This isn't about "new and unique ideas" in the sense of some profound insight. I was responding to the "was capable of communicating new and unique ideas" from

This isn't about "new and unique ideas" in the sense of some profound insight. I was responding to the "was capable of communicating new and unique ideas" from the parent, which is a way of paraphrasing some of the claims about Koko's language ability, in which it is claimed that Koko was going beyond mere use of single words to refer to literal objects or actions. I can put together a complex sentence describing abstract ideas, which is what I'm doing here. A dog cannot; a dog can understand a single word or sign in isolation, and may be some amount of literal sequencing, but there is no ability to understand an arbitrarily complex sequence of signs or words containing abstraction like human language is capable of. The claim about Koko's use of sign language is that she has been able to compose sentences out of combinations of words, and express abstract ideas; maybe somewhat more limited than humans in some way, but fundamentally the same way that human language works. That's what the skepticism is about; since while it's clear that she could be trained to recognize individual words and produce individual signs, and maybe some limited pairs, all of the evidence of anything more complex seems to come from interpretation through her handlers, who could have been consciously or subconsciously prompting her, and are using their own theories of mind and inference ability to read more into Koko's actions than what is really there. There's plenty of non-verbal communication you can do with a dog or even a cat. They can pick up on emotional states. They have memories. They can learn words or signs. They can be caring. A lot of the claims about Koko seem to be either unsurprising for anyone who has owned a pet (yes, pets can sometimes be surprisingly emotionally intelligent), or go far beyond what the evidence actually supports, relying much too much on subjective judgements and unblinded tests by the researchers. One of the reasons that this is a problem is that this exact same kind of thing is done with humans sometimes, in the form of "Facilitated Communication" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication), which is claimed to be a way of training "facilitators" to help calm and guide non-verbal autistic children's hands to be able to type out sentences and communicate. This was a very popular form of assistance for a while, and it even led to autistic children being able to speak out about their abusive parents. Except, as it it turns out, it was entirely based on pseudoscience. Once you did any kind of blinded testing, where you showed something different to the facilitator as you did to the patient, they would spell out the word for what the facilitator saw. The parental abuse, for which parents had been kicked out of their own homes and not allowed contact with their children? Entirely imagined by the facilitators. I'd recommend watching the PBS documentary "Prisoners of Silence" on this topic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sO9LyXuOQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sO9LyXuOQY). Allowing this kind of pseudoscience to get so much coverage can cause real harm to people, and it erodes faith in the scientific process.