Phil Wood insightfully writes: > > Do I understand it correctly, though, that the consensus is that bees > do not communicate with pinpoint accuracy via the dance and that > therefore it's not a "language?" It would seem to me that it might be > more precise to say that the dance is just not a very precise language. > There seems to be reluctant agreement that the bees don't communicate (if at all) as precise as the original works of Von Frisch suggested they do. VF used words like "directly" and "quickly" which don't stand up too well under test. MOre modern research focuses on whether the Dance Language information "biases" the bees to search in a certain area. CRitics of the theory take this to be a major retrenchment. For instance Adrian Wenner, on this list, thinks that recent Dance Language work is all ad hoc: That is, there is no clear and precise statement of the hypothesis being tested. Of course, all one needs to do to answer this criticism is state a hypothesis; and the "bias" versions, which accept some inprecision in bee behaviour, are still precise hypotheses. That is, a precise hypothesis can predict inprecise behaviour. > > I guess the upshot to me, a layperson, is that I really don't > understand what is meant by the phrase "language" here as used by the > experts. Anyone care to fill me in? Ah, there's the rub. Most biologists take "language" in the bee world to be metaphorical. Philosophers, such as myself, wonder what differentiates bee language from human language. And whether bee language, and indeed human language, genuinely constitutes language at all. Human language is generally thought to have these important features: 1. Generative nature: A finite number of symbols (words or actions) can be combined to generate a infinite number of denotations. 2. Grammar: The rules by which the symbols are combined. The bees combine the components of the dance according to rules. When we know the rules, we know what the dance allegedly says. 3. Information carrying: Symbols can be combined according to the rules of grammar so that the symbol combinations contain information. Information has been minimally defined as non-random organizations of symbols. Anyone who thinks that these three things are all there is to language, and who thinks the DL hypothesis is true, probably thinks that bees have a language. Of course, many researchers think that human language is much more complicated, and so they might think that bees don't have language. I don't think that precision is a huge issue within the "is the bee dance behaviour a language?" question. Your example is relevant here: human language behaviour often has imprecise effects. Hope this helps. -- ------------oooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooo------------- Phil Veldhuis | If I must be a fool, as all those who reason Winnipeg. MB, Canada | or believe any thing certainly are, my follies [log in to unmask] | shall at least be natural and agreeable. David Hume (1739)