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Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Duane Rumbaugh taught Kanzi to communicate symbolically using a “lexigram keyboard” they had developed. Kanzi’s capacity forces Deacon to draw another line. Although undoubtedly Kanzi could symbolize, he could not teach what he had learned to other bonobos, which means he did not develop the characteristically human capacity to participate in a replicable culture of symbolism or abstraction.⁵⁴

Deacon’s thesis is that the human brain and language co-evolved. “The changes in this organ responsible for this miracle were a direct consequence of the use of words … [T]he physical changes that make us human are the incarnations, so to speak, of the process of using words.” Or, more narrowly than this, leaving writing out of language, symbolic cognition is a derivative speech: “Spoken language is the vehicle that first introduces the power of symbols to children.”⁵⁵

Others in the neuroscience business don’t agree with Deacon that human brains are so very different from the brains of other animals. Merlin Donald, for instance, says that primate brains have essentially the same structure as human brains. But this doesn’t stop him from coming to a conclusion similar to Deacon’s, this time naming our species-virtue “consciousness,” a phenomenon “made dependent upon our human capacity for symbolization … [where] becoming aware of something is synonymous with capturing its symbolic form … This rigorous standard of awareness invariably excludes animals from true consciousness, primarily because we have language and they don’t.”⁵⁶ Further: “Ideas that are not within the purview of one’s language are not accessible.”⁵⁷

A grammar of multimodality shifts the balance away from language, and narrowly on the virtues of language as a symbolic system. We want to put a different interpretation on Peirce’s icon ⬄ index ⬄ symbol^§AS1.0b – our version of which is likeness ⬄ directedness ⬄ abstraction. Likeness, directedness and abstraction are integrally related processes; none is cognitively or practically superior. Nor should we attribute to language alone human mental capacities to abstract, or even more narrowly, to speech as its proxy.

Humans do abstraction in other forms. The most advanced science and medicine cannot be done without diagrams, and spatialized data presentations, and specialized instruments in dedicated lab spaces. These direct the both-ways traffic of meaning between the ideal – abstractions in these varied forms – and the material universe of things and bodies. In high science, there is a lot of talking around its practices,⁵⁸ but the most systematic application of the combinatorial powers of abstraction can’t be done in speech.

The quintessential artifacts of abstract knowledge are things like journal articles, medical records, databases, and engineering drawings. Not only are the affordances of speech for abstraction limited; in the most complex and generalizing of abstractions, text is pushed further and further away from speech, and closer to image, in for instance the essentially visual arrangement of ontologies,^§MS3.3a datasets,^§AS1.4.6a and mathematical notation.

Nor is abstraction the highest form of meaning. High science and advanced medicine, to stay with these examples, are necessarily full of likeness (for instance, images) and directedness (for instance, plans). Meanings can be profound without having to be abstract. Indeed, to be effective, abstraction must be supported by sense-making that shunts backwards and forwards across the functions of materialization – likeness, directedness, abstraction. The power of the meaning is in the functional transposition – a kind of “transubstantiation,”^§AS1.1.2a if you like.

Humans make abstract sense, though as B.F. Skinner^§MS3.1.2d and other behaviorists have shown, other sentient creatures can make sense in directed ways that at the very least verge on abstraction. Without needing to argue about the borderline of our specially human smarts, we can agree that we share with other creatures the capacity to make sense in likeness and directedness. We stay a natural species to the extent that there is a traffic between mind and matter that we have called materialization. Skinner was not wrong; this traffic means that all sentient creatures can learn, and the processes of learning in all animal species are not fundamentally, existentially, different. In our sense-making, we remain a natural species, and the mystery of meaning is not species-specific. Other creatures live by shared meanings as well. If there is mystery, it is sentience itself.

Just how smart is this species, anyhow? For all our abstraction, for our “consciousness,” for our “language,” what have we as a species achieved?

We live in a remnant of prairie forest in Central Illinois, and in 2016 the Emerald Ash Borer arrived. Before larvae emerge as brilliant green beetles, they feed on the inner bark and kill the tree. Now the borer/beetle has destroyed the conditions of its living. The ash trees in our forest have all died. Nobody knows, but wood packing for imports from Asia, where the borer is a native, may have brought it to North America. But self-harming change agents like these appear in nature from time to time, and humans are one such creature of nature. Nature is a state of perpetual unbalance, and humans, natural creatures, are just another manifestation of that unbalance.

As sentient creatures, we have proven ourselves no smarter than the Emerald Ash Borer, destroying on a global scale the natural conditions of our own living. We kill each other in wars, and treat each other to cruel inequalities, in fact more so than any other species. If we are different in any respect, we are uniquely hypocritical for our boastful self-congratulation about how smart we are to have language.

We are not that different, and to the extent that we can mean by systems of abstraction as well as by likeness and directedness, our meaning capacities demand more of our species. Our extended powers of materialization and the sociability of our meaning ideally afford us the capacity to care for each other and the earth.

Humans’ only difference then is an ethical one, a species responsibility that lies in our unrealized capacities. We have from time to time made ourselves political and economic promises to reach for such ideals beyond the immediate materialities of history. But so far, we have failed to materialize these ideals.

Until some day in a future that is as-yet only ideal, we cannot congratulate ourselves for our capacities to make better sense in the world than other creatures. Before then, we cannot with any justification call ourselves, by virtue of our sense-making capacities, a different kind of species.

In the meantime we remain, just like other creatures, multimodal meaning-makers with limited capacities for meaning and learning. We have yet to honor the fully conscious potentials that we suppose to be the promise of our species.

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⁵³ Terrence W. Deacon, 1997, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain, New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 70, 31, 23.

⁵⁴ Ibid., pp. 84–86, 124–25; Pär Segerdahl, William Fields, and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, 2005, Kanzi’s Primal Language: The Cultural Initiation of Primates into Language, London: Palgrave Macmillan; Duane M. Rumbaugh, ed. 1977, Language Learning by a Chimpanzee: The Lana Project, New York: Academic Press.

⁵⁵ Terrence W. Deacon, 1997, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain, New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 322, 352–53.

⁵⁶ Merlin Donald, 2001, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness, New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 111–12, 119.

⁵⁷ Merlin Donald, 1991, Origins of the Modern Mind, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 235.

⁵⁸ Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, 1986, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 38–41. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Terrence Deacon’s “Symbolic Species” §AS1.1.3a