ABSTRACT
The previous chapter discussed some of the problems in eighteenth century attempts to mark off the boundaries between nature and culture, the human and the animal, and suggested that the continuity between eighteenth century and modern debates on wolf children results from a desire to maintain an essentialist distinction between nature and culture. In this chapter I will attempt to show that these problems have refused to go away and that the contemporary human sciences continue to be embroiled in dogmatic disputes about human uniqueness. The main focus will be on attempts to teach chimpanzees a human sign language. The aim in reviewing these experiments will be to show how a commitment to a qualitative distinction between nature and culture and human and animal underlies many of the theoretical positions in the debates that have evolved. It will be argued that the main question at issue in these debates - to what extent can apes use human language - rests upon an outdated metaphysic, an anthropocentric evolutionism that uses humanity as the yardstick by which to measure the rest of the animal world. The real value of these experiments lies in what they reveal about the nature of chimpanzee intelligence and what continuities exist across the primate order - to what extent the chimpanzee's ability to use a type of linguistic symbol demonstrates the existence of significant similarities between the human brain and the brain of the ape.
