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Exchange with de Waal

Peter Fisher writes:

During the conference at the London School of Economics I asked Franz deWaal three questions about ape behaviour.

1. I asked about my idea that we could consider that great apes are emotionally and cognitively equivalent to children of about three or four years old.

DeWaal said that I should be careful with this.  He supported Goodall's view that they are more emotionally advanced than children of that age.  He pointed out that one could not consider a sexually mature adult chimp to be emotionally equivalent to a child.  This was a point that I, of course, accepted and I promised to take care with this in my book.  But I did point out many ordinary people might ask whether they could even have emotion, and that it was this kind of ignorance I was trying to confront.

1. I asked about the problem of "theory of mind" and I pointed out that some scientists have argued that the capacity for a "theory of mind" in apes has never been recorded experimentally.  I said that, as I understood it, he took a similar view to Goodall that this has been recorded in the field, and I asked him if it was just that no-one had designed an effective experiment to demonstrate "theory of mind" in apes.

DeWaal accepted that he agreed with Goodall that they do have a capacity for "theory of mind" and that there was a lot of anecdotal evidence to support this view.  I responded that anecdotal evidence this would be sufficient for my purposes.  He said that it is extremely difficult to design an experiment to show that apes have the capacity for "theory of mind".   Also when one reaches this level of investigation, it is not always clear what exactly is meant by "theory of mind".  But he said it would be fair to say that apes certainly do have some capacity for it.

1. I said that during my research I had noted that the only emotion that humans seem to have which apes do not have is the emotion of guilt.  I said that this was important because of its relevance to moral arguments.  I asked him whether he agreed and if he thought there might be a "precursor" emotion in apes.

He said that apes certainly do understand shame.  He said that guilt is a kind of self-punishment, where shame is a form of socially inspired punishment.  But he did not suggest that shame might be an evolutionary precursor of guilt.  However he agreed that the emotion of guilt might indeed be too sophisticated an emotion for apes.

Peter

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