ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

What’s in a Label?: Experimental Politics, Educated Publics, and the “Science Question” in Primate Language Studies

• In Event: The Language of Science

English Abstract

Between 1965 and 1980, psychological experiments attempting to instruct great apes in natural and artificial communication systems—American Sign Language, plastic token symbols, lexigram keyboards—received grant support from the United States government and private foundations in the millions of dollars, appeared in peer-reviewed academic journals, and were lauded in the print and video media. Yet, in 1980, the semiotician Thomas Sebeok convened a conference at the New York Academy of Sciences which cast the authenticity of ape language into doubt. By the late 1970s, embittered primate language investigators had begun vociferously lambasting their colleagues’ results: they demanded unfettered access to complete datasets and questioned the viability of double-blind studies. At the conference, Sebeok did not suggest that ape language studies were bad science; he insisted that these experiments—grant funded, peer-reviewed, publicly lauded—had not been science at all.

This paper unpacks the politics of such a startling claim and examines the after-effects it had on crafting a new narrative for primate language studies in the late 20th century. Taking the academic conference seriously as a forum for meaning making and consensus building within and beyond fields of inquiry, I argue that, by moving primate language retroactively into the realm of non-science, Sebeok side-stepped the questions it had raised and saved experimental science from itself. Too, the non-science label created a new meta-narrative of the history of primate language accessible to educated elites, leading to one of many fissures in the lay conception of science still with us today.

Author

• Max Fennell-Chametzky, Stanford University