My main criterion of putting bees and whales in the same category was mainly the use of signals for communication, whereas humans use signs. I'm not very well read in this area but just brought this up because it's an interesting way to look at communication.
I guess the main point was whether we can assume animals are capable of having recognizable emotions or if we're simply engaging in an act of anthropomorphization, right? The problem was not deciding whether or not the song of this specific individual is intended to communicate loneliness (because that's impossible to know), it was about whether we can assume he/she is actually feeling lonely or not independent of whatever data is transmitted. And I contend that we can.
But we can just as well talk about language itself; it's a completely different discussion to have, though. Everybody and everything uses signals, and they are in a way always symbols for something. Bacteria do this in very much the same way bees do. Whales and humans do it as well. The difference here is that animals with higher cognitive abilities tend to do more powerful things with signals. Bees and bacteria use a genetically prescribed protocol to communicate according to completely hard-coded behavior. Towards the other end of the spectrum, as animals get more powerful at cognition, both internal state and communication protocols become more dynamic with humans being the apex as the ones who are most capable of formulating abstract concepts. But it's also worth noting that humans laugh and cry, these are examples of very simple signals still emitted by very complex minds.
So is whale song more like an advanced mammalian language, or is it more like a human laughing? We don't know (yet). But we can make certain assumptions about this single individual's mental state without understanding its language. Imagine the last human on earth, wandering around. We can assume he's lonely, whether he's actually crying or not.
There are cases of feral children that have shown, rather nearly confirmed, presence of feelings and thorough bred communication between two animals of the same specie, or inter-specie as well. Fire warning, presence of tiger etc.
Remember, 90% of what we talk ain't coming out of our mouth. Similarly in case of animals, body language has a major role.
For example, a woman named Oksana Malaya was raised by a pack of dogs, so she is said to have grown up as a dog. She is said to easily communicate and behave with/like dogs and communicate in a rather native way - a phenomena they call 'Mowgli Syndrome'.
