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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Is Common Sense Explicit or Implicit?
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References: <35hhm3$k74@mp.cs.niu.edu> <35ibd4$aup@newsbf01.news.aol.com> <CwEC2D.JLG@spss.com> <JUwwX7x.clayke@delphi.com>
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 1994 20:33:54 GMT
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In article <JUwwX7x.clayke@delphi.com>,
Clayton Gillespie  <clayke@delphi.com> wrote:
>Mark Rosenfelder <markrose@spss.com> writes:
>>One possible answer is that they can't because they don't need to.
>>We can ask such a question because of our language ability; without it
>>we could neither ask nor answer it.
>>
>>Another approach is to ask if the difference could be exploited implicitly
>>by the bird: can it *act* as if it can tell an individual from a class?
> 
>I do not see a difference between having a language ability (or faculty of
>classification, if you prefer) and *acting* as if a language ability were
>had.  

The ability to classify is not the same as language ability.  Birds (IMHO)
have the first ability but not the second.

As for acting as if one has an ability-- the point of my comment was that
if the bird acts as if it has the ability in question, that's some evidence
that it does.  Not definitive evidence, unfortunately, since there might
be a better explanation of the bird's behavior.  That's part of the 
difficulty of investigating cognition; too much depends on the ingenuity
of one's interpretations.
