Did Alex have Language?

Etica E Politica 11 (1):271-290 (2009)
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Abstract

This paper argues that the utterances made by the renowned talking parrot, Alex, were not only meaningful and sincere, they counted as a language. Three arguments are considered in favor of this claim: 1) Alex demonstrated the capacity for recursion, 2) Alex satised the Davidsonian requirements for a talking entity to have language, and 3) Alex satised the Searlean requirements for making speech acts. The paper concludes that the pieces of human language that Alex most readily acquired and those pieces that he lacked might point out a kind of evolutionary path by which our ancestors acquired the language that we now speak

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