Oh gotcha, I didnt realize the question was specifically about rejection. It does seem unfortunate.
I’m not sure food service is a great analogy though. If you get a free meal, they usually aren’t going to upsell you. And if you find out a meal isn’t working for you, it’s not hard to walk out and grab a burger instead.
I think a closer analogy might be subscription service like internet or phone lines. You’re paying as long as you’re still using the service, they may increase prices, and it’s quite annoying to switch down the line.
I don’t think his point is that only humans communicate, but that we took it to a level not seen anywhere else.
We talk and write, not only about concrete things (“that person stole our food”) but also about abstract concepts, like a story about that stealing food is bad. And then we can bond over the shared idea that stealing food is bad. Then multiple of these shared ideas eventually turn into a constitution or the 10 commandments, development of science, etc.
But I have studied ant system communications a little bit (for AI use), and ants do communicate a lot too. And given their numbers, maybe they are the dominant life form on earth, and not humans.
I have yet to meet a domesticated animal that doesn’t side-eye a certain aunt of mine, while she got two men to marry her and more than a dozen women to consider her a best friend.
… to a level that we cannot yet recognize anywhere else
Meanwhile it seems that elephants use their trunks also for deixis, that dogs understand more than just the tone of our speech, etc.
The more we look, the more we see.
Also, it has been very practical for humanimals to deny non-human animals’ cognition — and as we are still leading a horrible war against the other animals (as can be seen in our division between wild animals, “livestock”, and pets) it would be a surprise if they’d aid us in understanding their languages, no?
I think “n-ary” is normal to write, isn’t it? at least when sufficiently high n are under consideration? or is that only used for number bases and not arity?
I agree that there’s much to discover how other species communicate, and the way we treat animals shapes how we look at, or down on, animals.
This point is also made in Sapiens. After building community through communications, we used that power to eradicate the other Homo species, and eradicate flora and fauna. The invention of industrialised farmed animals is the latest form of mass cruelty.
That said, I think this illustrates that the distinguishing feature of humans is their effective communications. Cruelty is not unique to humans. Motivating infinite numbers of strangers to work together to a single goal (religion, nations, etc) is unique as far as we know.
Maybe. But livestock and pets are human creations, any strategic hiding of language would’ve been bred out. Wild animals might evolve to hide their signals better, but only if that helps them evade humans. For most, it’s probably not even relevant, because humans either don’t care, or our threats (climate change, sonar, heat vision) bypass communication altogether.
We often say things like “don’t be too quick to judge”, “don’t be too judgmental”, “never judge a book by its cover” etc. But whenever we state our opinion, aren’t we giving a kind of judgement?
Is it possible to state your opinion without a single ounce of judgement?
P.S. Did you just judge me based on this post? If yes, are you being judgemental? If you say I’m judgemental, aren’t you being judgemental as well?
An opinion expresses doubt or says that this is a personal point of view that may not be shared by others. Whereas as a judgement says that something is objectively good or bad. If I say you are too judgemental, I’m saying we don’t have enough data to reach a conclusion, and that you expressed a judgement without thinking enough. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a judgement in general.
I think that there is a slight conflation between “judgement” and “assessment”.
Judgement is mostly used to describe a qualitative opinion on something or someone. (e.g. “That person’s behaviour is not good”)
An assessment is mostly used to describe a quantitive opinion on something or someone. (e.g. “By my assessment the food you bought for the party is not going to be enough”.)
That last example is nice because it can be followed with “You were very stingy, as usual”, which is a judgement.
Of course that is an oversimplification and there are many other parameters on your question, but even with this case we can conclude that:
Yes, you can do that.
Not at all. Posing that question provides us no real data concerning you, thus there is no judgement, assessment or whatever else to be made.
Finally:
“never judge a book by its cover”
I vaguely remember discussing this out somewhere, but I am not sure that this was in this forum. This phrase is antiquated now and a bit hard to connect with since modern covers have that exact purpose. To make you have a favorable opinion/judgement on the book, based on the marketing of the cover.
Older books that were just a binding and a title is where this phrase comes from, but those are rare now (or expensive, which is another type of way to judge/estimate the book’s contents’ value)
But we don’t usually arrive at an extreme conclusion, do we? It’s usually to a certain extent, and when we say we are 100% sure, most of the time it’s not.
Taking your example, if I say “That person’s behaviour is not good”, that may be too hasty, but what if I say “that person’s behaviour doesn’t seem to be good” or “he doesn’t seem to be in a good mood because blah blah blah”, isn’t it still considered a judgment?
I’d say yes. Unless it is a legal/court judgement, which is detailed and final, and it which case it is called a “ruling” (if I am not mistaken), then all judgements or assessment or whatever other manners of evaluating something or a situation, are based/predicated on the current amount of data we have at the moment. Depending on those, the level of certainty we can express about what we are thinking, will vary.
For example, a few days ago we were talking about people that do not seem to have basic manners even post pandemic and I mentioned that a coughing child was probably ill, based on some symptoms. Someone else pointed out that it could also have been some kind of alergy. I hadn’t thought of that and I gladly accepted the additional case/posibility, but without any more data both mine and that other person’s posibility/judgement/assessment is equally possible.
So, I’d go as far as to say that even a decision/evaluation based on no tangible data and just on a hunch which you cannot explain even to yourself, can be considered a “judgement”, in the cases where that word applies, as differentiated in the previous post.
A few more examples:
“Alice and Bob’s child is really obnoxious. Can’t they scold him so that he behaves properly? They are not doing their parents’ job.”
“Don’t be judgemental. Maybe they tried and it didn’t work. Some children are inherently difficult.”
“Bob quit his well-paid job to become a singer. That wasn’t a wise decision, surviving on his new job won’t be easy.”
“Don’t be judgemental. Maybe he doesn’t value money as much as you do, and has other priorities in life.”
Actually I’m curious how you arrived at that assessment. Did you assume that some people eat more? Some people eat less? Everyone eats the same amount? No matter which assumption you did, isn’t it a kind of judgment?
So…
I would like to see an example.
But we can never have the full set of data, can we? Even for the court cases, we can never know what’s going inside the convicts’ minds. If so, then all judgments that we make will be inherently premature.
For these examples, aren’t both of them being judgmental?
could just be me though