Max Fennell-Chametzky: Arguments with Apes: Psychology, Linguistics, and the Scientific Search for Human Beings' Place in Nature

Thanks to The Europe Center’s support, I was able to spend a week in Paris at the Archives nationales and the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle to help refine and expand my dissertation research. At these collecting sites, I worked in the unpublished personal and institutional papers of key scientists and scientific organizations that touched on the history of ape language experimentation’s reception in France.

As is the nature of historical archival research, the results of this work were a mixed bag with surprising and wide-ranging consequences for my research. While I had hypothesized, based on citations and claims made in secondary source material, that the French zoologist Pierre-Paul Grassé had provided interesting commentaries on the ape language experiments from his Neo-Lamarckian point of view, this proved not to be the case; his letters available at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, at least, did not contain reference to the new results coming out of the United States. Initially, I was dismayed; perhaps I had merely imagined the Franco-American great ape language connection. Thankfully, this hypothesis was quickly discarded.

At the Archives nationales, I examined the papers of the Centre Royaumont pour un science d’homme (Royaumont Center for a science of man), a Paris-based international scientific organizing group that, from its founding in 1971 until its bankruptcy in 1979, looked to unite insights from biology and anthropology to create a unified understanding of what it meant to be human. Presided over by the French Nobel Prize winning Biochemist Jacques Monod, and run on the day-to-day by the Italian biologist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, the Center hosted conferences on the Unity of Man in 1972 and, crucially for my purposes, the debate on language and learning between the American linguist Noam Chomsky and the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget in 1975, both of which were attended by David Premack, an American psychologist who worked with chimpanzees on language-like symbolic systems. Thus, I knew going into my archival work that the Center displayed some interest in language, including great ape language acquisition.

I could never have guessed how deep that interest ran. My reading in the Royaumont Center’s papers showed that their relationship with Premack and their fascination with this new form of American experimental psychology went far beyond a few conference papers and commentaries. Reports on Center activities and correspondence amongst Center officials revealed that, from the beginning, the Royaumont was, literally, invested in ape language research. Their yearly activity summaries and grant application documents listing areas of research focus highlighted a program in “Animal and Human Communication,” eventually renamed the program in “Cognition and Communication,” with Premack at its head, as an organizer collecting a salary. Royaumont Center monies even paid Premack for the acquisition of a new, smarter laboratory chimpanzee. Even when esteemed American members of the Center’s scientific advisory board, such as Chomsky and the Italian microbiologist Salvador E. Luria, expressed their skepticism regarding the degree to which animal language studies would contribute to the Center’s overall mission, Royaumont leadership maintained their courting and investment of ape language scientists.

Had I not had the support of The Europe Center, I would not have been able to view this archival material, which has completely changed how I think about the transnational reception of American ape language experimentation in the late twentieth century. Where once I thought the interest was rather niche, and then non-existent, these sources have opened a window to see how the elite scientists of France viewed, and contributed to, these controversial, compelling results.