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From code to speaker meaning

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Abstract

This paper has two aims. One is to defend an incrementalist view of the evolution of language, not from those who think that syntax could not evolve incrementally, but from those who defend a fundamental distinction between Gricean communication or ostensive inferential communication (Scott-Phillips, Sperber, Tomasello, originally based on Grice) and code-based communication. The paper argues against this dichotomy, and sketches ways in which a code-based system could evolve into Gricean communication. The second is to assess the merits of the Sender–Receiver Framework, originally formulated by David Lewis, and much elaborated and set into an evolutionary context by Brian Skyrms and colleagues, as a framework for thinking about the evolution of language. Despite the great strengths of that framework, and despite the great value of a framework that is both general and formally tractable, I argue that there are critical features of language that it fails to capture .

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Notes

  1. It may well be that this pragmatics-focused view of language understates the role of syntax, and the ways modifiers and adjectives affect their heads in unobvious ways: a mirror-image of the neglect of pragmatics and semantics by syntax-focused views of language.

  2. A cue is an act (or state) of an agent that can carry information for another agent, but which is not designed or intended to do so. The escape behaviour of one bird is an indication of danger to another, but the bird is not signalling, it is escaping.

  3. Information-sharing is a form of cooperation, and there is analogous puzzle about reciprocal cooperation that suggests that the costs and benefits have not been properly identified. Just as with signalling, models of cooperation also indicate that reciprocal cooperation should evolve quite readily. Models suggest that reciprocal cooperation does not depend on ecologically implausible cost–benefit ratios, or implausible rates of future interaction. Yet there are very few clear examples (see Boyd 2016 for a discussion of this puzzle).

  4. I mention proto-language here to side-step the issue of syntax, and whether it could evolve incrementally.

  5. Moreover, some of the reports are at best very marginal cases of pantomime “Orangutans groomed a partner briefly to solicit grooming; so do chimpanzees and gorillas” (Russon and Andrews 2011a, p. 315).

  6. See in particular their tabulated summary on Hobaiter and Byrne (2014, p. 1598).

  7. Or so they argue. However, Richard Moore points out that they have not excluded the possibility that some of the signals are just attention grabbing, with response specificity depending on context and the audience’s best guess at what the target wants (Moore 2014).

  8. Identifying the desired response is not at all trivial. If the target of the gesture responds in a way that causes the gesturing agent to stop gesturing, and if that agent does not show obvious signs of frustration and anger, then the response is deemed to have been the intended outcome of the gesture.

  9. In Genty and Zuberbuhler (2014) it is claimed that bonobos sometimes solicit sexual partners with a beckoning gesture allied with orienting their body to a specific location, and that this has iconic as well as spatial elements. But at best the iconicity is minimal, and its not clear that uptake depends on the iconic character of the gesture (supposing that it is iconic). There is also some suggestion that auditory iconicity (or sound symbolism) may also have helped bootstrap language (see Imai and Kita 2014).

  10. The same is true of reinforcement or reward, if we think of these changes as happening within the lifespan of individual agents rather than in their lineage.

  11. Ron Planer has pointed out to me that some defenders of the ostensive intentional conception of communication think that children younger than four fail language-based versions of the false belief task because they cannot perform multiple mindreading tasks in the one interaction, rather than because they cannot integrate language use and mindreading. But that predicts that children younger than four are incapable of conversational interaction in groups of three or more, for all such interactions, on their own analysis, involve multiple mindreading requirements.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Stephen Mann, Richard Moore, Ron Planer and Matt Spike for their comments on an earlier version of this paper; thanks also to the Australian Research Council for their generous funding of my research on human social and cognitive evolution.

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  1. School of Philosophy, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

    Kim Sterelny

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Correspondence to Kim Sterelny.

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Sterelny, K. From code to speaker meaning. Biol Philos 32, 819–838 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9597-8

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