Abstract
According to one currently influential line of thinking, the evolution of ostensive communication was a prerequisite for the evolution of human language. In this article, I distinguish between a strong and a weak version of this view and offer a sustained argument against the former. More specifically, the strong version of this view would have it that ostensive communication was a prerequisite not just for the evolution of fully modern language but for any language-like system of communication. I argue that this version is too strong: I show how some distinctive and important features of language may well have been assembled prior to the evolution of ostensive communication. Put another way, I argue that a protolanguage before ostensive communication scenario is a real possibility. I conclude by briefly arguing that such an evolutionary scenario coheres better with archaeological evidence from the early Pleistocene as well as evidence from developmental psychology pertaining to the nature of our mind reading abilities.
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Notes
This proposal was suggested by an anonymous reviewer.
I say “potential” here, as there is no guarantee that the act will prompt a reaction from the individual the act is aimed at. For brevity’s sake, I ignore this complication in what follows and simply talk of reactors.
I will use “her” for actors and “him” for reactors in what follows.
If the content of the informative intention makes reference to an intentional state, then an additional order of intentionality will be involved (e.g., if the actor’s informative intention is that the reactor believes that Andrew wants some chocolate). And so on.
Were we to press on with the example, we would uncover even greater metapsychological sophistication (e.g., why does Sally believe that recognition of her informative intention will make Robert behave this way, etc.).
It is simple because it does not involve reasoning about how recognition of the actor’s intention to communicate with the reactor will influence the reactor’s interpretation process of the act, but simply how recognition of this intention will influence that reactor’s behavior. A more complex case would be one in which the actor believes that the only way the reactor will accurately interpret her act is if the reactor recognizes that she is trying to communicate with the reactor in the first place. Here the actor has a communicative intention because she believes that the fulfillment of her informative intention causally depends upon the reactor recognizing that she is attempting to communicate with the reactor. The example in the text is also simple in that it involves just two individuals, and does not occur in the context of an ongoing conversation between the two.
Richard Moore (2014) has argued that this analysis of ostensive communication is overly complex. Unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of this article to engage with his arguments. Put simply, while I think Moore is probably correct that orthodoxy overstates the cognitive requirements for ostensive communication, I think Moore‘s account of these requirements is too minimal. In any case, the important claim for me is that ostensive communication remains cognitively more demanding than the form of communication I will consider below. And this, I would argue, remains true even on a deflationary account of ostensive communication such as Moore’s.
If the ideas I develop in the following section are at all plausible, then the intricacies of Scott-Phillips’ argument are basically moot: I will have refuted the argument by construction.
The term “theory of mind” here is used for stylistic purposes only; I take no stance in this article on whether metapsychological understanding is theory as opposed to simulation based.
See Apperly (2010) for an excellent discussion of various limitations and constraints on mind reading.
It is frequently assumed that imitation necessarily involves recognition of the actor’s goal and/or intention. Here I use the term in a broader way so that goal/intention recognition is possible but not necessary. (See Leighton et al. 2010 for a discussion of goal- versus non-goal-based accounts of imitation and a defense of the latter).
More generally, the point is that an increase in social intelligence might greatly facilitate this process. The reasoning of actor and reactor about each other’s behavior need not always involve the attribution of intentional states to the other. Some of this intelligence might take the form of so-called “behavior rules” (Povanelli and Vonk 2003) as well as generalizations that type stimuli and responses functionally (Sterelny 2003). This is but more grist for my mill.
See Hostetter and Alibali (2008) for a discussion.
Lorenz writes, “In these cases of a motor pattern obviously directed at a certain object but performed in spite of its absence, the naïve observer definitely receives the impression that the animal is hallucinating the missing object” (1981, p. 128).
It is worth noting that this kind of construction is commonly produced by children at two years of age (see Greenfield and Savage-Rumbaugh 1990).
I use scare quotes here because this is not a reaching behavior in the normal sense; it is a stylized reach that is used as a signal. Having made this clear, I will drop the scare quotes below.
It is worth noting here that the possibility of such coordination between actors and reactors shows that Scott-Phillips' taxonomy of routes to signalhood is incomplete. The actors and reactors I am envisioning will be able to invent signals directly, but not by virtue of engaging in ostensive-inferential communication with one another. Instead, the relevant source of design is derived from the general pattern they produce and interpret signals in accordance with.
This innovation will be especially likely to work if throwing a stone against a rock anvil is already a common behavior in the group, for then the chances are good that the behavior will be salient to the reactor. And any resemblance between the act requesting this behavior and the behavior itself will further increase the chances of success.
One could, of course, think that this general series of evolutionary steps is plausible while having reservations about the specific pathway to syntax just outlined.
For Tomasello, collaboration already involves recursive mind reading. I am very skeptical. But more to the present point, one can accept this explanation for information-sharing behavior without accepting his account of collaboration.
Also see Planer (2015) for a discussion of information sharing as a way of advertising knowledge and other hidden features.
See especially Tomasello 2014, pp. 32–49.
It is commonly assumed that a capacity to engage in joint attention is a cognitive prerequisite for the emergence of indicative signaling. But what, exactly, is this capacity? As Carpenter and Liebal (2011) point out, the term “joint attention” continues to be used in a variety of ways by different authors. If, as some would have it, this capacity simply consists in an ability to direct others’ attention towards external objects/situations (when one wants to) that one is currently attending to, and conversely, to have one’s own attention directed in this way, then it is quite plausible to think that the emergence of indicative signaling will in general require a capacity for joint attention, at least as regards indicative signals that are voluntary and learned. On the other hand, if, as certain other authors would have it, this capacity is taken to also involve an ability to recursively represent that sender and receiver are both attending to a specific object/situation, i.e., to represent the receiver as representing the sender as attending to such-and-such (when in the role of sender) and to represent the sender as representing the receiver as attending to such-and-such (when in the role of receiver), then I would deny that such a capacity is required for the emergence of indicative signaling. The latter is needlessly complex.
It is reasonable to think that the establishment of complex indicative and imperative constructions would lead to the emergence of yet another design feature of language, one Griebel and Oller (2014) term functional flexibility. Such flexibility involves the use of one and the same signal to express different illocutions in different contexts. Griebel and Oller explain, “… we can use the word ‘snake’ to serve an aggressive function (‘You snake!!’), in a question (‘Is this a snake?’), as an example (which we are doing in writing this), as a statement (‘This is a snake.’), or as a warning (‘Watch out, a snake.’). The word ‘snake’ does not change its reference/meaning across these performances—it always invokes a type of reptile—but in language we are completely flexible regarding the function performed by its reference” (p. 258).
Returning to our hypothetical case: Signals which originally evolved in the context of imperative communication (e.g., the arms-up-and-down signal used to request climbing) might be redeployed in the context of indicative communication (e.g., the signal point + arms-up-and-down might be used to indicate the presence of a climbing animal) and vice-versa.
One might accept that ostensive communication was a prerequisite for the evolution of full-blown language without accepting that linguistic communication is generally ostensive-inferential in nature. For example, one might think that ostensive communication was indeed necessary for the emergence of especially fancy aspects of human language, e.g., grammatical tense, while at the same time thinking that ostensive communication is too intellectually demanding to be a general account of linguistic communication.
See Christensen and Michael (2016) for a discussion of the state of the art of this literature.
For a skeptical view, see Heyes (2014).
There is evidence that children can do this at three years of age, however (Moll and Meltzoff 2011). But children are well on their way to language fluency by this point and (so) have been saturated in cultural information.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Kim Sterelny and Matt Spike for comments on an earlier draft of this article. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
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Planer, R.J. Protolanguage Might Have Evolved Before Ostensive Communication. Biol Theory 12, 72–84 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-017-0262-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-017-0262-x