes total lack of empathy of Penny Patterson it is treated with.
It's good that the movie shows that, so everybody can get his own impression and is not dependent on a literal description.
She talks of Koko as it were a human but treats it like a worm. Maybe she gets psychologically frustrated as she realizes that there are substantial differences between the two species or maybe the experiment didn't yield as much as expected.

3) Conclusion

There should be more movies like this that document scientific projects. The documentary would have won much if it shortly explained some of the theories that underlie the experiment. For this one, it would have been good to explain basic semantic theories (Frege, Pierce, Saussure) and theories that underlie this experiment. And it should have focused more on the criticism.
This might have turned some viewers off and it would be about half an hour longer, making it still run over less than 2h. And it would be a masterpiece.

That said, it's still a good documentary about a fascinating topic that was going on in academia in the middle of the last century, which I can recommend to everybody . 7.6/10

3 years 7 months ago

bodoni

cruel

13 years ago