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Thank you Clark and you all for coming along

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Delighted to be here...

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I'm really looking forward to spending this quarter at UCLA

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Plenty of people with overlapping research interests.

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As Clark says, I'm going to talk today

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about the evolution of human communication and languages,

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what I spend most my career today researching.

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There's the book –I might just as well hold it up!

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I didn't tell anybody (no, no, I'm joking) [laughs]

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But before I talk about language, given that I'm here for a quarter

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and I would like to talk to lots people and wider intellectual world while I'm here,

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I just wanted to briefly mention a couple other things I'm generally interested in.

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I've got a paper short of coming out on recursive mindreading, the idea that...

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this guy is thinking; she's thinking about what he's thinking;

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he can think about what she's thinking about what he's thinking and

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so on and so forth.

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Something that, although simple mind-reading is much studied, recursive mind-reading

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is not much studied, but it seems to me vital for a lot of critical human institutions, behaviors...

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And it's something I've become very interested in lately.

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And I've also become very interested in cultural attraction, which is

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an approach to thinking about culture and cultural evolution

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developed first by Dan Sperber and then by others such as

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Pascal Boyer and Lawrence Hirschfeld and so on.

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So these are just two things that I'm interested in general at the moment.

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I'm going to be collaborating with Jacob, who's just there, on cultural attraction while I'm here.

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But yes, as Clark said, today I'm going to talk about

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the origins and evolution of human communication and language.

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So the origins of human language is something with a long intellectual history.

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It goes back pre-Darwin...

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Several intellectuals have written about it...

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the most well-known of the pre-Darwinians (...)

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Darwin himself wrote about the origins of language for several pages in The Descent of Man.

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And there's been interest in it throughout the 20th century,

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I guess the clearest manifestation of that is the many

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ape-language experiments that took place from, I guess, from the 1920s onwards.

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And then 1960, a famous paper by a linguist called Charles Hockett...

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where he outlined what he called the designed features of language.

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Features of languages, that languages have which, in Charles Hockett's view,

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made languages what they are, made them languages. And he wrote about comparing them with other

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communication systems in the natural world. For instance, the bee dance, echolocation,

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and so on and so forth.

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And then since around the last 20, 25 years or so

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these various different streams of interest, from linguistics, from biology,

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from primatology, and so on, have come together a bit more. And there's now a healthy

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community of people studying language origins and evolution under the name Evolang.

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Conferences have been running since 1996.

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And the field I guess is mature enough that there's now in Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution.

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This is a big book, it's 800-pages long. This is published in 2011.

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And on its back cover it sort of says what its objectives are, and I actually agree that it

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does do what it says on the tin: this is a book where leading scholars

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present critical accounts of every aspect of the field.

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A wide-ranging summation of the work in all the disciplines involved.

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So this is proposed to be, and I agree, an accurate portrayal of where we are in

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the field language evolution.

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You look in the index and you look up the number of entries

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listed under different sub-disciplines of linguistics,

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and this is what you find... Syntax and related terms, semantics and related terms: plenty of entries;

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almost nothing on pragmatics. Pragmatics is kind of the messy part of language,

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is a bit that deals with language use in context. So if you think of semantics as meaning in isolation,

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pragmatics is meaning in context.

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So what we say is not always the same as what we mean, and

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pragmatics deals with that difference. It's stuff that's used in metaphor and

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irony and various ambiguity, and various other topics.

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But yet we're barely thinking about it in language evolution.

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Instead what we're doing is thinking of languages as... more like digital codes,

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and studying them in those terms. So I'm just going to give one example.

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It's a quote from a very famous paper from Pinker & Bloom in 1990,

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and they talk about the vocal-auditory channel having desirable features as a medium of communication:

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high-bandwidth; a serial interface; basic tools of a coding scheme;

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an inventory of distinguishable symbols and their concatenations.

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So we've got the language of information theory, of coding and decoding,

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scattered throughout this, and this is not just how people are thinking about it.

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It's also... You can see this in the methods that people employ, in the computational models and

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mathematical models that are build.

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But what people are looking at very much is coding systems,

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and how you start to combine symbols together to form

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more complex signals and so on and so forth.

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Very little work, actually, on the messy reality of language use out there in the world.

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If there's a central message to my book is that this agenda is a profound mistake.

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And I guess what I've tried to do in the book is

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to illustrate this is a profound mistake by taking pragmatic seriously, putting it front and center.

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This is what we're doing with language; this is what we're doing in communication in general.

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And showing that you can actually answer all the big questions you might want to ask

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about language evolution by taking pragmatics seriously.

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So why do only humans have language? Where are the points a continuity and discontinuity with other species?

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How do languages evolve the very structural properties that make them languages?

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All these questions get good answers if we start to take pragmatics seriously.

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I can't go into all that in one talk. What I'm going to do today is to talk about one of those questions,

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which is the relationship between non-human primate communication and human communication,

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the similarities and differences between them. And that will actually lead us to an explanation of

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—or part of an explanation— of why only humans have language.

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So let's get into a bit more detail. Actually, this is probably a good point for me to stress that

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I'm actually quite happy to take questions as we go along.

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I've come from research where that's the norm and I find that's quite a nice way

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for the speaker to know where the audience are. So please stick your hands up if you have any questions.

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OK, so let's go into a bit more detail on what the code-model communication is.

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One way of thinking about it is with what's called the conduit metaphor.

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You have this package, this thing that you put into a package, and then you send it along

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a conduit where it gets unwrapped at the other end.

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It's a way of thinking about how communication works in the first place.

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And we see this metaphor in our everyday language: "send me your ideas", "get your message across".

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Expressions like these are all employing this conduit metaphor.

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Another way of thinking about communication, a very famous way,

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is Shannon & Weaver's Information Theory. The idea here is

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that as information which gets encoded by some encoding algorithm,

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and then it gets transmitted, maybe some noise into the situation here,

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and then at this end it gets decoded by some decoding algorithm.

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And if the encoding algorithm the decoding algorithm are appropriately calibrated to one another,

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then what comes out one end is the same as what went in at the other end,

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and we can say communication has been successful.

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There's actually a plus sign here, though it's not strictly a sort of an equation

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(if you add these two up you get this). But you can probably see how

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if you're thinking about communication in these terms you end up with

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what I'm calling "natural codes"... And these are essentially pairs of associations;

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so you have an association between a state the world and a signal,

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and then an association between a signal and a response.

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And if those associations are matched up to one another, you can say we've got

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some sort communication system. So this is one natural code; this could be another natural code.

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And natural codes are perfectly good ways to think about many instances of communication in

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the natural world. It's how computers communicate, but is also,

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I think, the best way to describe all sorts of natural communication systems,

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from bacteria through insects, animals, and so on and so forth.

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The problem is... OK, before I move on to the problem...

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This is kind of stressing the point I was making earlier, that in language evolution

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were very much at the moment thinking about communication in terms of natural codes, so

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a BBS [Behavioral and Brain Sciences] paper, 2009, Nicholas Evans and Steve Levinson:

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"... those interested in the evolution of the biological preconditions for language

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have been looking in the wrong place"

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—I agree with them—"Instead of looking at the pragmatics of communicative exchange,

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they've been focused on the syntax and combinatorics".

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So that's where we are at the moment.

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We're looking at these codes and the combining of these codes in various ways.

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This is Wittgenstein on the left, and Paul Grice,

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who's often seen as a founder of pragmatics as a discipline.

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I like this slide because of the way they seem to be critically looking at each other

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Which kind of underlines one of the points both of them wanted to make

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—or at least Wittgenstein at one point of his career wanted to make—

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which is that communication is not as simple is this.. Actually, you know,

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it's very tempting, it's very attractive to look at languages

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and to try to make them fit this box of natural codes;

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to cut them up into digital components, and so on and so forth.

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But that doesn't work it turns out.

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And reality is undeterminancy... The fact that what I say is not the same as what I mean

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is actually not just the messy things on the edges.

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It's pervasive. It's everywhere.

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This is the point that both of these philosophers wanted to make.

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And we can see it (I'm not going to go deep into the philosophy) but we can see

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several simple examples just here. So, the most trivial example is to say, well, what's "that" here?

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We have these deictic expressions in languages.

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Pronouns, he/she and so on, and other examples.

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This here... Is this "bank" as in the side to the river or is it a financial institution?

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We don't know. This could mean "dinner", could mean "run away", it could mean

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"Look at the cute fluffy bunny"... It could mean all sorts of things.

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And in this one here Peter's answer (sorry if you cant see)

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Mary says, "Would you like to join us for dinner?"

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and Peter replies, "I ate earlier".

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And Peter's response doesn't actually answer Mary's question directly.

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He has not answered the question. Yet we all know and Mary knows what he's getting at.

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Now, the point I'm making here is not the trivial and obvious one,

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that there's ambiguity in language –we all know that, nobody's going to deny that.

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The point is that, as a code, as something to make communication possible in the first place,

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languages are not very good. In fact, they're quite hopeless.

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If all you've got is the code, if that's all, you don't know what this means,

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you don't know what this mean, in general don't know what any of this means on its own.

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So, to go back and think about the natural codes that made communication possible

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in that information-theoretic way.

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Communication can be said to exist if you have those pairs associations.

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That's simply not true here.

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If you just have a code, the linguistic code, you don't have communication, not yet.

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So taking these facts seriously, pragmatics has developed a different way of thinking

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about communication.

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Well, I've said "a" —there are probably several different proposals out there.

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I think the clearest one comes from Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's Relevance Theory.

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And the label they used to contrast their way of thinking about

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communication with the code model... So they coined the term "code model", and they

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contrasted it with what they call the "ostensive-inferential model".

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A slightly cumbersome phrase, but it does capture what they're trying to describe.

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And the idea is that we're providing evidence... When we talk we're providing evidence and

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what we are providing evidence for is intentions.

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And more precisely, those intentions are what we call

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"communicative intention" and "informative intention".

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So, informative intention is my intention that you come to believe something.

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So if I say, "There is cake for dinner", I want you to believe that there is cake for dinner.

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That's my intention. I want to change your mental state so that you now you think that

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there is going to be cake for dinner.

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A communicative intention is my intention that you recognize that I have

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an informative intention in the first place.

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So: I intend that you understand that I intend that you understand that there is cake for dinner.

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Now, that sounds complex. But... —I'm certainly not going to go into all the details

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because wed be here all week— but when you get into the details of

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Relevance Theory, this account—this way of thinking about communications—starts

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to deal seriously with the philosophical issues that Grice and Wittgenstein and plenty of others

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were addressing or were raising, excuse me.

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A more simple way, without getting in all the jargon, a kind of the simplest way of thinking about

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what's going on here is: we're expressing two intentions:

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one is what I'm trying to communicate, and the other is the fact that I'm trying to communicate.

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So: "what am I trying to say" and "am I trying to say anything at all?"

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This is not just an account of linguistic communication but communication in general.

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So what's the difference between this point, which is direct and very clearly directing toward Clark,

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and this point here, where I'm looking at my watch and the fact that I am pointing is incidental.

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One of these is communicative and the other one is not.

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So one of them is expressing a communicative intention, and the other is not.

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That's the need for the communicative intention there.

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And then once that you recognize that somebody has a communicative intention

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you can go about the challenge of identifying the content of the informative intention,

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of this half here.

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And as I said, this is not just linguistic –we see this all times.

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Pointing is one example, but we also shrug, we do all sorts of things with our bodies,

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and when we do we do them, we do them in stylized and exaggerated ways, and in doing so make it

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apparent to our intended audience that we're trying to communicate with them

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and what it is we're trying to communicate.

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Here is one example: I was in a pub some weeks ago, standing at the bar with a friend,

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we we're both facing that way, the bar is here,

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and I had my note in one hand and my other hand just here.

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And my friend had just ordered some chips, and they'd arrived, they had just been given to him,

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so they're situated just here. And were chatting away, and I, with my hand, I just went like this,

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I don't know if you can all see that,

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so I was chatting away and I went did this, in a deliberate and stylized way.

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Made this gesture with my hand.

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And he just said Yes. And I took a chip and ate it.

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Now... we move our hands all the time, right?,

222
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but there's something about the stylized and exaggerated way in which I did that,

223
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which revealed to my friend that,

224
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a) I wanted to communicate with him, and b) what it was I wanted to communicate.

225
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This is not something you can capture with a natural code.

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We didn't have any convention associated with this expression and

227
00:16:07,766 --> 00:16:11,797
the idea "Can I have a chip?" This is just something that's created on the fly.

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As said, we shrug our shoulders, we do all sorts of things. This is ostensive communication.

229
00:16:18,363 --> 00:16:23,907
So what we have here is two ways of thinking about the very possibility of communication in the first place.

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On the one hand we have the code model, and the code model is defined

231
00:16:27,167 --> 00:16:30,287
by the fact that is made possible by associations.

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So if you have an organism able to make associations with the state the world and with some behavior,

233
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and perhaps with the observations of the world and some reaction,

234
00:16:41,668 --> 00:16:45,507
then you can have communication in the code-model type of way.

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We see this all over the natural world.

236
00:16:48,037 --> 00:16:51,077
On the other hand, you have this other type of communication,

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which is about expressing and recognizing intentions.

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00:16:53,923 --> 00:16:57,297
And this is made possible—what defines it as a type of communication—

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is the fact that is a type of meta-psychology,

240
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is a type of manipulating others' minds,

241
00:17:04,210 --> 00:17:08,790
and mind-reading and manipulation. So, as a speaker, I'm trying to

242
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change your mental state right now. I'm manipulating your minds and you are trying to read my mental states.

243
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I have intentions and you're trying to read them.

244
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Made possible by our mechanisms of meta-psychology.

245
00:17:21,007 --> 00:17:24,099
And the difference here... I want to stress that the difference here

246
00:17:24,099 --> 00:17:26,685
is not one of degree; it's one of kind.

247
00:17:26,685 --> 00:17:31,465
And a way to make that graphic is to contrast it with an entirely different domain,

248
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namely locomotion. Flying and walking are two different types of locomotion.

249
00:17:37,386 --> 00:17:42,405
But we don't want to say that flying is some sort of enhanced form of walking.

250
00:17:42,405 --> 00:17:48,792
They're the same sort of thing, they're locomotion, but they're totally different ways

251
00:17:48,792 --> 00:17:51,302
of going about it, a difference in kind.

252
00:17:51,302 --> 00:17:55,292
Similarly, ostensive communication and code mode communication

253
00:17:55,292 --> 00:17:57,222
are differences in kind.

254
00:18:02,782 --> 00:18:06,673
So where does language fit into this distinction?

255
00:18:06,673 --> 00:18:12,143
It's a very assumption to make, a common assumption, that with linguistic communication

256
00:18:12,143 --> 00:18:17,102
what we're dealing with is a system which is really, at bottom, it's a code.

257
00:18:17,102 --> 00:18:22,171
And then on top of it you plug in all this meta-psychology, this pragmatics,

258
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and then you get language.

259
00:18:27,019 --> 00:18:31,282
Many people, both those inside linguistics and those outside,

260
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have said that, sometimes linguists have "physics envy".

261
00:18:35,122 --> 00:18:39,685
So they look at physics with this world where they can cut things up into precise things that are

262
00:18:39,685 --> 00:18:44,242
clearly identifiable. And they try to do the same thing with language, so

263
00:18:44,242 --> 00:18:48,041
you've got these individual phonemes and they are distinct from each other,

264
00:18:48,041 --> 00:18:52,152
and you can do the same thing for syntax and it goes to semantics and so on and so forth.

265
00:18:52,152 --> 00:18:57,885
And so the object of study for linguistics becomes –well, in addition, the object to study

266
00:18:57,885 --> 00:19:01,885
for linguistics are the languages themselves, the linguistic code.

267
00:19:01,885 --> 00:19:06,475
And so it's very easy to think that this is really what linguistic communication is about,

268
00:19:06,475 --> 00:19:10,795
is a type of communication made possible by associations—i.e. a code model—

269
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and then the meta-psychology, the pragmatics is the bonus, that's what makes it more expressively powerful.

270
00:19:16,595 --> 00:19:21,153
The reality is exactly the other way around. This common assumption is upside down.

271
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What's going on here, in linguistic communication,

272
00:19:24,015 --> 00:19:28,696
is that our communication is made possible by ostention, inference, meta-psychology.

273
00:19:28,696 --> 00:19:32,827
And then on top of that, what we've done is creating a linguistic code

274
00:19:32,827 --> 00:19:37,130
which allows us to be much more expressive, and more precise than we otherwise could be.

275
00:19:37,130 --> 00:19:41,066
So I can point to things in this room, but with language I can point to things

276
00:19:41,066 --> 00:19:44,726
remote in time and space, and I do that because I've got these tools, what

277
00:19:44,726 --> 00:19:48,632
we call the linguistic code, the conventions that allow me to do that.

278
00:19:48,632 --> 00:19:55,566
It's vital that our terminology reflects this; the difference between the sort of codes

279
00:19:55,566 --> 00:20:00,776
that are making ostensive communication more powerful and the natural code we had earlier.

280
00:20:00,776 --> 00:20:05,673
So natural codes make communication possible –that's the point I was making earlier.

281
00:20:05,673 --> 00:20:09,373
The linguistic code, on the other hand, is a different type of code.

282
00:20:09,373 --> 00:20:13,606
It's a type of code that makes a different type of communication, ostensive communication,

283
00:20:13,606 --> 00:20:17,167
more powerful. So I use this label: conventional codes.

284
00:20:17,167 --> 00:20:22,226
The linguistic code is a conventional code. It makes another type of communication—ostensive communication—

285
00:20:22,226 --> 00:20:25,246
more powerful than otherwise would be.

286
00:20:31,023 --> 00:20:34,706
OK, so now we understand what language is.

287
00:20:34,706 --> 00:20:41,166
Languages are conventional codes designed to make a type

288
00:20:41,166 --> 00:20:44,892
of communication more expressively powerful than otherwise would be.

289
00:20:44,892 --> 00:20:48,593
And with that thought in mind we can be very clear about what it is

290
00:20:48,593 --> 00:20:51,192
we're trying to explain the origins and evolution of.

291
00:20:51,192 --> 00:20:55,622
And we can boil this down to two things: on the one hand, we need to explain

292
00:20:55,622 --> 00:21:00,122
how we evolved the social-cognitive mechanisms that make ostensive communication

293
00:21:00,122 --> 00:21:05,853
possible in first place. That's one challenge. And the other challenge is to explain

294
00:21:05,853 --> 00:21:09,810
the creation, the cultural evolution of the conventional code itself.

295
00:21:09,810 --> 00:21:13,977
How, when we're interacting with each other, do we create these codes, converge upon

296
00:21:13,977 --> 00:21:17,952
shared meanings for those codes. And how do they change in the way they're used

297
00:21:17,952 --> 00:21:20,892
in interaction, passed between generations, to come to take the

298
00:21:20,892 --> 00:21:23,802
structural features that we associate with languages.

299
00:21:23,802 --> 00:21:28,902
They're really, to my mind, the two big questions for evolutionary linguistics.

300
00:21:28,903 --> 00:21:31,473
I'm going to talk in the rest of the talk about number one.

301
00:21:31,473 --> 00:21:36,272
Number two is where I think cultural attraction has a big role to play, and it's a very exciting

302
00:21:36,272 --> 00:21:39,829
area for research, but I'm not going to talk about that today. I'm going to focus

303
00:21:39,829 --> 00:21:42,189
for the rest of the talk on number one.

304
00:21:45,158 --> 00:21:51,028
There's a whole body of research looking at, comparing the cognitive abilities

305
00:21:51,028 --> 00:21:57,863
of humans, in particular human children, with those of our primate relatives, particularly chimpanzees.

306
00:21:59,833 --> 00:22:05,325
Then immediately, when I look at this literature I see a bit of... it's a challenge to comparison,

307
00:22:05,325 --> 00:22:09,868
when we look at it from the pragmatic perspective.

308
00:22:09,868 --> 00:22:15,497
In pragmatics we have a rich body of theory, we've defined this thing called ostensive communication.

309
00:22:15,497 --> 00:22:19,079
It's a very central idea about how human communication works.

310
00:22:19,079 --> 00:22:23,155
And people looking at non-human primate communication certainly recognize the

311
00:22:23,155 --> 00:22:26,233
importance of pragmatics –there's no question of that.

312
00:22:26,233 --> 00:22:30,628
The idea that intentions are critical is central to that literature.

313
00:22:30,628 --> 00:22:34,838
But what people have been studying for the most part is not this,

314
00:22:34,838 --> 00:22:39,348
but something else that is called intentional communication.

315
00:22:39,348 --> 00:22:45,488
The question is, well, are these the same thing? If not, how do they differ?

316
00:22:48,378 --> 00:22:51,118
And I think they're different things.

317
00:22:51,118 --> 00:22:55,509
When people look for intentional communication in the primate literature,

318
00:22:55,509 --> 00:22:59,460
there's a whole bunch of different criteria that are used,

319
00:22:59,460 --> 00:23:02,519
sometimes consistently, sometimes inconsistently,

320
00:23:02,519 --> 00:23:03,899
between different studies.

321
00:23:03,899 --> 00:23:07,769
And sometimes that inconsistency is for good methodological reasons.

322
00:23:07,769 --> 00:23:12,037
It's easier to look for certain of these criteria in one domain,

323
00:23:12,037 --> 00:23:16,166
say in the vocal domain rather than in the gesture domain and so on.

324
00:23:16,166 --> 00:23:21,786
But anyway, the literature by and large tends to use some or all of these seven criteria

325
00:23:21,786 --> 00:23:25,976
as measures of intentional communication.

326
00:23:27,419 --> 00:23:32,059
And some of these might be stronger or weaker than others.

327
00:23:32,059 --> 00:23:35,706
Now, rather than going into a detailed discussion of these, what I want to bring attention to

328
00:23:35,706 --> 00:23:39,084
is that all of these are really about goal-directedness.

329
00:23:39,084 --> 00:23:41,912
They're about how the signal itself is used.

330
00:23:41,912 --> 00:23:46,989
So, is the signal used in a goal-directed way, in an intentional way?,

331
00:23:46,989 --> 00:23:54,012
or is it used in a more... less socially-sensitive way?, in a way that perhaps suggests,

332
00:23:54,012 --> 00:23:57,242
less meta-psychology involved?

333
00:23:59,397 --> 00:24:03,607
Now, thinking back to what ostensive communications is, ostensive communication is defined

334
00:24:03,607 --> 00:24:07,834
as the expression of intentions. So what intentions are doing here,

335
00:24:07,834 --> 00:24:11,797
they're the thing that is being expressed, they're what is expressed.

336
00:24:11,797 --> 00:24:15,877
I express my informative intentions and my communicative intentions.

337
00:24:15,877 --> 00:24:19,717
When I point in a stylized way rather than an incidental way, I'm expressing

338
00:24:19,717 --> 00:24:21,557
a communicative intention.

339
00:24:21,557 --> 00:24:25,435
Whereas what's been studied in the primate literature, it seems to me,

340
00:24:25,435 --> 00:24:30,465
is "how" signals are being produced: are they produced in an intentional way or not?

341
00:24:30,465 --> 00:24:32,644
So these are not quite the same thing.

342
00:24:32,644 --> 00:24:39,017
Having said that, you'll often see the language used in the literature conflating the two.

343
00:24:39,017 --> 00:24:44,977
So, these communicative intentions (this phrase) has a technical definition in pragmatics,

344
00:24:44,977 --> 00:24:50,397
is the thing that expresses the signaling signalhood, the fact that you're trying to communicate.

345
00:24:50,767 --> 00:24:55,537
But this paper is certainly very much talking about an intention to communicate,

346
00:24:55,537 --> 00:24:58,017
actually about this sort of thing.

347
00:24:58,017 --> 00:25:01,517
It is not obvious to me that these are the same things.

348
00:25:01,517 --> 00:25:09,357
What we need to look at is: Do we see the expression and recognition of informative and communicative intentions?

349
00:25:09,357 --> 00:25:13,162
That's what ostensive communication is at bottom.

350
00:25:13,162 --> 00:25:15,725
And so that's really the question we should be asking.

351
00:25:15,725 --> 00:25:20,767
And there's at least enough data out there for us to give us a tentative answer to this question so...

352
00:25:20,767 --> 00:25:22,978
That's where we're going now.

353
00:25:22,978 --> 00:25:28,383
So, the expression and the recognition of communicative intentions and informative intentions.

354
00:25:28,383 --> 00:25:34,383
We have a two-by-two grid and we can ask about both human children and about great apes.

355
00:25:35,739 --> 00:25:39,223
And first we're going to look at the expression of informative intention.

356
00:25:39,223 --> 00:25:43,433
An informative intention is an intention to manipulate a mental state.

357
00:25:43,433 --> 00:25:47,119
I have an intention to change your mental states right now

358
00:25:47,119 --> 00:25:50,208
about what informative attentions are, and so on and so forth.

359
00:25:50,208 --> 00:25:52,683
So how might we go about testing this in the lab?

360
00:25:52,683 --> 00:25:54,173
Here's one way.

361
00:25:54,173 --> 00:26:00,103
In this study, the children come into the lab and they play a game set up in various ways

362
00:26:00,103 --> 00:26:05,173
but the long made short of it is that the child is going to make a request off the adult

363
00:26:05,173 --> 00:26:07,799
for an object. In this case a ball.

364
00:26:07,799 --> 00:26:13,049
And then they're going to get the ball, but they're going get it in one of two different conditions.

365
00:26:13,053 --> 00:26:17,437
Either they're going to get it because the experimenter says, "Oh, you want the ball?, here's the ball" -everybody's happy.

366
00:26:17,437 --> 00:26:24,714
Or the experimenter says, "Oh, you want the paper? (or the elephant?), and then, accidentally, gives them the ball.

367
00:26:24,714 --> 00:26:29,751
So in this case the child has the material goal satisfied

368
00:26:29,751 --> 00:26:36,704
but if they have an informative intention, an intention to manipulate a mental state, that's actually not been satisfied,

369
00:26:36,704 --> 00:26:41,644
because the adult's mental state has not been changed in the way that the child so wished.

370
00:26:41,644 --> 00:26:44,432
Whereas in this case that has happened.

371
00:26:44,432 --> 00:26:48,642
And what we find is that children kick up a fuss in this situation, they start complaining.

372
00:26:48,644 --> 00:26:52,155
"No, you didn't understand"; "No, I want the ball"; "But you have the ball;"

373
00:26:52,155 --> 00:26:54,514
"but, but, but..." And you can see where this goes.

374
00:26:54,514 --> 00:27:00,714
The fact that they're complaining shows that their goals are not simply material, not simply to get the ball,

375
00:27:00,714 --> 00:27:04,984
but change the mental state of the adult, which in turn will get them the ball.

376
00:27:04,984 --> 00:27:10,784
So children understand, they have some understanding, of what an informative intention is,

377
00:27:10,784 --> 00:27:16,204
and are able to express it, and understand when that intention has been satisfied or not.

378
00:27:17,354 --> 00:27:20,994
Nobody's done the comparable experiment with great apes.

379
00:27:24,784 --> 00:27:29,421
Recognition of an informative intention... Well, actually, here nobody's done the experiment

380
00:27:29,421 --> 00:27:31,240
with great apes or with children.

381
00:27:31,240 --> 00:27:34,751
And the sort of experiment that could be done would be

382
00:27:34,751 --> 00:27:41,401
similar to the previous one I've just described, but perhaps with an observer and if that observer...

383
00:27:42,801 --> 00:27:45,741
Hold on, my thoughts have gone blank, sorry...

384
00:27:52,217 --> 00:27:53,947
Sorry --I have a mind blank.

385
00:27:59,731 --> 00:28:01,531
No, my mind's gone blank.

386
00:28:01,531 --> 00:28:05,026
Hopefully you're doing the work for me and you're on your own!

387
00:28:05,026 --> 00:28:05,881
Sorry?

388
00:28:05,881 --> 00:28:07,046
[...unintelligible...]

389
00:28:07,046 --> 00:28:08,894
--Yeah, maybe so yes

390
00:28:08,894 --> 00:28:18,094
[(...unintelligible...) the wrong thing is given and the observer says bad-bad-bad or something?]

391
00:28:18,742 --> 00:28:21,194
Good, good okay, yes twice! Coming back now...!

392
00:28:21,194 --> 00:28:25,344
So, let's say... Let's go back to the previous one...

393
00:28:28,554 --> 00:28:32,760
Let's say we're in this situation and then the child doesn't complain,

394
00:28:32,760 --> 00:28:36,404
or another adult—there are two adults—and this adult asks for the ball,

395
00:28:36,404 --> 00:28:39,820
gets the ball, even though they we're misunderstood.

396
00:28:39,820 --> 00:28:44,201
Does the observer say, "Hold on!!, something's not up, something's not right here..."?

397
00:28:44,201 --> 00:28:49,354
And if they do, they're recognizing that somebody else—namely this person—has an informative intention.

398
00:28:49,354 --> 00:28:51,905
Nobody's done that experiment with kids or with apes.

399
00:28:52,994 --> 00:28:55,424
So we don't know the answer to that.

400
00:28:55,424 --> 00:29:00,874
Let's look now at communicative intentions. Communicative intentions are intentions to make it

401
00:29:00,874 --> 00:29:05,837
apparent to your audience that you have an informative intention. It's signaling signalhood.

402
00:29:05,837 --> 00:29:11,227
Making apparent to somebody that you want to communicate with them in the first place.

403
00:29:13,634 --> 00:29:18,346
And the recognition of communicative intentions has been studied in several different ways.

404
00:29:18,346 --> 00:29:22,404
I think the clearest demonstration is in this paper. What happens here...

405
00:29:22,404 --> 00:29:25,236
(This is where the example of the point, the incidental point

406
00:29:25,236 --> 00:29:28,316
because I'm looking at my watch, and the direct point come from).

407
00:29:28,316 --> 00:29:33,719
In this study the children and the experimenter play a game and they

408
00:29:33,719 --> 00:29:38,943
play with his toys, and then the game comes to an end and they have to pack the toys away.

409
00:29:38,943 --> 00:29:44,611
And they do so. One of the toys is accidentally sort of left out somewhere else in the room.

410
00:29:44,611 --> 00:29:50,974
And the child is (...), and the experimenter points at the toy.

411
00:29:50,974 --> 00:29:58,084
And the experimenter either points at the toy in a very ostensive, deliberate, stylized way

412
00:29:58,084 --> 00:30:00,817
—i.e. with expression of communicative intention—

413
00:30:00,817 --> 00:30:08,574
like this, looking at the child. Or they point (they're still pointing) but they're looking at their watch.

414
00:30:08,574 --> 00:30:12,460
So, superficially similar behaviors but one expresses a communicative intention,

415
00:30:12,460 --> 00:30:14,110
the other one doesn't.

416
00:30:14,110 --> 00:30:18,494
And what happens is that children are far more likely to go and fetch the toy

417
00:30:18,494 --> 00:30:22,038
and put it away when the communicative intention has been expressed.

418
00:30:22,038 --> 00:30:25,133
So it seems that the children are able to recognize the communicative intention

419
00:30:25,133 --> 00:30:27,803
when is expressed by an adult.

420
00:30:28,813 --> 00:30:32,363
Again, not been done in great apes.

421
00:30:32,363 --> 00:30:40,869
[So what about meta communication and play (…unintelligible…) What about in another domain? —

422
00:30:40,869 --> 00:30:45,139
(….) multi component signals where part of it is what follows is going to be

423
00:30:45,139 --> 00:30:49,455
(...potentially informative...), which has been demonstrated in lots of studies?

424
00:30:49,555 --> 00:30:50,835
Right...

425
00:30:52,121 --> 00:30:59,701
Isn't that a signal about a signal? Isn't that a signal about "pay attention to what follows"?

426
00:31:01,551 --> 00:31:06,783
I don’t know the literature you’re referring to in enough detail, so I’d have to look at that

427
00:31:06,783 --> 00:31:08,313
to be able to answer the question.

428
00:31:08,833 --> 00:31:13,443
[(...Playouts....), you know, things like that… that all animals would engage in

429
00:31:13,443 --> 00:31:17,503
(…some kind of game and pay attention to signals…)] and what follows is going to be play]

430
00:31:17,503 --> 00:31:20,963
These things are akin to attention-getters I guess…

431
00:31:20,963 --> 00:31:26,003
[…and then you can think about multi-component signals (...) (...that later...) become informative in same way.]

432
00:31:26,883 --> 00:31:31,473
So it seems to me… I’m more familiar with the idea of attention-getters…

433
00:31:31,473 --> 00:31:34,473
that seems to be similar to what you’re pointing to.

434
00:31:34,473 --> 00:31:37,607
That seems describable to me in terms of a natural code.

435
00:31:37,607 --> 00:31:44,743
So you can form associations between those behaviors and a subsequent behavior,

436
00:31:44,743 --> 00:31:48,143
and hence you can say, well, this would be a natural code.

437
00:31:48,143 --> 00:31:55,176
What's going on here is that... The study I just described would be stronger if it wasn't pointing,

438
00:31:55,176 --> 00:32:00,356
if it was something that was.... uncontroversially could not have been said

439
00:32:00,356 --> 00:32:06,835
that any convention could have been formed. And that's really the Litmus test, right?

440
00:32:06,835 --> 00:32:11,516
So it's that... when I was in the pub with my friend and I tilted my hand...

441
00:32:11,516 --> 00:32:18,666
There's no pre-established convention or anything else there... When you do see... Yes?

442
00:32:19,021 --> 00:32:28,117
[unintelligible] Are (...) necessary? In the sense that, if you take a more continuous view of

443
00:32:28,117 --> 00:32:32,737
the evolution of signals or the evolution of meaning or the evolution of manipulation,

444
00:32:32,737 --> 00:32:42,756
arbitrariness is great, that was (X)'s criteria, but you can imagine pressures, structure,

445
00:32:42,756 --> 00:32:49,237
form-follows-function, function-follows-design criteria, things sound and look certain ways to be

446
00:32:49,237 --> 00:32:55,619
effective—efficacy—and it's nice to sort of say that humans are (...great...) because

447
00:32:55,619 --> 00:33:02,849
we can (...have arbitrary...) signals, but is that a necessary component of thinking about these intentional...

448
00:33:02,865 --> 00:33:05,172
No no, I'm not saying...

449
00:33:05,172 --> 00:33:11,672
I'm not trying to link arbitrariness to this distinction I'm trying to draw up here at the moment.

450
00:33:11,672 --> 00:33:16,662
What I'm saying is that the best way to test the true expression and

451
00:33:16,662 --> 00:33:20,400
recognition of communicative intentions is in a context where

452
00:33:20,400 --> 00:33:24,853
there's no way that you can say that this is a conventional code, a natural code of any sort.

453
00:33:24,853 --> 00:33:28,007
I'm interested in the question of how you test for these things,

454
00:33:28,007 --> 00:33:30,760
and the best way to do that would be in that way.

455
00:33:30,760 --> 00:33:33,470
Coming back to the attention-getters, I mean...

456
00:33:33,470 --> 00:33:37,760
Most of them seem to be iconic?, from my knowledge of them...

457
00:33:37,760 --> 00:33:40,363
It's conceivable that they don't have to be.

458
00:33:40,363 --> 00:33:44,187
But either way, they can be described in terms of a natural code.

459
00:33:44,187 --> 00:33:45,410
[I agree with that.]

460
00:33:45,410 --> 00:33:46,900
Well, OK.

461
00:33:49,131 --> 00:33:53,341
OK, finally, the expression of communicative intention:

462
00:33:53,341 --> 00:33:59,531
expressing the fact that you want to communicate with somebody else.

463
00:33:59,531 --> 00:34:04,621
Now, how are you going to go about testing this in children? (Well, in great apes I really don't know),

464
00:34:04,621 --> 00:34:07,641
but in children is much straight forward.

465
00:34:08,391 --> 00:34:11,851
A few years ago, I spent some time in Mike Tomasello's lab and

466
00:34:11,851 --> 00:34:15,429
we looked into something that is not strictly speaking the expression of

467
00:34:15,429 --> 00:34:20,060
communicative intentions but it shows exactly the same sort of thing.

468
00:34:20,060 --> 00:34:23,701
We were interested in something called "hidden authorship".

469
00:34:23,701 --> 00:34:26,830
With hidden authorship –this is providing a stimulus for someone

470
00:34:26,830 --> 00:34:30,173
but hiding the fact that you're actually proving it for them.

471
00:34:30,173 --> 00:34:34,102
Imagine you are at a polite dinner party and you want some more wine but

472
00:34:34,102 --> 00:34:37,448
is impolite for you to ask your host for more wine directly.

473
00:34:37,448 --> 00:34:43,063
So you wait until he or she has turned their back and then you move your empty wine glass to

474
00:34:43,063 --> 00:34:46,641
somewhere conspicuous in the middle of the table, and you wait for them to turn around and

475
00:34:46,641 --> 00:34:48,688
the see the wine glass and they fill it up.

476
00:34:48,688 --> 00:34:53,098
So you provided a stimulus for someone but you hidden the fact that is for them.

477
00:34:53,098 --> 00:34:55,518
And this is interesting because...

478
00:34:56,808 --> 00:35:01,398
it expresses an intention, or is evidence of an intention which has

479
00:35:01,398 --> 00:35:05,922
the same relationship to an informative intention that communicative intention does.

480
00:35:05,922 --> 00:35:07,125
It just is a negative.

481
00:35:07,125 --> 00:35:08,875
So rather than,

482
00:35:08,875 --> 00:35:12,189
"I intend that you understand that I have an informative intention",

483
00:35:12,189 --> 00:35:16,297
"I intend that you don't understand that I have an informative intention towards you".

484
00:35:16,297 --> 00:35:18,424
Otherwise, it is the same sort of thing.

485
00:35:18,424 --> 00:35:21,822
So we wanted to test whether children could hide authorship.

486
00:35:21,822 --> 00:35:24,039
So here is how we went about it.

487
00:35:24,039 --> 00:35:27,974
The first thing I should say is that we did it with 3- and 4 year-olds, quite young kids.

488
00:35:27,974 --> 00:35:31,972
This kind is quite a bit older but that's because this video is from the pilot study, but

489
00:35:31,972 --> 00:35:34,376
is representative of what happened.

490
00:35:34,376 --> 00:35:39,029
So... there's Experimenter 1 here, and the child, this is Experimenter 2.

491
00:35:39,029 --> 00:35:43,549
Experimenter 1 and the child come into the room first and they find in the middle of the room this

492
00:35:43,549 --> 00:35:48,779
box which has four hose in it, and you can see from the hose what kind of objects belong in there.

493
00:35:48,779 --> 00:35:52,689
There's a hat, there's car and there's a ball, and so on and so forth.

494
00:35:52,689 --> 00:35:56,919
And, "Oh, I like the hiding and finding game, we need to find these objects that

495
00:35:56,919 --> 00:35:59,682
are hidden around the room so let's go and find them".

496
00:35:59,682 --> 00:36:02,212
So the experimenter and the child find the objects.

497
00:36:02,212 --> 00:36:06,412
And in that way the child -excuse me, they find the objects and then the experimenter says,

498
00:36:06,412 --> 00:36:10,638
"Oh, experimenter 2 is coming along as well and she really likes the hiding-finding game and so

499
00:36:10,638 --> 00:36:14,164
we need to put these object back where we found them so she can have a go herself".

500
00:36:14,164 --> 00:36:17,503
They go about that. So the child now knows where all the objects are.

501
00:36:17,503 --> 00:36:20,853
Then the child sits down just here, next to Experimenter 1.

502
00:36:20,853 --> 00:36:25,757
Experimenter 2 comes in and is going to play the hiding-and-finding game.

503
00:36:25,757 --> 00:36:30,108
Before I explain exactly what she does, is worth stressing that the ball that goes in here

504
00:36:30,108 --> 00:36:33,647
is hidden just behind this barrier, just next to where the child sits down.

505
00:36:33,647 --> 00:36:36,977
This barrier here is the same as this barrier here.

506
00:36:36,977 --> 00:36:41,490
And Experimenter 2 comes in and says, "Oh, is the hiding-and-finding game,

507
00:36:41,490 --> 00:36:45,393
I really like the game," and then she says "but" and she says

508
00:36:45,393 --> 00:36:48,463
one of two different things depending on condition:

509
00:36:48,463 --> 00:36:52,233
She either says, "Oh, I really don't like it if I can't complete it,"

510
00:36:52,233 --> 00:36:55,513
in which case she's given the child reasons to help her, or she says:

511
00:36:55,513 --> 00:36:59,013
"But I really don't like it if anyone helps me complete it,"

512
00:36:59,013 --> 00:37:02,762
so now she's forbidden the child to help her find the object.

513
00:37:02,762 --> 00:37:06,693
So then she goes around and finds a couple of the objects.

514
00:37:06,693 --> 00:37:10,963
She's already found the hat as you can see, and then there's a couple of others she can't find them.

515
00:37:10,963 --> 00:37:13,334
"Oh, where's the ball, I cant find it, I'm looking everywhere."

516
00:37:13,334 --> 00:37:17,181
She spends plenty of time with her back to the child so the child can do

517
00:37:17,181 --> 00:37:19,600
various things to help her without her knowing.

518
00:37:19,600 --> 00:37:22,026
And the question is what the childs going to do.

519
00:37:22,026 --> 00:37:25,306
So keep your eye on this child here and what he does with ball.

520
00:37:31,501 --> 00:37:35,645
So he takes the ball, moves it in front, and the experimenter turns around and says,

521
00:37:35,645 --> 00:37:39,317
"Oh, there's the ball why didn't I see it earlier, it was always there in clear view",

522
00:37:39,317 --> 00:37:41,097
and the child is very happy.

523
00:37:41,097 --> 00:37:46,707
This is a 7-year-old child as I said; you do it with younger kids is not quite as clean as this [laughs]

524
00:37:46,707 --> 00:37:53,401
They do things like: Ahem! [laughs] and, in various ways, try to have it both ways.

525
00:37:53,401 --> 00:37:57,924
But the fact that they want to have it both ways, shows that they understand the difference between

526
00:37:57,924 --> 00:38:02,926
an informative intention—providing the stimulus for someone—and a communicative intention:

527
00:38:02,926 --> 00:38:05,512
the fact that youre trying to communicate with them.

528
00:38:05,512 --> 00:38:10,552
We find very clear differences in both in 3- and 5-year olds

529
00:38:10,552 --> 00:38:17,862
in terms of the number of times they suppress that intention in various trials.

530
00:38:20,612 --> 00:38:25,222
OK, so here's our provisional conclusions... Go ahead.

531
00:38:25,222 --> 00:38:29,432
[Oh, after you do your provisional conclusions...]

532
00:38:29,432 --> 00:38:32,191
OK. Is it going to be about this slide, is it? or...

533
00:38:32,191 --> 00:38:35,112
[It's about this experiment as a whole, so...]

534
00:38:35,112 --> 00:38:36,552
Go now

535
00:38:36,552 --> 00:38:38,352
[No (...unintelligible...)]

536
00:38:38,352 --> 00:38:44,379
My provisional conclusion is that children are ostensive communicators.

537
00:38:44,379 --> 00:38:51,434
So there isn't any of these cells that isn't filled in and you were right to raise the point that

538
00:38:51,434 --> 00:38:58,547
for this here perhaps could be done without pointing, with some other behavior

539
00:38:58,547 --> 00:39:03,827
But it's starting to look as that the answer for children here is going to be Yes.

540
00:39:03,827 --> 00:39:08,287
The answer for great apes we don't know and there are clear methodological challenges to

541
00:39:08,287 --> 00:39:11,037
doing these sorts of studies with chimps, I mean I see that.

542
00:39:11,037 --> 00:39:16,177
Nevertheless, when I've spoken to relevant experts of chimpanzee communication and cognition,

543
00:39:16,177 --> 00:39:21,012
they expressed a great deal of skepticism that chimps are going to pass these sorts of studies.

544
00:39:21,012 --> 00:39:27,057
Now, that's an entirely provisional conclusion, could be overturn by data, of course it could.

545
00:39:27,057 --> 00:39:29,526
But my provisional conclusion...

546
00:39:29,526 --> 00:39:34,126
–well, I should add also, it's also interesting that the studies haven't been done.

547
00:39:34,126 --> 00:39:38,580
Although some of them... The hidden-authorship study is not at all clear how you'd do that,

548
00:39:38,580 --> 00:39:40,650
big methodological challenges.

549
00:39:40,661 --> 00:39:47,071
But the first study—about when the ball... and receiving the right object

550
00:39:47,071 --> 00:39:50,071
for the wrong reason and so on and so forth—

551
00:39:50,071 --> 00:39:55,071
that is perhaps amountable, but nobody seems to have done it.

552
00:39:55,079 --> 00:40:00,523
And I do wonder if the reason why nobody's done that is because

553
00:40:00,523 --> 00:40:04,766
researchers are skeptical that chimps are going to pass it and if you get negative

554
00:40:04,766 --> 00:40:07,894
results is perhaps difficult to interpret, difficult to publish...

555
00:40:07,894 --> 00:40:11,722
Maybe little motivation to pursuing such an experiment if you're skeptical about

556
00:40:11,722 --> 00:40:16,742
the possible outcome. Entirely provisional. Totally, these conclusions could be overturned by data,

557
00:40:16,742 --> 00:40:20,744
but for now, it seems to me that the data suggest that non-human primates

558
00:40:20,744 --> 00:40:24,274
are not communicating in an ostensive, inferential way.

559
00:40:24,682 --> 00:40:29,684
[I don't know if you have maybe just 30 seconds, depending upon your time...

560
00:40:29,684 --> 00:40:35,971
(...unintelligible...)

561
00:40:35,971 --> 00:40:39,091
... but the division you spoke of…

562
00:40:41,494 --> 00:40:47,604
You’re looking at the social aspects… of the subject here, right?

563
00:40:49,044 --> 00:40:55,244
(...of...) the ostensive and the informative things… You said (...your work is going to look...) at cultural…

564
00:40:56,404 --> 00:41:02,853
Beyond a certain age—in humans of course—culture is very strong.]

565
00:41:02,853 --> 00:41:04,698
Of course, yes.

566
00:41:04,698 --> 00:41:15,287
[... And whether or not a teenager or an adult is going to do something that a child

567
00:41:15,287 --> 00:41:23,528
might do is a question… And how they’re going to do it, is certainly a question….

568
00:41:23,655 --> 00:41:26,955
So my basic question is…

569
00:41:30,465 --> 00:41:33,465
What is your justification for

570
00:41:33,465 --> 00:41:42,487
separating the social from the cultural… And perhaps if you have time (….),

571
00:41:42,487 --> 00:41:51,397
could you give us a minute of what that cultural research is that you’re doing, on this area?]

572
00:41:51,397 --> 00:41:55,934
I'm not trying to separate social from cultural, that's the first thing to say.

573
00:41:55,934 --> 00:42:01,318
What I am separating out is the social-cognitive mechanisms—cognitive mechanisms—

574
00:42:01,318 --> 00:42:05,374
that make ostensive communication possible in the first place.

575
00:42:05,374 --> 00:42:10,314
So they're mechanisms of meta-psychology which (...gives rise...) to these sorts of behaviors...

576
00:42:10,314 --> 00:42:15,994
[My question is how can you, particularly with teenagers and adults,

577
00:42:15,994 --> 00:42:22,184
take out the strong cultural influences (...)?]

578
00:42:22,184 --> 00:42:23,274
I'm not trying to.

579
00:42:23,274 --> 00:42:31,434
[You're not? So if you had time (...) to talk a little bit about the

580
00:42:31,434 --> 00:42:35,154
cultural aspects of your research in this area]

581
00:42:35,154 --> 00:42:41,174
I still have three slides to go... Can I do that in the question session?

582
00:42:41,174 --> 00:42:45,374
[OK, so that'd be my first question] [laughs]

583
00:42:47,924 --> 00:42:52,374
So I've made this dichotomy earlier between two different ways of thinking about the

584
00:42:52,374 --> 00:42:54,674
possibility of communication.

585
00:42:54,674 --> 00:42:59,254
So, ostension and inference on the one hand, which provisionally for now I'm going to say

586
00:42:59,273 --> 00:43:03,879
only seems to be present in humans... And on the other hand code-model communication.

587
00:43:03,879 --> 00:43:07,034
So if it is the case that non-human primates don't communicate ostensibly

588
00:43:07,034 --> 00:43:10,267
then it should be the case that they communicate using natural codes.

589
00:43:10,267 --> 00:43:13,440
But we should check that. Let's look at the data here.

590
00:43:13,440 --> 00:43:15,774
Do they communicate using natural codes?

591
00:43:15,774 --> 00:43:20,734
It's certainly true that great apes gestural communication is accepted to be intentional.

592
00:43:20,734 --> 00:43:24,064
And there's a live debate in the literature at the moment about the origins of

593
00:43:24,064 --> 00:43:27,064
the the codes that are being used.

594
00:43:27,064 --> 00:43:31,694
On the one hand, you have researchers arguing that processes of ontogenetic ritualization

595
00:43:31,694 --> 00:43:37,214
can give rise to these codes; others saying that there's more of a perhaps innate

596
00:43:37,214 --> 00:43:39,594
or, in some ways, species-wide repertoire.

597
00:43:39,594 --> 00:43:44,234
The point I want to make is that either way, what we're looking at here is

598
00:43:44,234 --> 00:43:47,234
an argument about the origins of associations

599
00:43:47,234 --> 00:43:51,575
between states of the world and behaviors and between behaviors and responses.

600
00:43:51,575 --> 00:43:54,044
In other words, the origins of natural codes.

601
00:43:54,044 --> 00:43:57,314
So, they're not using the language of the natural codes,

602
00:43:57,314 --> 00:44:00,450
but they're talking about associations of certain types.

603
00:44:00,450 --> 00:44:04,760
That's pervasive through the discussions that are going on in this literature.

604
00:44:04,760 --> 00:44:10,549
Here is a quote: "We conducted naturalistic observations of wild East African chimpanzee...

605
00:44:10,549 --> 00:44:14,761
Our results indicate that chimpanzees are able to respond flexibly"

606
00:44:14,761 --> 00:44:17,561
Why did I put that quote there? I've no idea [laughs].

607
00:44:17,561 --> 00:44:20,542
That might be lost ignore that!

608
00:44:20,542 --> 00:44:24,979
It's kind of relevant but I don't know [...unintelligible...] the point I was trying to make.

609
00:44:24,979 --> 00:44:29,031
Oh yeah –this is why. OK, let me go back, now I know why...

610
00:44:29,031 --> 00:44:31,559
Sorry. Let's go down to here.

611
00:44:31,559 --> 00:44:36,028
OK, so there's the natural code. What's particularly interesting about these natural codes

612
00:44:36,028 --> 00:44:38,209
is that they seem to be used in a very flexible way.

613
00:44:38,209 --> 00:44:42,089
So we can describe for example bacterial communication in terms of a natural code

614
00:44:42,089 --> 00:44:48,959
and that'd be a very fixed natural code governed by various, relatively simple, mechanisms.

615
00:44:50,839 --> 00:44:54,233
But it seems to be more flexible in chimpanzees, so there's the question of

616
00:44:54,233 --> 00:44:56,783
where that flexibility comes from.

617
00:44:56,783 --> 00:44:59,013
And the natural answer would be some sort of Theory of Mind,

618
00:44:59,013 --> 00:45:02,013
meta-psychological abilities of some sort.

619
00:45:02,013 --> 00:45:07,712
Obviously, as I'm sure many or most or all of you are aware,

620
00:45:07,712 --> 00:45:11,781
there are live debates about exactly what the extent of

621
00:45:11,781 --> 00:45:16,142
such abilities might be in chimpanzees, but it seems to be... It might not be a full-blown

622
00:45:16,142 --> 00:45:19,675
Theory of Mind but some sort of awareness of the goals of others

623
00:45:19,675 --> 00:45:23,145
that does seem to be present in some of our primate relatives.

624
00:45:23,145 --> 00:45:26,553
So the answer to the question here is a kind of "Yes, but..."

625
00:45:26,553 --> 00:45:31,720
Yes, they seem to use natural codes, but they're natural codes which

626
00:45:31,720 --> 00:45:36,870
are being made more expressively powerful by forms of meta-psychology.

627
00:45:36,870 --> 00:45:40,210
This, interestingly, appears to be the very opposite of

628
00:45:40,210 --> 00:45:43,210
what we actually see in linguistic communication.

629
00:45:43,210 --> 00:45:49,930
So linguistic communication is made possible by mechanisms of meta-psychology,

630
00:45:49,930 --> 00:45:54,390
which allow us to shrug, to point, to do all these things that we do non-verbally.

631
00:45:54,390 --> 00:45:59,177
And then it's made more precise and expressively powerful by mechanisms of association;

632
00:45:59,177 --> 00:46:01,537
by the fact that we can create these conventions.

633
00:46:01,537 --> 00:46:03,990
Great-ape communication seems to be entirely the other way up.

634
00:46:03,990 --> 00:46:06,590
It's made possible by these natural codes,

635
00:46:06,590 --> 00:46:09,830
but then it's used in a particularly flexible way which makes it richer

636
00:46:09,830 --> 00:46:16,470
than other natural codes out there in the natural world because of some forms of meta-psychology.

637
00:46:16,470 --> 00:46:21,717
So, how would we tell the difference between these two different types of communication?

638
00:46:21,717 --> 00:46:25,758
Well, if you have a set of associations made more powerful by meta-psychology,

639
00:46:25,758 --> 00:46:35,019
then what you should expect to see is some sort of more finite set of prototypes of some sort...

640
00:46:35,019 --> 00:46:39,279
that's the base of associations, but then is used in more flexible ways.

641
00:46:39,297 --> 00:46:42,845
And it seems to me that the quote from that paper and other papers

642
00:46:42,845 --> 00:46:45,845
seem to be pointing in that direction.

643
00:46:45,845 --> 00:46:52,411
Papers that are looking at cataloguing what non-human primate communication systems look like

644
00:46:52,411 --> 00:46:55,087
are converging upon this sort of conclusion.

645
00:46:55,087 --> 00:46:58,837
On the other hand, if you have a system made possible by meta-psychology,

646
00:46:58,837 --> 00:47:01,341
and then made more powerful by associations,

647
00:47:01,341 --> 00:47:05,089
then essentially anything goes! If it's made possibly by meta-psychology,

648
00:47:05,089 --> 00:47:09,220
then you can create new signals at will.

649
00:47:09,220 --> 00:47:13,599
You can have associations that can be used in all sorts of ways.

650
00:47:13,599 --> 00:47:19,379
And you have the one-off use of novel behaviors like the twisting of my wrist for communicative ends.

651
00:47:19,379 --> 00:47:22,200
This seems to be what we see in language. 


652
00:47:24,040 --> 00:47:29,240
These points have important implications for how we think about continuity and discontinuity

653
00:47:29,240 --> 00:47:31,390
in human communication and language.

654
00:47:31,390 --> 00:47:34,920
As said earlier, it's a common assumption in evolutionary linguistics,

655
00:47:34,920 --> 00:47:38,643
or in linguistics in general and in evolutionary linguistics,

656
00:47:38,643 --> 00:47:42,830
that the code is the thing that makes everything possible and the pragmatics

657
00:47:42,830 --> 00:47:46,534
goes on top as if the messy stuff goes on top to make it more powerful.

658
00:47:46,534 --> 00:47:50,910
And you can see that... This is James Hurfords two books, 2007, 2012.

659
00:47:50,910 --> 00:47:55,761
"We may see in alarm calls a skeletal version of our own shared codes"

660
00:47:55,761 --> 00:47:59,576
–so the continuity there, between the monkeys calls and human languages.

661
00:47:59,576 --> 00:48:03,616
"It seems quite plausible that the earlier precursors of language were much more,

662
00:48:03,616 --> 00:48:06,668
perhaps entirely, coding-decoding in nature".

663
00:48:06,668 --> 00:48:10,486
So language starts as a code model then you have the pragmatics on later.

664
00:48:10,486 --> 00:48:12,976
I think this is a big mistake.

665
00:48:12,976 --> 00:48:19,596
The emphasis on continuity here is taking the Darwinian lesson that form changes very gradually,

666
00:48:19,596 --> 00:48:22,525
but then applying it to function too.

667
00:48:22,525 --> 00:48:29,584
It's a bit like saying, Well, flying is a very powerful form of locomotion, walking is less powerful,

668
00:48:29,584 --> 00:48:34,857
Darwin tells us these things change gradually, so one must have evolved from the other.

669
00:48:34,857 --> 00:48:36,182
That doesn't fly.

670
00:48:36,182 --> 00:48:38,749
The real continuity here is in social intelligence.

671
00:48:38,749 --> 00:48:42,004
So, non-human primate communication is made more expressively powerful by

672
00:48:42,004 --> 00:48:45,004
forms of meta-psychology.

673
00:48:45,004 --> 00:48:50,074
When they're made even more rich, they allow a whole new type of communication system:

674
00:48:50,074 --> 00:48:55,224
ostensive communication. When you start adding the layers, the recursive mind-reading layers,

675
00:48:55,224 --> 00:49:01,204
then from the total that was being used to make a natural code more powerful,

676
00:49:01,204 --> 00:49:04,950
you suddenly get a quite new form of communication: ostensive communication,

677
00:49:04,950 --> 00:49:09,750
which really opens the flood gates to all sorts of communicative richness.

678
00:49:11,459 --> 00:49:13,182
OK , let me wrap up.

679
00:49:13,182 --> 00:49:19,543
Human communication is ostensive and inferential. We're expressing and recognizing intentions;

680
00:49:19,543 --> 00:49:22,314
informative and communicative intentions.

681
00:49:22,314 --> 00:49:26,584
It's critical when we're thinking about the evolution of language to distinguish

682
00:49:26,584 --> 00:49:29,104
between natural codes and conventional codes.

683
00:49:29,104 --> 00:49:32,292
Natural codes make communication possible in the first place.

684
00:49:32,292 --> 00:49:36,324
Computers communicate in that way, bacteria do, and so on and so forth.

685
00:49:36,324 --> 00:49:40,044
Conventional codes do something quite different. They make an already-existing,

686
00:49:40,044 --> 00:49:45,134
different type of communication systems more powerful than otherwise would be.

687
00:49:46,511 --> 00:49:50,694
Something I didn't talk about in detail was that point number two from earlier.

688
00:49:50,694 --> 00:49:53,344
If we're going to look at cultural evolution of conventional codes,

689
00:49:53,344 --> 00:49:58,594
the right framework I think to do that, is cultural attraction.

690
00:50:00,794 --> 00:50:04,874
Non-human primate communication is probably using natural codes.

691
00:50:04,874 --> 00:50:08,467
That is a conclusion that could be overturned by more data.

692
00:50:08,467 --> 00:50:15,567
But it is made more expressive by some limited forms of meta-psychological abilities.

693
00:50:15,567 --> 00:50:21,241
What that tells us is that the continuity between non-human primates and humans

694
00:50:21,241 --> 00:50:23,530
is really in social intelligence.

695
00:50:23,530 --> 00:50:27,314
It goes from limited forms of mind-reading and manipulation to

696
00:50:27,314 --> 00:50:32,140
a form of mind-reading and manipulation where we're actually helping each other do that.

697
00:50:32,140 --> 00:50:36,154
I'm encouraging you to read my mind right now, and you're allowing me to

698
00:50:36,154 --> 00:50:39,704
manipulate your mental states. More generally, pragmatics

699
00:50:39,704 --> 00:50:46,410
—the messy reality of using language out there in communication in real-world language use—

700
00:50:46,410 --> 00:50:49,870
is solely neglected in language evolution research.

701
00:50:49,870 --> 00:50:51,980
Thank you very much for your time.

702
00:50:52,217 --> 00:50:56,387
[Applause]

703
00:51:02,513 --> 00:51:08,341
[Just if perhaps... 2 or 3 minutes to give an example of your research on

704
00:51:08,341 --> 00:51:13,741
that question which you call cultural attraction. I'd never heard that term before.]

705
00:51:13,741 --> 00:51:20,112
OK. The idea of cultural attraction is... The thing to explain...

706
00:51:21,116 --> 00:51:26,456
So, there are ... OK, two or three minutes is long enough.

707
00:51:27,585 --> 00:51:31,070
Culture consists of two types of things:

708
00:51:31,070 --> 00:51:35,600
mental representations and public expressions of those mental representations.

709
00:51:35,600 --> 00:51:39,318
Some mental representations are widely shared in the community and

710
00:51:39,318 --> 00:51:43,658
some are only shared sometimes. The ones that are widely shared are the ones we call culture.

711
00:51:43,658 --> 00:51:47,583
So we might all have similar ideas of, you know, God or whatever might be...

712
00:51:47,583 --> 00:51:51,538
And if we have similar versions of that mental representation we call it culture.

713
00:51:51,538 --> 00:51:56,089
The thing that needs explaining is why some mental representations are

714
00:51:56,089 --> 00:52:00,227
common in a population, some are not common. And...

715
00:52:03,397 --> 00:52:07,124
And I guess the key insight in cultural attraction theory is that

716
00:52:07,124 --> 00:52:12,110
as these mental representations and their public expressions are passed through a community...

717
00:52:12,110 --> 00:52:17,012
As I'm taking to you, I'm taking my mental representations, forming a public expression,

718
00:52:17,012 --> 00:52:20,868
and you're taking that public expression and forming your own mental representations.

719
00:52:20,868 --> 00:52:23,852
There's no guarantee that those two mental representations are the same and

720
00:52:23,852 --> 00:52:27,084
in fact our mechanisms of communication and cognition are actually

721
00:52:27,084 --> 00:52:30,154
going to manipulate them to fit them with our existing mental representation

722
00:52:30,154 --> 00:52:32,294
and so on and so forth...

723
00:52:32,294 --> 00:52:37,832
And those changes are often going to be common through a population.

724
00:52:37,832 --> 00:52:41,364
So you might change in a very similar way to many other people.

725
00:52:41,364 --> 00:52:45,015
And if many of us are making similar changes,

726
00:52:45,015 --> 00:52:49,325
then those mental representations tend to gravitate in certain directions and not in others.

727
00:52:49,445 --> 00:52:51,137
[...unintelligible...]

728
00:52:51,137 --> 00:52:57,335
Well, there are subtle though I think very important differences between the labels,

729
00:52:57,335 --> 00:53:00,335
which I'm not going to go into the details...

730
00:53:00,345 --> 00:53:04,695
[I understand that. I think we can stop there as far as I am concern, cause I understand.

731
00:53:05,005 --> 00:53:09,205
Do you know who (...is going to read...) on kin selection?]

732
00:53:09,326 --> 00:53:20,096
[...unintelligible...]

733
00:53:25,846 --> 00:53:36,867
[Taking your argument for Darwinian gradualism seriously, I actually have objections to your flight analogy

734
00:53:36,867 --> 00:53:40,057
(... that'd like to put as an aside...) (...)]

735
00:53:41,132 --> 00:53:45,678
Yes, yes, I realize that... It was more to make a point than to...

736
00:53:45,678 --> 00:53:53,086
[I understand... But so, the same concern applies more substantively to your conclusions for

737
00:53:53,086 --> 00:53:56,240
the very differences between the great apes and humans,

738
00:53:56,240 --> 00:53:59,199
which is: How do we get from here to there...?

739
00:53:59,199 --> 00:54:04,789
That is, if Theory of Mind abilities and social reasoning in general...

740
00:54:06,263 --> 00:54:11,423
appear progressively across apes and,

741
00:54:11,423 --> 00:54:15,797
presumably (...keeping in time...) across hominids, right?,

742
00:54:15,797 --> 00:54:21,837
then why do we get a reversal, why don't we see the same sort of emergence of

743
00:54:21,837 --> 00:54:27,616
communicative abilities in parallel with mind-reading abilities in, you know,

744
00:54:27,616 --> 00:54:40,106
co-extinct apes now rather than the reverse (...you claim...)? So, you're claiming that social cognition adds to the ability

745
00:54:40,106 --> 00:54:47,229
to manipulate the natural codes, but (...isn't the...) the driver of much of the behavior,

746
00:54:47,229 --> 00:54:53,796
and the reverse is true in humans. And I would say, well, why don't we see the two emerging...

747
00:54:53,796 --> 00:54:58,566
If what we see is more limited abilities in both extents in (...us...)

748
00:54:58,566 --> 00:55:01,566
and great apes, and if we're (...taking them into

749
00:55:01,566 --> 00:55:07,986
some winter into the past...) (...), then why the reversal? Wouldn't you expect to see, you know,

750
00:55:07,986 --> 00:55:13,399
according to Darwinian gradualism, wouldn't we expect to see the same kind of linear progression?

751
00:55:13,399 --> 00:55:16,790
That is, there's no half-a-wing problem there, you know.

752
00:55:16,790 --> 00:55:19,790
There's a little bit of a forelimb with some feathers on it, then there's a bit more

753
00:55:19,790 --> 00:55:23,630
and a bit more, and stops being a forelimb and starts being a wing and so on...]

754
00:55:23,630 --> 00:55:31,681
OK, good yes. So... In a way, the point where my analogy with locomotion and wings falls down is

755
00:55:31,681 --> 00:55:36,941
exactly where, how I want to answer the question. So, that analogy isn't perfect, I grant.

756
00:55:36,941 --> 00:55:40,232
You get into the details of ostensive communication... It's

757
00:55:40,232 --> 00:55:45,492
an intention that you understand I have an intention that you understand X.

758
00:55:45,492 --> 00:55:50,055
You don't get ostensive communication until all that apparatus is in place.

759
00:55:50,055 --> 00:55:54,705
There aren't... It doesn't seem to me that there are...

760
00:55:54,705 --> 00:55:58,284
It doesn't seem to me that there are partly ostensive forms of communication;

761
00:55:58,284 --> 00:56:02,364
you've got to have the whole apparatus in place in the first place.

762
00:56:02,364 --> 00:56:08,025
So you can build ever small sophisticated ways of reasoning about each others' minds.

763
00:56:08,025 --> 00:56:13,304
But once they... It's only once they start to become recursive in quite a rich way that you actually get

764
00:56:13,304 --> 00:56:15,690
ostensive communication happening

765
00:56:15,690 --> 00:56:19,164
[OK, so you have to have all of the selection for the mind-reading abilities coming from something else...]

766
00:56:19,164 --> 00:56:23,674
Yes, which would be some sort of Social Brain Hypothesis.]

767
00:56:23,674 --> 00:56:28,854
[So, good. Well, it's a Machiavellian intelligence argument with no communication in their (...)]

768
00:56:28,854 --> 00:56:30,664
Not in the first place.

769
00:56:30,664 --> 00:56:35,394
[(...) does necessarily depend upon your idea of gradualism?]

770
00:56:38,317 --> 00:56:41,744
Does what depend on my idea of gradualism?

771
00:56:41,744 --> 00:56:44,699
[Does your argument really depend on gradualism?]

772
00:56:44,699 --> 00:56:46,947
So...

773
00:56:46,947 --> 00:56:55,698
[I only ask that because I think there are lots of situations (...) where the edifice

774
00:56:55,698 --> 00:56:59,758
doesn't fall on (...) rise and fall (...on...) gradualism.]

775
00:56:59,758 --> 00:57:04,128
Oh, no, I'm not saying my argument rises or falls on gradualism But, you know, (...)

776
00:57:09,688 --> 00:57:14,055
[I found that really interesting and convincing.

777
00:57:14,055 --> 00:57:17,055
Although one thing that was left unstated, it was implicit,

778
00:57:17,055 --> 00:57:21,459
was why you think that testing these things in human children is important?

779
00:57:21,459 --> 00:57:26,999
And I'm wondering, you know, are there particular ages that you think are, you know...

780
00:57:26,999 --> 00:57:30,572
Do we have to push it back to the earliest point possible in order to

781
00:57:30,572 --> 00:57:35,000
provide the strongest test? Could you say some things about that?]

782
00:57:35,000 --> 00:57:37,118
The general motivation of that sort of...


783
00:57:37,118 --> 00:57:39,687
[... and what you think the research on the young kids tells us

784
00:57:39,687 --> 00:57:42,077
with respect to the evolution of language]

785
00:57:42,077 --> 00:57:44,530
It controls for other types of intelligence,

786
00:57:44,530 --> 00:57:47,530
in particular physical intelligence, intelligence with the physical world.

787
00:57:47,530 --> 00:57:51,887
So, children at about... —(...) knows better than I exactly at what sort of ages— 

788
00:57:51,887 --> 00:57:56,337
but around 2 or 3 years of age, adult chimpanzees and young children

789
00:57:56,337 --> 00:58:01,277
have similar powers for understanding the physical world (...)

790
00:58:01,277 --> 00:58:06,619
but they seem to have very different powers with the social world. So you're controlling for that

791
00:58:06,619 --> 00:58:11,519
other general type of intelligence, when you're comparing their social intelligence.

792
00:58:11,519 --> 00:58:16,249
[And... could you say just a little bit more about that? Why is that important?]

793
00:58:16,249 --> 00:58:21,437
Oh, well, because let's say we did this on adults, or with teenagers or whatever. Then somebody

794
00:58:21,437 --> 00:58:26,087
could turn around and say, Well they're just generally more intelligent. So it's not the fact that,

795
00:58:26,087 --> 00:58:28,516
that there's any particularly social intelligence or

796
00:58:28,516 --> 00:58:31,516
particularly meta-psychological-community intelligence;

797
00:58:31,516 --> 00:58:35,506
it's just the general intelligence that's being applied to a particular problem at hand.

798
00:58:35,506 --> 00:58:43,176
You can control for that by dealing with humans that have similar powers in those regards.

799
00:58:49,947 --> 00:58:50,477
Go on

800
00:58:51,161 --> 00:58:57,176
[The argument you're making for a shift in terms of associative, ostensive (...)

801
00:58:57,176 --> 00:59:02,036
that characterize your argument with great apes and the reversal with humans,

802
00:59:02,036 --> 00:59:06,886
and particularly the notion that this is not gradual transition,

803
00:59:06,886 --> 00:59:10,725
(...you said that...) is not a gradual transition,

804
00:59:10,725 --> 00:59:13,725
implies there must be a set the conditions under which

805
00:59:13,725 --> 00:59:19,025
that shift is being driven, that is unique to humans but it's not found in the great apes, otherwise

806
00:59:19,025 --> 00:59:22,980
presumably there would have been the same (...transition...) in terms of (...).

807
00:59:22,980 --> 00:59:24,870
Do you have any sorts of thoughts on

808
00:59:24,870 --> 00:59:31,340
what might be those conditions that would generate that kind of phase change?]

809
00:59:32,344 --> 00:59:36,185
I'm generally sympathetic to some version of Social Brain Hypothesis.

810
00:59:36,185 --> 00:59:39,905
Humans are an incredibly social species, they live in very large social groups...

811
00:59:39,905 --> 00:59:46,298
That seems to select for a whole lot of forms of social intelligence.

812
00:59:46,298 --> 00:59:49,828
Now, the Social Brain Hypothesis/Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis,

813
00:59:49,828 --> 00:59:51,768
whatever you want to call it,

814
00:59:51,768 --> 00:59:54,318
exists in various different forms, and people are still arguing on the nuances,

815
00:59:54,318 --> 00:59:57,290
but it does seem to me that there is quite a lot of agreement that

816
00:59:57,290 --> 01:00:01,699
the hyper sociality of humans has driven a particular social intelligence,

817
01:00:01,699 --> 01:00:05,989
which gives you the meta-psychology that I've been talking about.

818
01:00:05,989 --> 01:00:10,596
[Possibly the further development (...that could be made about your argument is to state the...)

819
01:00:10,596 --> 01:00:17,416
necessary condition with the argument (...) (...sufficient argument...)

820
01:00:17,416 --> 01:00:20,556
in a sense that (... something well-argued would say...)

821
01:00:20,556 --> 01:00:25,168
Well, why did we continue in this trajectory towards our present communicative capacities;

822
01:00:25,168 --> 01:00:33,315
why didn't we plateau at some (...more novel...) model of communicative ability (…) as well as driving further

823
01:00:33,315 --> 01:00:39,848
development of communication abilities (...) and not to be reaching a new plateau (...)

824
01:00:39,848 --> 01:00:45,168
something a little bit smarter than the great apes but well below modern humans...]

825
01:00:45,168 --> 01:00:49,953
That's why this line here. The real continuity is in social intelligence.

826
01:00:49,953 --> 01:00:52,953
And one thing that I say in the book is that,

827
01:00:52,953 --> 01:00:57,716
in a way—this isn't strictly true, but in a way—the way to think about human communication

828
01:00:57,716 --> 01:01:03,026
is not as a communication system, but as a form of social intelligence/social cognition.

829
01:01:03,026 --> 01:01:08,506
I am trying to manipulate your mind right now, you are letting me, and—equally—you're trying

830
01:01:08,506 --> 01:01:12,076
to read my mind –we're just helping each other, because we've got the set of tools that

831
01:01:12,076 --> 01:01:15,076
allow us to do it in a particularly rich way.

832
01:01:15,076 --> 01:01:17,991
So, it's not the case that there is a kind of simple form of communication

833
01:01:17,991 --> 01:01:22,051
(...that I stop telling you, that once you get it, you stop there...).

834
01:01:22,051 --> 01:01:28,078
This whole communication thing is on the cline of social intelligence,

835
01:01:28,078 --> 01:01:30,266
it's at one particular end.

836
01:01:30,266 --> 01:01:33,396
[But it did stop in the apes. That is, presumably...]

837
01:01:33,396 --> 01:01:35,936
No, no. Because... Oh, sorry yes!

838
01:01:35,936 --> 01:01:40,482
[Social intelligence... The argument is also, to whatever extent it was advantageous

839
01:01:40,482 --> 01:01:43,482
for our hominid ancestors,

840
01:01:43,482 --> 01:01:49,416
presumably is advantageous for our almost identical chimpanzees ancestors

841
01:01:49,416 --> 01:01:52,446
close to the divergence of (...Hominoidea...)]

842
01:01:52,446 --> 01:01:56,466
Would you buy any version of the Machiavellian Intelligence/Social Brain Hypothesis?

843
01:01:56,466 --> 01:02:01,025
[I don't have any objections with the Machiavellian argument as long as

844
01:02:01,025 --> 01:02:03,935
one introduces what would be the conditions

845
01:02:03,935 --> 01:02:10,096
under which further development of Machiavellian intelligence has a payoff, rather than just

846
01:02:10,096 --> 01:02:12,986
presuming that somehow it just naturally develops that way.

847
01:02:12,986 --> 01:02:15,986
Because once that you start down that route,

848
01:02:15,986 --> 01:02:21,731
you must follow it all the way to human kinds of communication.

849
01:02:21,731 --> 01:02:24,723
It seems to me what's missing in the argument is,

850
01:02:24,723 --> 01:02:29,763
what are those external conditions that would be driving the continued development of

851
01:02:29,763 --> 01:02:35,607
Machiavellian intelligence. Because, certainly, it's hard to imagine (...it as...)

852
01:02:35,607 --> 01:02:43,229
a self-generating process that couldn't stop until it got to the level of our human communication.]

853
01:02:43,229 --> 01:02:47,639
[But if communication is socially beneficial...?]

854
01:02:47,639 --> 01:02:51,678
[But what would be the conditions under which it is socially beneficial for

855
01:02:51,678 --> 01:02:56,320
hominid ancestors but not chimpanzee ancestors?

856
01:02:56,320 --> 01:02:59,850
That question... I would reframe it as...

857
01:02:59,850 --> 01:03:05,980
[The ability of the individual chimpanzees didn't also...

858
01:03:08,889 --> 01:03:12,979
... evolve (...) by accident?]

859
01:03:14,079 --> 01:03:18,189
[(...mutations...) didn't actually have to occur, you know.]

860
01:03:18,930 --> 01:03:25,780
[...unintelligible...]

861
01:03:25,992 --> 01:03:29,813
So, the answer in the Social Brain Hypothesis is that humans are more social because

862
01:03:29,813 --> 01:03:35,303
we do live in larger groups. We do have, you know, a richer array of interactions...

863
01:03:35,303 --> 01:03:37,993
[Why can't it be a happy accident?]

864
01:03:37,993 --> 01:03:40,703
[If we look down at the development of human evolution that's true,

865
01:03:40,703 --> 01:03:43,703
that's what we've come to at present, yes,

866
01:03:43,703 --> 01:03:49,383
we live in larger groups, but certainly initially we weren't. That is, at the time of divergence of

867
01:03:49,383 --> 01:03:54,673
our hominid ancestors up in the Serengeti Plain or whatever, the size of the social groups

868
01:03:54,673 --> 01:03:58,959
(....follows no difference from...) the size of the chimpanzees social groups.]

869
01:03:58,959 --> 01:04:02,706
[So that's the thing that differ. So, you know, specialty in hominids is

870
01:04:02,706 --> 01:04:05,706
very very old and predates encephalization,

871
01:04:05,706 --> 01:04:09,416
and our specialty is going to favor biparental care.

872
01:04:09,416 --> 01:04:12,416
We're the only primate that has extensive biparental care

873
01:04:12,416 --> 01:04:19,217
in large groups, so, you know, we can go on all day about things that might have lead to

874
01:04:19,217 --> 01:04:23,717
an upper ceiling that isn't there in apes that was there in hominids...]

875
01:04:24,206 --> 01:04:27,996
[I don't disagree with (...),

876
01:04:27,996 --> 01:04:31,616
...but I just want to bring attention to the fact that, in this kind of arguments,

877
01:04:31,616 --> 01:04:35,556
we also need to also be able to identify why was it that

878
01:04:35,556 --> 01:04:38,606
our particular lineage was driven in this direction

879
01:04:38,606 --> 01:04:44,657
whereas the ape lineage was not. What was different that was going on in our linage?]

880
01:04:44,657 --> 01:04:46,863
[But to be honest, that's not Thom...]

881
01:04:46,863 --> 01:04:50,892
[ I didn't want to say that, but (...)] (laughs)

882
01:04:50,892 --> 01:04:56,527
[He's saying you get human communicative abilities once

883
01:04:56,527 --> 01:05:04,057
you reach a threshold of social intelligence. Then the answer is not on him to explain how you reach

884
01:05:04,057 --> 01:05:09,257
that threshold, because—as we agreed—there are many things that might have contributed to it]

885
01:05:09,257 --> 01:05:13,857
[Well, obviously it might not be on Thom's.. It's up to him to decide whether

886
01:05:13,857 --> 01:05:17,017
it is or not (...we're not going to decide...) for him.

887
01:05:17,017 --> 01:05:21,237
But the answer is on somebody. Or at least to recognize that this is obviously a critical aspect of

888
01:05:21,237 --> 01:05:27,627
the argument in the sense of (...) . At least to recognize that there needs to be some way of

889
01:05:27,627 --> 01:05:34,843
accounting for why did occur this linage and it did not in others where the specific kinds of

890
01:05:34,843 --> 01:05:41,544
mechanisms one is talking about presumably were also operating (...) social intelligence, presumably

891
01:05:41,544 --> 01:05:44,364
was also beneficial in the context of chimpanzees (...)

892
01:05:44,364 --> 01:05:47,364
argument about social intelligence development (...)

893
01:05:47,364 --> 01:05:52,177
we're looking at changes in primates in terms of social complexity and then response to (...)

894
01:05:52,177 --> 01:05:56,567
(...that developing of...) social intelligence. Why does that particular trajectory terminate

895
01:05:56,567 --> 01:05:59,567
whereas ours doesn't? I'm not saying that you

896
01:05:59,567 --> 01:06:04,527
have to have the answer (...) rather it seems to me that this part of the argument at some point needs

897
01:06:04,527 --> 01:06:09,878
to be addressed (...). Of course, we might all come up with just-so stories about what might be

898
01:06:09,878 --> 01:06:14,088
the reasons for them (....) carrying the debate as well.]

899
01:06:14,927 --> 01:06:17,207
Can I take a different question?

900
01:06:18,717 --> 01:06:21,637
[This is a comment, not a question]

901
01:06:21,637 --> 01:06:22,647
OK

902
01:06:22,647 --> 01:06:28,017
[It's about this issue of the ability of attribute communicative intent to an interlocutor's behavior

903
01:06:28,017 --> 01:06:33,647
even when you've never seen or heard that particular behavior before.

904
01:06:33,647 --> 01:06:38,653
And I'm sure you know about this –it's an experiment out of Tomasello's group that

905
01:06:38,653 --> 01:06:41,653
addresses this directly, where the task is to choose

906
01:06:41,653 --> 01:06:48,025
the box that has a reward when the reward's been hidden and there are three boxes, visually different

907
01:06:48,025 --> 01:06:51,616
from each other. So, there's two experimenters, one directly facing the subject,

908
01:06:51,616 --> 01:06:54,616
the other standing is behind the subject,

909
01:06:54,616 --> 01:06:59,339
who communicates something to the subject, maybe a child or an ape,

910
01:06:59,339 --> 01:07:01,755
either by pointing at the right box

911
01:07:01,755 --> 01:07:05,505
—and that, of course, both the apes and the children have seen lots of pointing—

912
01:07:05,505 --> 01:07:08,808
or holding up a little replica of the box or putting on a marker on the box.

913
01:07:08,808 --> 01:07:11,808
And those, presumably, the child has never seen before

914
01:07:11,808 --> 01:07:16,115
and yet the children are much better at picking the correct box

915
01:07:16,115 --> 01:07:19,757
–much better than chance, whereas the apes don't do better than chance.

916
01:07:19,757 --> 01:07:23,787
So that's the issue that (...Dan Bornstein...) was debating with you about (...)]

917
01:07:24,407 --> 01:07:26,257
Well...

918
01:07:28,217 --> 01:07:32,397
So the thing with the object-choice task is... Yeah...

919
01:07:37,288 --> 01:07:41,775
So, it's clear that chimps struggle with points in the object-choice task;

920
01:07:41,775 --> 01:07:46,599
you can point at one or the other one and they still choose at chance level. It's not clear

921
01:07:46,599 --> 01:07:49,939
whether that's a failure to recognize that somebody's communicating

922
01:07:49,939 --> 01:07:53,829
in the first place or some sort of...

923
01:07:55,669 --> 01:08:00,976
Actually, I don't know what the alternative might look like. I kind of feel

924
01:08:00,976 --> 01:08:06,006
like there's an alternative that is some sort of cultural explanation there...

925
01:08:12,064 --> 01:08:17,854
I'm not sure what methods (….). It’s certainly the case that the results of the object-choice task

926
01:08:17,854 --> 01:08:22,274
is consistent with what I'm saying, so in a way I'm looking for (...)

927
01:08:22,553 --> 01:08:28,754
[You see, to me is very convincing. It seems to indicate that a child, even a 3-year-old child, will,

928
01:08:28,754 --> 01:08:32,794
whenever the adult is looking at the child or

929
01:08:32,794 --> 01:08:35,794
in other way indicating that (...the child should pay attention...),

930
01:08:35,794 --> 01:08:40,420
no matter what the adult does—even if is something the kid has never seen before—

931
01:08:40,420 --> 01:08:44,938
whatever this is, it's got to be something that is intended to make me understand something.]

932
01:08:44,938 --> 01:08:48,888
I certainly think that kids are communicating ostensively and

933
01:08:48,888 --> 01:08:53,156
are understanding ostensive communication, which is what you're describing.

934
01:08:53,156 --> 01:08:56,606
You won't find me (...arguing against that...). I mean, I'm agreeing that

935
01:08:56,606 --> 01:09:03,256
what you're observing is entirely consistent with what I am arguing. I guess (...) a direct test of

936
01:09:03,256 --> 01:09:07,059
the 4 things that I wanted to point, that I'm trying to address, and

937
01:09:07,059 --> 01:09:12,989
that's why (...I haven't talked about it in the book but...) I do get a passing mentioning.

938
01:09:19,453 --> 01:09:28,103
[I'm just wondering... You keep saying you're trying to modify our mental representations, (...) modify yours

939
01:09:28,103 --> 01:09:33,803
I'm just wondering, how much of this (...whole dual thing...) is dependent on

940
01:09:33,803 --> 01:09:41,593
this picture of communication that heavily emphasizes mental representation.

941
01:09:41,593 --> 01:09:45,773
I missed the beginning of your talk so maybe you mentioned something about this,

942
01:09:45,773 --> 01:09:53,759
but Wittgenstein once said something about how, you know, tools all serve to modify something,

943
01:09:53,759 --> 01:10:02,063
so the chisel modifies the piece of wood and, you know... the hammer modifies the nail...

944
01:10:02,063 --> 01:10:08,256
What does it take to modify (...) my idea of the (...length of the thing...)?

945
01:10:08,256 --> 01:10:13,336
And then Wittgenstein says, What is accomplished by this assimilation of expressions?

946
01:10:13,336 --> 01:10:20,623
So, I'm just wondering, what is done by... What is the consequence of viewing

947
01:10:20,623 --> 01:10:25,913
everything in terms of mental representations and intentions?

948
01:10:25,913 --> 01:10:35,735
And one reason I'm thinking about this is, you may well be right that social communication and people...

949
01:10:35,735 --> 01:10:38,925
That the point of continuity between earlier primates

950
01:10:38,925 --> 01:10:42,941
and us is social communication.

951
01:10:42,941 --> 01:10:48,191
But there have been a lot of patterns found by conversation analysts that

952
01:10:48,191 --> 01:10:56,641
don't emphasize mental representations. They sort of emphasize adjacency pairs, more of a "dance",

953
01:10:56,641 --> 01:11:03,938
which may involve keeping track of things and maybe involves keeping track of intentions.

954
01:11:05,160 --> 01:11:10,991
And, I guess... (how do you pronounce his name, Federico Rossano?)

955
01:11:10,991 --> 01:11:16,891
Rossano has found that in a lot of primates there are

956
01:11:16,891 --> 01:11:20,360
sort of similar timings, some similar stuff.

957
01:11:20,360 --> 01:11:24,680
So, maybe this (...conversationalist analysts stuff...) is just the

958
01:11:24,680 --> 01:11:29,843
(...conventionalized content...) that you're kind of setting to the side,

959
01:11:29,843 --> 01:11:32,843
but I'm just wondering –if you focused more

960
01:11:32,843 --> 01:11:38,759
on that kind of pattern you come up with slightly different take on things...]

961
01:11:38,759 --> 01:11:48,591
I don't see the two... I don't see (...as foxing...) on the conversational patterns and

962
01:11:48,591 --> 01:11:51,345
forms of the conventions, and focusing on

963
01:11:51,345 --> 01:11:55,245
the mental representation as being in any way (...on a par...) (...).

964
01:11:55,245 --> 01:11:57,885
So the former is a consequence of the latter.

965
01:11:57,885 --> 01:12:01,876
[Wait, which is a consequence? Just spell it out]

966
01:12:01,876 --> 01:12:09,466
We're engaged in the mental manipulation and mind-reading that I was talking about earlier and...

967
01:12:11,040 --> 01:12:14,286
[And that leads to the conversational (...)?]

968
01:12:14,286 --> 01:12:17,878
That with lead to—well, that and many other things that are involved:

969
01:12:17,878 --> 01:12:20,889
the cultural attraction and so on and so forth—would lead to conversational patterns that

970
01:12:20,889 --> 01:12:24,519
you do observe in conversational analysis and so on and so forth.

971
01:12:24,519 --> 01:12:26,129
I don't see any reason to...

972
01:12:26,129 --> 01:12:31,547
[But you said the apes have that patterns and don't have the other stuff, then that doesn't work.]

973
01:12:31,547 --> 01:12:38,260
Well, the patterns that we might observe in ape communication and in human communication

974
01:12:38,260 --> 01:12:41,719
are not themselves cognitive traits that could be subjected by biological evolution.

975
01:12:41,719 --> 01:12:45,589
They're not patterns of...

976
01:12:45,589 --> 01:12:48,026
[The ability to produce such patterns!]

977
01:12:48,026 --> 01:12:53,600
Sure!... No, no, no! No individual produces patterns; these are patterns of exchange...

978
01:12:53,600 --> 01:12:59,859
[Right, (...the ability to...) participate in such patterns. I just wonder if... Again, you seem to be saying that

979
01:12:59,859 --> 01:13:06,129
the representations are driving everything, and I'm just wondering if it might be the other way round or

980
01:13:06,129 --> 01:13:11,497
if they might be both be driving each other and if it's necessary always to...

981
01:13:11,497 --> 01:13:15,722
I'm not one of these anti-representationalist people...

982
01:13:15,722 --> 01:13:19,122
but I wonder if it's always necessary or even necessarily helpful.

983
01:13:19,122 --> 01:13:24,462
And I just think it might be fun to think of it in a different way just for (...kicks...) (laughs)]

984
01:13:28,061 --> 01:13:32,056
I guess there's two points I want to make.

985
01:13:32,056 --> 01:13:35,111
Let me draw on the conversation analysis and the patterns.

986
01:13:35,111 --> 01:13:39,801
Let me draw on an analogy in a different area of language which I worked on, which is

987
01:13:39,801 --> 01:13:42,051
the fact that you we combine things together...

988
01:13:42,051 --> 01:13:46,171
They're very basic syntax, is taking things together in various ways.

989
01:13:46,171 --> 01:13:51,981
Human language is full of this. And some people have started to uncover

990
01:13:51,981 --> 01:13:56,744
simple forms of this, in some non-human primate communication. So there's a

991
01:13:56,744 --> 01:14:01,784
natural Darwinian story to (...be told there...). So the last couple of years I've been collaborating with

992
01:14:01,784 --> 01:14:03,532
some microbiologists.

993
01:14:03,532 --> 01:14:06,532
Cause I've been skeptical, for all the reasons I've highlighted here, that there's actually

994
01:14:06,532 --> 01:14:12,062
a continuity there. So I got talking to some microbiologists who work on bacterial communication.

995
01:14:12,062 --> 01:14:19,051
And we did an experiment basically replicating the playback experiments done with various monkey species.

996
01:14:19,051 --> 01:14:25,161
We found the same results. We found combinatorial communication of the same sort you find in monkeys in bacteria.

997
01:14:25,161 --> 01:14:32,690
Now, the point here is that you can see these patterns... This is a system, right?, a communication system,

998
01:14:32,690 --> 01:14:37,889
like the patterns (...) is not a trait that is subjected to biological evolution (...) The capacity to engage in patterns,

999
01:14:37,889 --> 01:14:43,289
the capacity to combine things together might be. But there's no reason why that isn't very phylogenetically deep

1000
01:14:43,289 --> 01:14:49,972
I don't see them as cognitively demanding. Bacteria stick symbols together. So do monkeys, so do humans.

1001
01:14:49,972 --> 01:14:55,796
That's not the thing to explain. And it seems to me quite possible the same thing is true of

1002
01:14:55,796 --> 01:14:59,036
the patterns that you're pointing to.

1003
01:14:59,759 --> 01:15:02,699
[Well, maybe true, I don't know]

1004
01:15:05,208 --> 01:15:13,743
[So... You started out by talking about what is the invention, alluded to, that you might get to]

1005
01:15:13,743 --> 01:15:15,856
(...) (...patterns of communication...)

1006
01:15:16,646 --> 01:15:18,386
(...)

1007
01:15:18,856 --> 01:15:20,896
[Sure, I got that (laughs).

1008
01:15:21,532 --> 01:15:32,678
The claim, (... further into the taxonomazing game....) people seem to like to talk about what's special

1009
01:15:32,678 --> 01:15:42,978
for language. And I was wondering what your position was there. Because most of the ingredients that you've given

1010
01:15:42,978 --> 01:15:48,229
(...where surely...) conventions are not special for language... it all depends on cultural conventions

1011
01:15:48,229 --> 01:15:50,420
(...that are not linguistic...) ]

1012
01:15:50,420 --> 01:15:51,768
Yeah, sure.

1013
01:15:51,768 --> 01:15:57,685
[(...certainly ontogeny is not special for language...). Is there anything, in your view... –for instance,

1014
01:15:57,685 --> 01:16:05,425
emergent thing that hasn't particularly... There's no linguistic trace that specifically (...have been selected...)?]

1015
01:16:05,425 --> 01:16:11,758
Right. So, it seems to me that the point number two, the (...join with...) cultural attraction and languages is to explain

1016
01:16:11,758 --> 01:16:16,278
why we see these the sorts of properties, the structural properties, that we associate with languages. So,

1017
01:16:16,278 --> 01:16:21,555
people have long observed that languages have various (...differences...) in structural properties,

1018
01:16:21,555 --> 01:16:25,981
(...independent of...) the relations. And we need to explain why certain, you know,

1019
01:16:25,981 --> 01:16:29,241
word orders are common while other ones are not.

1020
01:16:29,241 --> 01:16:34,477
And those explanations..., well, that's where cultural attraction come in, and the sorts of factors of attraction that

1021
01:16:34,477 --> 01:16:40,093
are going to be important are the ability to stick things together, the ability to engage in patterns, patterns of interactions and

1022
01:16:40,093 --> 01:16:41,803
so on and so forth. And various other things,

1023
01:16:41,803 --> 01:16:47,353
which might well be phylogenetic indeed, might well shared with other human behaviors and so on and so forth

1024
01:16:47,673 --> 01:16:48,678
[ or bacteria (...)]

1025
01:16:48,828 --> 01:16:54,133
Indeed. Each one is on a case by case basis, but I don't have any one that I want to hold up as, you know,

1026
01:16:54,133 --> 01:16:58,055
as this one is only working in language. I dont have any reasons to do that...

1027
01:16:58,055 --> 01:17:02,057
But that's not to say that there isn't one; there might be but I don't know what it is.

1028
01:17:02,057 --> 01:17:09,437
[So I guess what I'm getting at is—and I confess that don't like when people ask these kinds of questions—

1029
01:17:09,437 --> 01:17:17,015
what has there been selected for? (...) I mean, natural selection is selecting for a thing...

1030
01:17:18,726 --> 01:17:22,909
Is any of the things that (...being...) selected for specifically because of (...) ?]

1031
01:17:23,409 --> 01:17:30,046
Oh, I see . Maybe, maybe not. Once you've got ostensive communication and you've got conventions which are

1032
01:17:30,046 --> 01:17:37,001
making it more expressively powerful –this is an extremely powerful tool, right? It allows us to do all sorts of things.

1033
01:17:37,001 --> 01:17:41,962
It seems quite plausible to me that you could have the natural selection for mechanisms that make the acquisition of

1034
01:17:41,962 --> 01:17:47,544
those conventions and the use of those conventions much more fluent and easy than otherwise might be.

1035
01:17:47,544 --> 01:17:50,348
If there's such a thing, that is what we should be calling

1036
01:17:50,348 --> 01:17:53,348
an LAD [Language Acquisition Device] or a UG [Universal Grammar] or whatever.

1037
01:17:53,348 --> 01:17:57,267
In fact (...I quote you...),you say much the same thing in the book.

1038
01:17:57,267 --> 01:18:03,179
Whether there is such thing of that sort... I actually dont know. That's why I said maybe maybe

1039
01:18:03,509 --> 01:18:04,379
[OK]

1040
01:18:07,567 --> 01:18:15,329
[I will try to keep this really brief because I'll take a lot of your time during the (...rest of your stay...).

1041
01:18:15,329 --> 01:18:19,688
So, you already know that I disagree with you about a whole "how much do apes do".

1042
01:18:19,688 --> 01:18:20,738
Yes.

1043
01:18:20,738 --> 01:18:24,748
But I'd like, to kind of, just bang on about that for a second.]

1044
01:18:24,748 --> 01:18:25,539
OK

1045
01:18:25,539 --> 01:18:32,136
[Because I think that the example that you started up with, with—you know: "I'd like a chip please"—none of that

1046
01:18:32,136 --> 01:18:40,211
would be capture in any of the (...published literature...) about apes, and I think that you're relaying somewhat heavily on,

1047
01:18:40,211 --> 01:18:49,832
you know, the body of work that manages to get published about primatology, and the meaning of primate signals.

1048
01:18:49,832 --> 01:18:58,310
And I think that the onus there is really on primatologists to discuss and to really sort of open up our thinking about

1049
01:18:58,310 --> 01:19:05,677
primate communication. But I'd say that the experiments that are done, and certainly the work that is published about

1050
01:19:05,677 --> 01:19:11,869
certain communicative repertoires in primate systems, are heavily influenced by, you know, the kind of,

1051
01:19:11,869 --> 01:19:16,690
"Oh, what makes human language special?! Oh, let's look at primates and the (...) models and (...) models"]

1052
01:19:16,690 --> 01:19:19,020
Yes, I agree, and I think its a mistake, yes.

1053
01:19:19,020 --> 01:19:24,577
[But, I'd say that, you know, certainly in ape gesture literature, 80% of the communication gets thrown out

1054
01:19:24,577 --> 01:19:33,292
because we don't have enough examples of X leads to Y to say anything about it. And so the vast majority of

1055
01:19:33,292 --> 01:19:42,628
interactions and (...), and you know... Apes spend a huge amount of time, you know, doing this

1056
01:19:43,008 --> 01:19:45,498
(laughs)

1057
01:19:45,628 --> 01:19:48,051
None of that is provable,]

1058
01:19:48,051 --> 01:19:49,701
Sure, I understand.

1059
01:19:49,701 --> 01:19:53,971
[None of that is objective and replicable... There's a lot of discussion about,

1060
01:19:53,971 --> 01:20:00,288
Well... is it anecdote...? data...? I don't really know where I fall; I've written things about, you know,

1061
01:20:00,288 --> 01:20:07,668
[sarcastic tone:] Semantics of the Gesture Repertoire. I'm completely guilty of this, but I think that is very hard to

1062
01:20:07,668 --> 01:20:14,021
make a claim where you say, "ape communications is this way" and "human communication is this way" when

1063
01:20:14,021 --> 01:20:21,838
this (...) the published claims about ape communication is being this way are very strongly influenced by exactly the same kind of

1064
01:20:21,838 --> 01:20:27,628
(...thing that...) sort of faults with linguistics and (...thinking of...) what makes human language special

1065
01:20:27,640 --> 01:20:30,462
that you criticized in the first half of your talk.]

1066
01:20:30,852 --> 01:20:34,490
So that's why there are question marks on these (laughs)

1067
01:20:34,900 --> 01:20:39,350
[I'd preferred it if you'd offered them as series of (...)](laughs)

1068
01:20:40,980 --> 01:20:44,598
(...)

1069
01:20:44,598 --> 01:20:48,871
[(...) I wanted to know what you thought in terms of the OI [ostensive inferential] model...

1070
01:20:48,871 --> 01:20:51,688
Can you have ostension without a code?]

1071
01:20:51,688 --> 01:20:55,473
Yes, sure. Point... That chip gesture...

1072
01:20:55,473 --> 01:21:01,214
[No, I know, but I mean do you think could you have the cognitive capacities as a species

1073
01:21:01,214 --> 01:21:06,364
without having either a very developed natural or conventional code system?]

1074
01:21:10,552 --> 01:21:16,881
Yes, and you can see it in the natural world. We see it in kids. So ostensive communication

1075
01:21:16,881 --> 01:21:20,221
precedes linguistic communication in development.

1076
01:21:20,221 --> 01:21:32,895
[Yeah, no, I agree with you, but I am not sure about this ordering of ...... informational intent and communicative intent

1077
01:21:32,895 --> 01:21:40,635
as communicative intent follows informative intent. I mean, if informative intent relies to some extent on

1078
01:21:40,635 --> 01:21:45,022
there being conventional or natural codes. Doesn't it or was I...?]

1079
01:21:45,022 --> 01:21:46,488
No, I'm not following, sorry

1080
01:21:46,488 --> 01:21:47,805
[I'll argue about that later]

1081
01:21:47,805 --> 01:21:49,045
OK

1082
01:21:49,045 --> 01:21:53,445
[The difference between meaningful and symbolic, right?]

1083
01:21:53,945 --> 01:21:55,309
I've lost track now (laughs)

1084
01:21:56,793 --> 01:22:00,603
[The difference between meaningful and symbolic]

1085
01:22:00,925 --> 01:22:07,224
[We should take this up after (...) because we're now at the end of our discussion.

1086
01:22:07,224 --> 01:22:09,604
Thank you very much] (applause)