"Gordon R. Dickson - Dolphin's Way" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

do we really understand perfectly what the other person means when he
speaks to us?"
She looked at him for a moment, and then slowly shook her head without
taking her eyes off his face. "Well," said Mal, "that's essentially our problem
with the dolphins – only on a much larger scale. Dolphins, like Castor and
Pollux, can talk with me, and I with them, but we can't understand each other
to any great degree."
"You mean intellectually understood, don't you?" Jane said. "Not just
mechanically?"
"That's right," Mal answered. "We agree on denotation of an auditory or
other symbol, but not on connotation. I can say to Castor, 'the Gulf Stream
is a strong ocean current,' and he'll agree exactly. But neither of us really
has the slightest idea of what the other really means. My mental image of
the Gulf Stream is not Castor's image. My notion of 'powerful' is relative to
the fact I'm six-feet tall, weigh a hundred and seventy-five pounds, and can
lift my own weight against the force of gravity. Castor's is relative to the fact
that he is seven feet long, can speed up to forty miles an hour through the
water, and as far as he knows weighs nothing, since his four hundred
pounds of body-weight are balanced out by the equal weight of the water
he displaces. And the concept of lifting something is all but unknown to him.
My mental abstraction of 'ocean' is not his, and our ideas of what a current
is may coincide, or be literally worlds apart in meaning. And so far we've
found no way of bridging the gap between us."
"The dolphins have been trying as well as you?"
"I believe so," said Mal. "But I can't prove it. Any more than I can really
prove the dolphin's intelligence to hard-core skeptics until I can come up
with something previously outside human knowledge that the dolphins have
taught me. Or have them demonstrate that they've learned the use of some
human intellectual process. And in these things we've all failed – because,
as I believe and Dr. Knight believed, of the connotative gap, which is a
result of the environmental barrier."
She sat watching him. He was probably a fool to tell her all this, but he
had had no one to talk to like this since Dr. Knight's heart attack, eight
months before, and he felt words threatening to pour out of him.
"We've got to learn to think like the dolphins," he said, "or the dolphins
have to learn to think like us. For nearly six years now we've been trying and
neither side's succeeded." Almost before he thought, he added the one
thing he had been determined to keep to himself. "I've been afraid our
research funds will be cut off any day now."
"Cut off? By the Willernie Foundation?" she said. "Why would they do
that?"
"Because we haven't made any progress for so long," Mal said bitterly.
"Or, at least, no provable progress. I'm afraid time's just about run out. And
if it runs out, it may never be picked up again. Six years ago, there was a lot
of popular interest in the dolphins. Now, they've been discounted and
forgotten, shelved as merely bright animals."
"You can't be sure the research won't be picked up again."
"But I feel it," he said. "It's part of my notion about the ability to
communicate with an alien race being the test for us humans. I feel we've
got this one chance and if we flub it, we'll never have another." He pounded