Yours is an unfortunate interpretation of what I intended to say, which may be my fault for not fully elaborating.
Our science is limited and we should apply it to the best of our ability. The dubious methodology employed by Dr. Patterson undercuts many of the scientific claims she makes.
But in the fields of primatology (and anthropology) first hand accounts ("thick description" practiced in ethnology) are considered data though not quite in the sense of quantifiable, numerical data we are used to in engineering and computer science.
The people who have direct contact with Koko and provide descriptions of their communication with Koko are documenting their empirical experience, observations that provide detail and bias.
Taking another approach, communicating with Koko is basically an organism-to-organism example of a Turing test and, from what I understand, human evaluators of Koko's communication tend to conclude Koko was communicating intelligently.
Also, labeling emotional reactions, as they pertain to communication, "garbage" is probably a mistake. Emotions are quite important in human communication, and emotions are increasingly important, for example, in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. Dismissing emotions wholesale as "garbage" is probably a scientific error.
EDIT: Add last paragraph. Revise first sentence of last paragraph.
The problem with all of this is that using these kinds of emotional reactions to evaluate research can lead to making some significant errors that can cause real harm.
As an example, facilitated communication was once touted as a way in which non-verbal autistic people could communicate with the outside world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication). The facilitators thought it worked. Parents thought it worked. It felt great to be able to talk to your kids who you could never talk to before.
The problem is, it was complete bunk. If you did any kind of actually blinded test, such as showing one picture to the facilitator and another to the subject, they would write out what the facilitator saw. The facilitators themselves weren't even aware they were doing this.
But on the basis of this completely pseudoscientific method, there had been parents who had been accused of sexual assault of their children and kicked out of their house because of it, when in reality the abuse had just been imagined by the facilitator.
Emotions are definitely important in communication, and communicating emotions with animals is definitely possible.
But there are real reasons for demanding better evidence before claiming that you are interpreting language on behalf of some other person or animal.
> quantifiable, numerical data we are used to in engineering and computer science
You make it sound like quantifiable, numerical data is a fairly niche thing, but of course it's used in pretty much every field of scientific inquiry.
Science is the practice of using the best tools we have to better understand the world around us. Subjective description of interactions with the world around us is just a very basic baseline from which to start inquiry, not something that you can say has led to meaningful results.
In this case, it doesn't even necessarily require substantial numerical data to evaluate these claims; just basic blinding procedures, like evaluating the results of Koko describing something that she saw that her handler did not, and getting some basic statistics over a number of interactions to see if they do better than chance.
