Can an Ape Become Your Co-author? Reflections on Becoming as a Presupposition of Teaching

Abstract

Wittgenstein’s remarks on teaching highlight how teaching is an interactive, bidirectional process: through her responses, the learner contributes to the teaching process. However, not every potential learner exhibits such responses. A one-year-old child is typically too young to respond in ways that sustain interactive processes of “learning how to multiply.” But we have the attitude that she will become teachable, when she gets a little older. Teaching can be said to presuppose a dimension of becoming . Our familiarity with this dimension comes to expression in how we imagine the learner in Wittgenstein’s examples . We do not assume that the pupil in the mathematical rule-following discussion is a one-year-old child, for example, or an ape. By discussing ape language research, this chapter investigates becoming as a presupposition of teaching . Ape language research is interesting because we generally do not expect that an ape can become someone whose spontaneous responses sustain language learning . Using as my point of departure an article by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and three language-competent bonobos, I show how different our attitudes to ape and human learnability are. We patiently await learnability in human children , but assume that apes must be specifically trained, if they are to learn at all. By revealing our attitudes to apes as not living in a dimension of becoming (as being at most susceptible to disciplining), and by demonstrating the challenges these presumptions mean for ape language research, the chapter emphasizes the didactic significance of attitudes to learnability , and of becoming as a presupposition of teaching .