0033 What about monkeys and apes?

As far as psychological experiments with chimpanzees are concerned, these great apes practice the relationality inherent in the category-based nested form, each on his or her own and not in coordination.

0034 Here is a picture.

0035 For example, a captive chimpanzee may be challenged by a banana, suspended above reach on a string from the ceiling of an enclosure containing several large boxes.  The chimpanzee may figure out that the boxes may be stacked, allowing access to the banana.  The chimpanzee performs whatever it takes to turn the metaphor that a word is like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle into something literal.  But, it cannot um… displace the referent.

0036 Say what?

Here is the deal that becomes plain in chapter four, concerning monkeys and apes.

0037 How crazy is that?

If I use the principle of uniformitarianism, and I work forward from the common ancestor with the chimpanzee (say, 7 Myr), who solves challenges for food, and I work backwards from civilized folk, who will solve a puzzle because it offers a challenge, then do the forward and backward exercises meet in the same… um…. location?   I mean, does the label, “challenge”, remain the same when passing between the starting point and the end point?

0038 If the word, “challenge”, is a piece of a jigsaw, then one edge will eventually connect through other pieces to a specific reward, especially food, and a different edge will eventually connect to a reconceptualization of the specific reward, as something that might be called, “satisfaction”.

0039 What does this imply?

Well, if I take the metaphor that a word is like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle literally, then the content-level actuality_2a in the following two-level interscope corresponds to a word, whether gestural (as in sign-language) or spoken (as in speech-alone talk).

0040 Obviously, this is what monkeys and chimpanzees do, with the chimpanzees performing better.  Once the pieces fit into an assembly, then the assemblies fit together, and the food is obtained.  The referent is not displaced.  The challenge is to sensibly construct a solution.

0041 Often enough, biologists stop with this sensible construction and go on to say that the general intelligence of monkeys and apes is adaptive, because it solves problems.  But, the spoken term, “the cognitive capacity of monkeys and apes”, is a label that introduces a perspective-level actuality_2c, that does not exist for monkeys or apes.  Monkeys and apes do not realize_1c that they have satisfied the conditions whereby the actual solution_2b can be displaced by the term, “challenge”_2c.

But, the biologist does.