Gricean/Grecian Thoughts On Apis melliferera -- (nn)

--- By JLS

i.e. the infamous dance (so-called in the 1940s) by von Frisch!

From online sources:

The first recorded reference to this is in Aristotle’s
Historia Animalium.

Grice would know about that!

Kak, of Baton Rouge, writes, online:

"Aristotle appears to suggest

that the recruited bees follow

the forager to the food source.

... Nothing very striking about this

dance, since it serves only to

attract the attention of the other

bees to the foraging bee who

leads the recruits to the source of

food."

"And it is clear that bees and other

animals do have the capacity to

associate and remember visual maps."

Kak concludes:

"The process described by Aristotle

does not constitute a language."

---- True! One is suprised that Aristotle thought that things like _Persian_ constitute a language!

---

Kak goes on to quotes from Rosin (1988).

‘There are numerous contradictory versions of the ‘dance language’ hypothesis that concur only in the belief that somewhere, somehow, some honey bees use ‘dance language’ information."

Kak, writing for "Mankind Quarterly":

"It appears that the controversy is partly

of a semantic nature. What does language mean?"

---

and perhaps more importantly, what does 'mean' mean?

---



--- The Holloway-Hart-Grice controversy:

Kak:

"The evidence garnered by Wenner and
associates appears to establish that
the dance does NOT represent a
language to the bees"

Holloway, "Language and intelligence"
Hart, review
Grice, Meaning 1948.

KAK -- 'grey matter in the bee':

"It is possible, therefore, that a dance may carry cues strongly correlated with certain aspects of the find of the food source that may be correctly interpreted by the bee’s cognitive apparatus."

"On the other hand, processing of odor information is easily understood by neurophysiological models."







ANIMISM GALORE:

Krogh 1948 welcomes the anti-Gricean anti-Grecian von Frisch hypothesis:

"The series of experiments constitutes

a most beautiful example of what the

human mind can accomplish by tireless effort on a very high level of intelligence. But I would ask you to give some thought also to

the mind of the bees.

"I have no doubt that some will
attempt to explain the performances
of the bees as the result of reflexes
and instincts"

--- and that's L. J. Kramer, and J. L. Speranza, and Aristotle, and H. P. Grice, and anyone willing to join in! (Who did he think he was, von Frisch?)

Krogh:

"for my part I find it difficult to assume

that such perfection and flexibility in behavior can be reached without

some kind of mental processes

going on in the small heads of the bees."


--- small is as small does! What pains me is the penis of the drone! So utterly unteologically cut like that! "Screw the screw!"

"Language in humans is based on
the most complex representational
system of which we are aware and
is primarily neocortically based."



And it's back to Gricean Dennettian antisphexishness. (I'm proud to have hosted Dennett when lecturing abroad!)

"free will (Kak 1986, Kak 1987). Physics,
which ultimately lies at the basis of
chemistry and biology, does not allow free
will, but no person would deny the
reality of his free choices. The system
of language, and its use to
represent [pirotic assumptions], validates
this belief in the reality of
free will. Somehow the postulate that
only humans have linguistic capability
appears to make the determinism/free will
paradox less threatening."


Frisch, K. von.
1947: The dances of the honey bee, Bulletin of Animal Behaviour, 5, 1-32.

Gould, J.
1974: Honey bee communication, Nature, 252, 300-301.


Seeley, T.
1991: Bee warned, Nature, 349, 114.

Wells, PH. and Wenner, AM.
1973: Do bees have a language? Nature, 241, 171-174.
(IMPLICATURE: No).