The Creative Porpoise Climbs the Semiotic Scaffolding
Phillip Guddemi
One of Jesper Hoffmeyer’s many innovative concepts in biosemiotics was that of semiotic freedom. I propose to relate Hoffmeyer’s idea of semiotic freedom to Gregory Bateson’s concept of levels of learning, by way of describing an experiment in porpoise learning which was inspired by Bateson’s observations of human-porpoise interactions in a performing oceanarium setting.
In this oceanarium, the Sea Life Park in Hawaii, in the middle 1960s, the public was told that what they were observing in their entertainment was porpoise learning, according to the accepted canons of behaviorism at that time. Bateson noted that this was impossible, since the same porpoises put on six shows a day five days a week, thus they could not be learning anew each time. On the other hand, it would spoil the illusion if a tourist saw the same porpoise learning the same thing again.
Bateson postulated that the porpoise must achieve a learning at a different “level,” i.e. that what the trainer wanted was for the porpoise to produce a new behavior when called upon to do so. Bateson proposed to demonstrate this experimentally. The experimental porpoise was subjected to several sessions just as the show porpoises had been. In each session the porpoise is frustrated by not being rewarded for the same behavior as in the previous session. At about the fourteenth session, the porpoise dances excitedly in the tank and produces twelve new behaviors in sequence, four of them never seen in the species before.
The behaviorist concept of a “behavior” (which Bateson did not use unironically) must of course be critiqued. What the trainers called a behavior is a part of a human-animal relationship, involving for the porpoise a decontextualizing of some habitual response to the porpoise’s umwelt which is then re-porpoised (so to speak) into the new context of the human-porpoise “show” encounter. This is a kind of biosemiotic transfer from what the behavior means in its originary porpoise context, and the porpoise’s capacity to do this may point to a precursor of symbolic sign use.
This may especially be true given the ability of the porpoise to demonstrate learning at the conceptual level of the ability to produce novel (or creative) recontextualizations of behavior. (The trainer herself, Karen Pryor, in spite of her ostensible behaviorism, entitled the chapter she wrote about the experiment “The Creative Porpoise.”) Bateson considered this as learning at the level of category, inspired by mathematical and philosophical concepts of the early 20th Century. Peirce might have seen it as an exemplification of his phrase the habit of habit change. And Hoffmeyer would very likely have seen it in the context of semiotic scaffolding – related to an increase in what he called semiotic freedom.
References
Bateson, Gregory. “Double Bind, 1969.” Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000, pp. 276-8.
Hoffmeyer, Jesper. Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs. Scranton and London, University of Scranton Press, 2008.
Pryor, Karen. Lads before the Wind: Adventures in Porpoise Training. N.Y., Harper and Row, 1975.