Thank you Clark and you all for coming along
Delighted to be here...
I'm really looking forward to spending this quarter at UCLA
Plenty of people with overlapping research interests.
As Clark says, I'm going to talk today
about the evolution of human communication and languages,
what I spend most my career today researching.
There's the book –I might just as well hold it up!
I didn't tell anybody (no, no, I'm joking) [laughs]
But before I talk about language, given that I'm here for a quarter
and I would like to talk to lots people and wider intellectual world while I'm here,
I just wanted to briefly mention a couple other things I'm generally interested in.
I've got a paper short of coming out on recursive mindreading, the idea that...
this guy is thinking; she's thinking about what he's thinking;
he can think about what she's thinking about what he's thinking and
so on and so forth.
Something that, although simple mind-reading is much studied, recursive mind-reading
is not much studied, but it seems to me vital for a lot of critical human institutions, behaviors...
And it's something I've become very interested in lately.
And I've also become very interested in cultural attraction, which is
an approach to thinking about culture and cultural evolution
developed first by Dan Sperber and then by others such as
Pascal Boyer and Lawrence Hirschfeld and so on.
So these are just two things that I'm interested in general at the moment.
I'm going to be collaborating with Jacob, who's just there, on cultural attraction while I'm here.
But yes, as Clark said, today I'm going to talk about
the origins and evolution of human communication and language.
So the origins of human language is something with a long intellectual history.
It goes back pre-Darwin...
Several intellectuals have written about it...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the most well-known of the pre-Darwinians (...)
Darwin himself wrote about the origins of language for several pages in The Descent of Man.
And there's been interest in it throughout the 20th century,
I guess the clearest manifestation of that is the many
ape-language experiments that took place from, I guess, from the 1920s onwards.
And then 1960, a famous paper by a linguist called Charles Hockett...
where he outlined what he called the designed features of language.
Features of languages, that languages have which, in Charles Hockett's view,
made languages what they are, made them languages. And he wrote about comparing them with other
communication systems in the natural world. For instance, the bee dance, echolocation,
and so on and so forth.
And then since around the last 20, 25 years or so
these various different streams of interest, from linguistics, from biology,
from primatology, and so on, have come together a bit more. And there's now a healthy
community of people studying language origins and evolution under the name Evolang.
Conferences have been running since 1996.
And the field I guess is mature enough that there's now in Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution.
This is a big book, it's 800-pages long. This is published in 2011.
And on its back cover it sort of says what its objectives are, and I actually agree that it
does do what it says on the tin: this is a book where leading scholars
present critical accounts of every aspect of the field.
A wide-ranging summation of the work in all the disciplines involved.
So this is proposed to be, and I agree, an accurate portrayal of where we are in
the field language evolution.
You look in the index and you look up the number of entries
listed under different sub-disciplines of linguistics,
and this is what you find... Syntax and related terms, semantics and related terms: plenty of entries;
almost nothing on pragmatics. Pragmatics is kind of the messy part of language,
is a bit that deals with language use in context. So if you think of semantics as meaning in isolation,
pragmatics is meaning in context.
So what we say is not always the same as what we mean, and
pragmatics deals with that difference. It's stuff that's used in metaphor and
irony and various ambiguity, and various other topics.
But yet we're barely thinking about it in language evolution.
Instead what we're doing is thinking of languages as... more like digital codes,
and studying them in those terms. So I'm just going to give one example.
It's a quote from a very famous paper from Pinker & Bloom in 1990,
and they talk about the vocal-auditory channel having desirable features as a medium of communication:
high-bandwidth; a serial interface; basic tools of a coding scheme;
an inventory of distinguishable symbols and their concatenations.
So we've got the language of information theory, of coding and decoding,
scattered throughout this, and this is not just how people are thinking about it.
It's also... You can see this in the methods that people employ, in the computational models and
mathematical models that are build.
But what people are looking at very much is coding systems,
and how you start to combine symbols together to form
more complex signals and so on and so forth.
Very little work, actually, on the messy reality of language use out there in the world.
If there's a central message to my book is that this agenda is a profound mistake.
And I guess what I've tried to do in the book is
to illustrate this is a profound mistake by taking pragmatic seriously, putting it front and center.
This is what we're doing with language; this is what we're doing in communication in general.
And showing that you can actually answer all the big questions you might want to ask
about language evolution by taking pragmatics seriously.
So why do only humans have language? Where are the points a continuity and discontinuity with other species?
How do languages evolve the very structural properties that make them languages?
All these questions get good answers if we start to take pragmatics seriously.
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,
which is the relationship between non-human primate communication and human communication,
the similarities and differences between them. And that will actually lead us to an explanation of
—or part of an explanation— of why only humans have language.
So let's get into a bit more detail. Actually, this is probably a good point for me to stress that
I'm actually quite happy to take questions as we go along.
I've come from research where that's the norm and I find that's quite a nice way
for the speaker to know where the audience are. So please stick your hands up if you have any questions.
OK, so let's go into a bit more detail on what the code-model communication is.
One way of thinking about it is with what's called the conduit metaphor.
You have this package, this thing that you put into a package, and then you send it along
a conduit where it gets unwrapped at the other end.
It's a way of thinking about how communication works in the first place.
And we see this metaphor in our everyday language: "send me your ideas", "get your message across".
Expressions like these are all employing this conduit metaphor.
Another way of thinking about communication, a very famous way,
is Shannon & Weaver's Information Theory. The idea here is
that as information which gets encoded by some encoding algorithm,
and then it gets transmitted, maybe some noise into the situation here,
and then at this end it gets decoded by some decoding algorithm.
And if the encoding algorithm the decoding algorithm are appropriately calibrated to one another,
then what comes out one end is the same as what went in at the other end,
and we can say communication has been successful.
There's actually a plus sign here, though it's not strictly a sort of an equation
(if you add these two up you get this). But you can probably see how
if you're thinking about communication in these terms you end up with
what I'm calling "natural codes"... And these are essentially pairs of associations;
so you have an association between a state the world and a signal,
and then an association between a signal and a response.
And if those associations are matched up to one another, you can say we've got
some sort communication system. So this is one natural code; this could be another natural code.
And natural codes are perfectly good ways to think about many instances of communication in
the natural world. It's how computers communicate, but is also,
I think, the best way to describe all sorts of natural communication systems,
from bacteria through insects, animals, and so on and so forth.
The problem is... OK, before I move on to the problem...
This is kind of stressing the point I was making earlier, that in language evolution
were very much at the moment thinking about communication in terms of natural codes, so
a BBS [Behavioral and Brain Sciences] paper, 2009, Nicholas Evans and Steve Levinson:
"... those interested in the evolution of the biological preconditions for language
have been looking in the wrong place"
—I agree with them—"Instead of looking at the pragmatics of communicative exchange,
they've been focused on the syntax and combinatorics".
So that's where we are at the moment.
We're looking at these codes and the combining of these codes in various ways.
This is Wittgenstein on the left, and Paul Grice,
who's often seen as a founder of pragmatics as a discipline.
I like this slide because of the way they seem to be critically looking at each other
Which kind of underlines one of the points both of them wanted to make
—or at least Wittgenstein at one point of his career wanted to make—
which is that communication is not as simple is this.. Actually, you know,
it's very tempting, it's very attractive to look at languages
and to try to make them fit this box of natural codes;
to cut them up into digital components, and so on and so forth.
But that doesn't work it turns out.
And reality is undeterminancy... The fact that what I say is not the same as what I mean
is actually not just the messy things on the edges.
It's pervasive. It's everywhere.
This is the point that both of these philosophers wanted to make.
And we can see it (I'm not going to go deep into the philosophy) but we can see
several simple examples just here. So, the most trivial example is to say, well, what's "that" here?
We have these deictic expressions in languages.
Pronouns, he/she and so on, and other examples.
This here... Is this "bank" as in the side to the river or is it a financial institution?
We don't know. This could mean "dinner", could mean "run away", it could mean
"Look at the cute fluffy bunny"... It could mean all sorts of things.
And in this one here Peter's answer (sorry if you cant see)
Mary says, "Would you like to join us for dinner?"
and Peter replies, "I ate earlier".
And Peter's response doesn't actually answer Mary's question directly.
He has not answered the question. Yet we all know and Mary knows what he's getting at.
Now, the point I'm making here is not the trivial and obvious one,
that there's ambiguity in language –we all know that, nobody's going to deny that.
The point is that, as a code, as something to make communication possible in the first place,
languages are not very good. In fact, they're quite hopeless.
If all you've got is the code, if that's all, you don't know what this means,
you don't know what this mean, in general don't know what any of this means on its own.
So, to go back and think about the natural codes that made communication possible
in that information-theoretic way.
Communication can be said to exist if you have those pairs associations.
That's simply not true here.
If you just have a code, the linguistic code, you don't have communication, not yet.
So taking these facts seriously, pragmatics has developed a different way of thinking
about communication.
Well, I've said "a" —there are probably several different proposals out there.
I think the clearest one comes from Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's Relevance Theory.
And the label they used to contrast their way of thinking about
communication with the code model... So they coined the term "code model", and they
contrasted it with what they call the "ostensive-inferential model".
A slightly cumbersome phrase, but it does capture what they're trying to describe.
And the idea is that we're providing evidence... When we talk we're providing evidence and
what we are providing evidence for is intentions.
And more precisely, those intentions are what we call
"communicative intention" and "informative intention".
So, informative intention is my intention that you come to believe something.
So if I say, "There is cake for dinner", I want you to believe that there is cake for dinner.
That's my intention. I want to change your mental state so that you now you think that
there is going to be cake for dinner.
A communicative intention is my intention that you recognize that I have
an informative intention in the first place.
So: I intend that you understand that I intend that you understand that there is cake for dinner.
Now, that sounds complex. But... —I'm certainly not going to go into all the details
because wed be here all week— but when you get into the details of
Relevance Theory, this account—this way of thinking about communications—starts
to deal seriously with the philosophical issues that Grice and Wittgenstein and plenty of others
were addressing or were raising, excuse me.
A more simple way, without getting in all the jargon, a kind of the simplest way of thinking about
what's going on here is: we're expressing two intentions:
one is what I'm trying to communicate, and the other is the fact that I'm trying to communicate.
So: "what am I trying to say" and "am I trying to say anything at all?"
This is not just an account of linguistic communication but communication in general.
So what's the difference between this point, which is direct and very clearly directing toward Clark,
and this point here, where I'm looking at my watch and the fact that I am pointing is incidental.
One of these is communicative and the other one is not.
So one of them is expressing a communicative intention, and the other is not.
That's the need for the communicative intention there.
And then once that you recognize that somebody has a communicative intention
you can go about the challenge of identifying the content of the informative intention,
of this half here.
And as I said, this is not just linguistic –we see this all times.
Pointing is one example, but we also shrug, we do all sorts of things with our bodies,
and when we do we do them, we do them in stylized and exaggerated ways, and in doing so make it
apparent to our intended audience that we're trying to communicate with them
and what it is we're trying to communicate.
Here is one example: I was in a pub some weeks ago, standing at the bar with a friend,
we we're both facing that way, the bar is here,
and I had my note in one hand and my other hand just here.
And my friend had just ordered some chips, and they'd arrived, they had just been given to him,
so they're situated just here. And were chatting away, and I, with my hand, I just went like this,
I don't know if you can all see that,
so I was chatting away and I went did this, in a deliberate and stylized way.
Made this gesture with my hand.
And he just said Yes. And I took a chip and ate it.
Now... we move our hands all the time, right?,
but there's something about the stylized and exaggerated way in which I did that,
which revealed to my friend that,
a) I wanted to communicate with him, and b) what it was I wanted to communicate.
This is not something you can capture with a natural code.
We didn't have any convention associated with this expression and
the idea "Can I have a chip?" This is just something that's created on the fly.
As said, we shrug our shoulders, we do all sorts of things. This is ostensive communication.
So what we have here is two ways of thinking about the very possibility of communication in the first place.
On the one hand we have the code model, and the code model is defined
by the fact that is made possible by associations.
So if you have an organism able to make associations with the state the world and with some behavior,
and perhaps with the observations of the world and some reaction,
then you can have communication in the code-model type of way.
We see this all over the natural world.
On the other hand, you have this other type of communication,
which is about expressing and recognizing intentions.
And this is made possible—what defines it as a type of communication—
is the fact that is a type of meta-psychology,
is a type of manipulating others' minds,
and mind-reading and manipulation. So, as a speaker, I'm trying to
change your mental state right now. I'm manipulating your minds and you are trying to read my mental states.
I have intentions and you're trying to read them.
Made possible by our mechanisms of meta-psychology.
And the difference here... I want to stress that the difference here
is not one of degree; it's one of kind.
And a way to make that graphic is to contrast it with an entirely different domain,
namely locomotion. Flying and walking are two different types of locomotion.
But we don't want to say that flying is some sort of enhanced form of walking.
They're the same sort of thing, they're locomotion, but they're totally different ways
of going about it, a difference in kind.
Similarly, ostensive communication and code mode communication
are differences in kind.
So where does language fit into this distinction?
It's a very assumption to make, a common assumption, that with linguistic communication
what we're dealing with is a system which is really, at bottom, it's a code.
And then on top of it you plug in all this meta-psychology, this pragmatics,
and then you get language.
Many people, both those inside linguistics and those outside,
have said that, sometimes linguists have "physics envy".
So they look at physics with this world where they can cut things up into precise things that are
clearly identifiable. And they try to do the same thing with language, so
you've got these individual phonemes and they are distinct from each other,
and you can do the same thing for syntax and it goes to semantics and so on and so forth.
And so the object of study for linguistics becomes –well, in addition, the object to study
for linguistics are the languages themselves, the linguistic code.
And so it's very easy to think that this is really what linguistic communication is about,
is a type of communication made possible by associations—i.e. a code model—
and then the meta-psychology, the pragmatics is the bonus, that's what makes it more expressively powerful.
The reality is exactly the other way around. This common assumption is upside down.
What's going on here, in linguistic communication,
is that our communication is made possible by ostention, inference, meta-psychology.
And then on top of that, what we've done is creating a linguistic code
which allows us to be much more expressive, and more precise than we otherwise could be.
So I can point to things in this room, but with language I can point to things
remote in time and space, and I do that because I've got these tools, what
we call the linguistic code, the conventions that allow me to do that.
It's vital that our terminology reflects this; the difference between the sort of codes
that are making ostensive communication more powerful and the natural code we had earlier.
So natural codes make communication possible –that's the point I was making earlier.
The linguistic code, on the other hand, is a different type of code.
It's a type of code that makes a different type of communication, ostensive communication,
more powerful. So I use this label: conventional codes.
The linguistic code is a conventional code. It makes another type of communication—ostensive communication—
more powerful than otherwise would be.
OK, so now we understand what language is.
Languages are conventional codes designed to make a type
of communication more expressively powerful than otherwise would be.
And with that thought in mind we can be very clear about what it is
we're trying to explain the origins and evolution of.
And we can boil this down to two things: on the one hand, we need to explain
how we evolved the social-cognitive mechanisms that make ostensive communication
possible in first place. That's one challenge. And the other challenge is to explain
the creation, the cultural evolution of the conventional code itself.
How, when we're interacting with each other, do we create these codes, converge upon
shared meanings for those codes. And how do they change in the way they're used
in interaction, passed between generations, to come to take the
structural features that we associate with languages.
They're really, to my mind, the two big questions for evolutionary linguistics.
I'm going to talk in the rest of the talk about number one.
Number two is where I think cultural attraction has a big role to play, and it's a very exciting
area for research, but I'm not going to talk about that today. I'm going to focus
for the rest of the talk on number one.
There's a whole body of research looking at, comparing the cognitive abilities
of humans, in particular human children, with those of our primate relatives, particularly chimpanzees.
Then immediately, when I look at this literature I see a bit of... it's a challenge to comparison,
when we look at it from the pragmatic perspective.
In pragmatics we have a rich body of theory, we've defined this thing called ostensive communication.
It's a very central idea about how human communication works.
And people looking at non-human primate communication certainly recognize the
importance of pragmatics –there's no question of that.
The idea that intentions are critical is central to that literature.
But what people have been studying for the most part is not this,
but something else that is called intentional communication.
The question is, well, are these the same thing? If not, how do they differ?
And I think they're different things.
When people look for intentional communication in the primate literature,
there's a whole bunch of different criteria that are used,
sometimes consistently, sometimes inconsistently,
between different studies.
And sometimes that inconsistency is for good methodological reasons.
It's easier to look for certain of these criteria in one domain,
say in the vocal domain rather than in the gesture domain and so on.
But anyway, the literature by and large tends to use some or all of these seven criteria
as measures of intentional communication.
And some of these might be stronger or weaker than others.
Now, rather than going into a detailed discussion of these, what I want to bring attention to
is that all of these are really about goal-directedness.
They're about how the signal itself is used.
So, is the signal used in a goal-directed way, in an intentional way?,
or is it used in a more... less socially-sensitive way?, in a way that perhaps suggests,
less meta-psychology involved?
Now, thinking back to what ostensive communications is, ostensive communication is defined
as the expression of intentions. So what intentions are doing here,
they're the thing that is being expressed, they're what is expressed.
I express my informative intentions and my communicative intentions.
When I point in a stylized way rather than an incidental way, I'm expressing
a communicative intention.
Whereas what's been studied in the primate literature, it seems to me,
is "how" signals are being produced: are they produced in an intentional way or not?
So these are not quite the same thing.
Having said that, you'll often see the language used in the literature conflating the two.
So, these communicative intentions (this phrase) has a technical definition in pragmatics,
is the thing that expresses the signaling signalhood, the fact that you're trying to communicate.
But this paper is certainly very much talking about an intention to communicate,
actually about this sort of thing.
It is not obvious to me that these are the same things.
What we need to look at is: Do we see the expression and recognition of informative and communicative intentions?
That's what ostensive communication is at bottom.
And so that's really the question we should be asking.
And there's at least enough data out there for us to give us a tentative answer to this question so...
That's where we're going now.
So, the expression and the recognition of communicative intentions and informative intentions.
We have a two-by-two grid and we can ask about both human children and about great apes.
And first we're going to look at the expression of informative intention.
An informative intention is an intention to manipulate a mental state.
I have an intention to change your mental states right now
about what informative attentions are, and so on and so forth.
So how might we go about testing this in the lab?
Here's one way.
In this study, the children come into the lab and they play a game set up in various ways
but the long made short of it is that the child is going to make a request off the adult
for an object. In this case a ball.
And then they're going to get the ball, but they're going get it in one of two different conditions.
Either they're going to get it because the experimenter says, "Oh, you want the ball?, here's the ball" -everybody's happy.
Or the experimenter says, "Oh, you want the paper? (or the elephant?), and then, accidentally, gives them the ball.
So in this case the child has the material goal satisfied
but if they have an informative intention, an intention to manipulate a mental state, that's actually not been satisfied,
because the adult's mental state has not been changed in the way that the child so wished.
Whereas in this case that has happened.
And what we find is that children kick up a fuss in this situation, they start complaining.
"No, you didn't understand"; "No, I want the ball"; "But you have the ball;"
"but, but, but..." And you can see where this goes.
The fact that they're complaining shows that their goals are not simply material, not simply to get the ball,
but change the mental state of the adult, which in turn will get them the ball.
So children understand, they have some understanding, of what an informative intention is,
and are able to express it, and understand when that intention has been satisfied or not.
Nobody's done the comparable experiment with great apes.
Recognition of an informative intention... Well, actually, here nobody's done the experiment
with great apes or with children.
And the sort of experiment that could be done would be
similar to the previous one I've just described, but perhaps with an observer and if that observer...
Hold on, my thoughts have gone blank, sorry...
Sorry --I have a mind blank.
No, my mind's gone blank.
Hopefully you're doing the work for me and you're on your own!
Sorry?
[...unintelligible...]
--Yeah, maybe so yes
[(...unintelligible...) the wrong thing is given and the observer says bad-bad-bad or something?]
Good, good okay, yes twice! Coming back now...!
So, let's say... Let's go back to the previous one...
Let's say we're in this situation and then the child doesn't complain,
or another adult—there are two adults—and this adult asks for the ball,
gets the ball, even though they we're misunderstood.
Does the observer say, "Hold on!!, something's not up, something's not right here..."?
And if they do, they're recognizing that somebody else—namely this person—has an informative intention.
Nobody's done that experiment with kids or with apes.
So we don't know the answer to that.
Let's look now at communicative intentions. Communicative intentions are intentions to make it
apparent to your audience that you have an informative intention. It's signaling signalhood.
Making apparent to somebody that you want to communicate with them in the first place.
And the recognition of communicative intentions has been studied in several different ways.
I think the clearest demonstration is in this paper. What happens here...
(This is where the example of the point, the incidental point
because I'm looking at my watch, and the direct point come from).
In this study the children and the experimenter play a game and they
play with his toys, and then the game comes to an end and they have to pack the toys away.
And they do so. One of the toys is accidentally sort of left out somewhere else in the room.
And the child is (...), and the experimenter points at the toy.
And the experimenter either points at the toy in a very ostensive, deliberate, stylized way
—i.e. with expression of communicative intention—
like this, looking at the child. Or they point (they're still pointing) but they're looking at their watch.
So, superficially similar behaviors but one expresses a communicative intention,
the other one doesn't.
And what happens is that children are far more likely to go and fetch the toy
and put it away when the communicative intention has been expressed.
So it seems that the children are able to recognize the communicative intention
when is expressed by an adult.
Again, not been done in great apes.
[So what about meta communication and play (…unintelligible…) What about in another domain? —
(….) multi component signals where part of it is what follows is going to be
(...potentially informative...), which has been demonstrated in lots of studies?
Right...
Isn't that a signal about a signal? Isn't that a signal about "pay attention to what follows"?
I don’t know the literature you’re referring to in enough detail, so I’d have to look at that
to be able to answer the question.
[(...Playouts....), you know, things like that… that all animals would engage in
(…some kind of game and pay attention to signals…)] and what follows is going to be play]
These things are akin to attention-getters I guess…
[…and then you can think about multi-component signals (...) (...that later...) become informative in same way.]
So it seems to me… I’m more familiar with the idea of attention-getters…
that seems to be similar to what you’re pointing to.
That seems describable to me in terms of a natural code.
So you can form associations between those behaviors and a subsequent behavior,
and hence you can say, well, this would be a natural code.
What's going on here is that... The study I just described would be stronger if it wasn't pointing,
if it was something that was.... uncontroversially could not have been said
that any convention could have been formed. And that's really the Litmus test, right?
So it's that... when I was in the pub with my friend and I tilted my hand...
There's no pre-established convention or anything else there... When you do see... Yes?
[unintelligible] Are (...) necessary? In the sense that, if you take a more continuous view of
the evolution of signals or the evolution of meaning or the evolution of manipulation,
arbitrariness is great, that was (X)'s criteria, but you can imagine pressures, structure,
form-follows-function, function-follows-design criteria, things sound and look certain ways to be
effective—efficacy—and it's nice to sort of say that humans are (...great...) because
we can (...have arbitrary...) signals, but is that a necessary component of thinking about these intentional...
No no, I'm not saying...
I'm not trying to link arbitrariness to this distinction I'm trying to draw up here at the moment.
What I'm saying is that the best way to test the true expression and
recognition of communicative intentions is in a context where
there's no way that you can say that this is a conventional code, a natural code of any sort.
I'm interested in the question of how you test for these things,
and the best way to do that would be in that way.
Coming back to the attention-getters, I mean...
Most of them seem to be iconic?, from my knowledge of them...
It's conceivable that they don't have to be.
But either way, they can be described in terms of a natural code.
[I agree with that.]
Well, OK.
OK, finally, the expression of communicative intention:
expressing the fact that you want to communicate with somebody else.
Now, how are you going to go about testing this in children? (Well, in great apes I really don't know),
but in children is much straight forward.
A few years ago, I spent some time in Mike Tomasello's lab and
we looked into something that is not strictly speaking the expression of
communicative intentions but it shows exactly the same sort of thing.
We were interested in something called "hidden authorship".
With hidden authorship –this is providing a stimulus for someone
but hiding the fact that you're actually proving it for them.
Imagine you are at a polite dinner party and you want some more wine but
is impolite for you to ask your host for more wine directly.
So you wait until he or she has turned their back and then you move your empty wine glass to
somewhere conspicuous in the middle of the table, and you wait for them to turn around and
the see the wine glass and they fill it up.
So you provided a stimulus for someone but you hidden the fact that is for them.
And this is interesting because...
it expresses an intention, or is evidence of an intention which has
the same relationship to an informative intention that communicative intention does.
It just is a negative.
So rather than,
"I intend that you understand that I have an informative intention",
"I intend that you don't understand that I have an informative intention towards you".
Otherwise, it is the same sort of thing.
So we wanted to test whether children could hide authorship.
So here is how we went about it.
The first thing I should say is that we did it with 3- and 4 year-olds, quite young kids.
This kind is quite a bit older but that's because this video is from the pilot study, but
is representative of what happened.
So... there's Experimenter 1 here, and the child, this is Experimenter 2.
Experimenter 1 and the child come into the room first and they find in the middle of the room this
box which has four hose in it, and you can see from the hose what kind of objects belong in there.
There's a hat, there's car and there's a ball, and so on and so forth.
And, "Oh, I like the hiding and finding game, we need to find these objects that
are hidden around the room so let's go and find them".
So the experimenter and the child find the objects.
And in that way the child -excuse me, they find the objects and then the experimenter says,
"Oh, experimenter 2 is coming along as well and she really likes the hiding-finding game and so
we need to put these object back where we found them so she can have a go herself".
They go about that. So the child now knows where all the objects are.
Then the child sits down just here, next to Experimenter 1.
Experimenter 2 comes in and is going to play the hiding-and-finding game.
Before I explain exactly what she does, is worth stressing that the ball that goes in here
is hidden just behind this barrier, just next to where the child sits down.
This barrier here is the same as this barrier here.
And Experimenter 2 comes in and says, "Oh, is the hiding-and-finding game,
I really like the game," and then she says "but" and she says
one of two different things depending on condition:
She either says, "Oh, I really don't like it if I can't complete it,"
in which case she's given the child reasons to help her, or she says:
"But I really don't like it if anyone helps me complete it,"
so now she's forbidden the child to help her find the object.
So then she goes around and finds a couple of the objects.
She's already found the hat as you can see, and then there's a couple of others she can't find them.
"Oh, where's the ball, I cant find it, I'm looking everywhere."
She spends plenty of time with her back to the child so the child can do
various things to help her without her knowing.
And the question is what the childs going to do.
So keep your eye on this child here and what he does with ball.
So he takes the ball, moves it in front, and the experimenter turns around and says,
"Oh, there's the ball why didn't I see it earlier, it was always there in clear view",
and the child is very happy.
This is a 7-year-old child as I said; you do it with younger kids is not quite as clean as this [laughs]
They do things like: Ahem! [laughs] and, in various ways, try to have it both ways.
But the fact that they want to have it both ways, shows that they understand the difference between
an informative intention—providing the stimulus for someone—and a communicative intention:
the fact that youre trying to communicate with them.
We find very clear differences in both in 3- and 5-year olds
in terms of the number of times they suppress that intention in various trials.
OK, so here's our provisional conclusions... Go ahead.
[Oh, after you do your provisional conclusions...]
OK. Is it going to be about this slide, is it? or...
[It's about this experiment as a whole, so...]
Go now
[No (...unintelligible...)]
My provisional conclusion is that children are ostensive communicators.
So there isn't any of these cells that isn't filled in and you were right to raise the point that
for this here perhaps could be done without pointing, with some other behavior
But it's starting to look as that the answer for children here is going to be Yes.
The answer for great apes we don't know and there are clear methodological challenges to
doing these sorts of studies with chimps, I mean I see that.
Nevertheless, when I've spoken to relevant experts of chimpanzee communication and cognition,
they expressed a great deal of skepticism that chimps are going to pass these sorts of studies.
Now, that's an entirely provisional conclusion, could be overturn by data, of course it could.
But my provisional conclusion...
–well, I should add also, it's also interesting that the studies haven't been done.
Although some of them... The hidden-authorship study is not at all clear how you'd do that,
big methodological challenges.
But the first study—about when the ball... and receiving the right object
for the wrong reason and so on and so forth—
that is perhaps amountable, but nobody seems to have done it.
And I do wonder if the reason why nobody's done that is because
researchers are skeptical that chimps are going to pass it and if you get negative
results is perhaps difficult to interpret, difficult to publish...
Maybe little motivation to pursuing such an experiment if you're skeptical about
the possible outcome. Entirely provisional. Totally, these conclusions could be overturned by data,
but for now, it seems to me that the data suggest that non-human primates
are not communicating in an ostensive, inferential way.
[I don't know if you have maybe just 30 seconds, depending upon your time...
(...unintelligible...)
... but the division you spoke of…
You’re looking at the social aspects… of the subject here, right?
(...of...) the ostensive and the informative things… You said (...your work is going to look...) at cultural…
Beyond a certain age—in humans of course—culture is very strong.]
Of course, yes.
[... And whether or not a teenager or an adult is going to do something that a child
might do is a question… And how they’re going to do it, is certainly a question….
So my basic question is…
What is your justification for
separating the social from the cultural… And perhaps if you have time (….),
could you give us a minute of what that cultural research is that you’re doing, on this area?]
I'm not trying to separate social from cultural, that's the first thing to say.
What I am separating out is the social-cognitive mechanisms—cognitive mechanisms—
that make ostensive communication possible in the first place.
So they're mechanisms of meta-psychology which (...gives rise...) to these sorts of behaviors...
[My question is how can you, particularly with teenagers and adults,
take out the strong cultural influences (...)?]
I'm not trying to.
[You're not? So if you had time (...) to talk a little bit about the
cultural aspects of your research in this area]
I still have three slides to go... Can I do that in the question session?
[OK, so that'd be my first question] [laughs]
So I've made this dichotomy earlier between two different ways of thinking about the
possibility of communication.
So, ostension and inference on the one hand, which provisionally for now I'm going to say
only seems to be present in humans... And on the other hand code-model communication.
So if it is the case that non-human primates don't communicate ostensibly
then it should be the case that they communicate using natural codes.
But we should check that. Let's look at the data here.
Do they communicate using natural codes?
It's certainly true that great apes gestural communication is accepted to be intentional.
And there's a live debate in the literature at the moment about the origins of
the the codes that are being used.
On the one hand, you have researchers arguing that processes of ontogenetic ritualization
can give rise to these codes; others saying that there's more of a perhaps innate
or, in some ways, species-wide repertoire.
The point I want to make is that either way, what we're looking at here is
an argument about the origins of associations
between states of the world and behaviors and between behaviors and responses.
In other words, the origins of natural codes.
So, they're not using the language of the natural codes,
but they're talking about associations of certain types.
That's pervasive through the discussions that are going on in this literature.
Here is a quote: "We conducted naturalistic observations of wild East African chimpanzee...
Our results indicate that chimpanzees are able to respond flexibly"
Why did I put that quote there? I've no idea [laughs].
That might be lost ignore that!
It's kind of relevant but I don't know [...unintelligible...] the point I was trying to make.
Oh yeah –this is why. OK, let me go back, now I know why...
Sorry. Let's go down to here.
OK, so there's the natural code. What's particularly interesting about these natural codes
is that they seem to be used in a very flexible way.
So we can describe for example bacterial communication in terms of a natural code
and that'd be a very fixed natural code governed by various, relatively simple, mechanisms.
But it seems to be more flexible in chimpanzees, so there's the question of
where that flexibility comes from.
And the natural answer would be some sort of Theory of Mind,
meta-psychological abilities of some sort.
Obviously, as I'm sure many or most or all of you are aware,
there are live debates about exactly what the extent of
such abilities might be in chimpanzees, but it seems to be... It might not be a full-blown
Theory of Mind but some sort of awareness of the goals of others
that does seem to be present in some of our primate relatives.
So the answer to the question here is a kind of "Yes, but..."
Yes, they seem to use natural codes, but they're natural codes which
are being made more expressively powerful by forms of meta-psychology.
This, interestingly, appears to be the very opposite of
what we actually see in linguistic communication.
So linguistic communication is made possible by mechanisms of meta-psychology,
which allow us to shrug, to point, to do all these things that we do non-verbally.
And then it's made more precise and expressively powerful by mechanisms of association;
by the fact that we can create these conventions.
Great-ape communication seems to be entirely the other way up.
It's made possible by these natural codes,
but then it's used in a particularly flexible way which makes it richer
than other natural codes out there in the natural world because of some forms of meta-psychology.
So, how would we tell the difference between these two different types of communication?
Well, if you have a set of associations made more powerful by meta-psychology,
then what you should expect to see is some sort of more finite set of prototypes of some sort...
that's the base of associations, but then is used in more flexible ways.
And it seems to me that the quote from that paper and other papers
seem to be pointing in that direction.
Papers that are looking at cataloguing what non-human primate communication systems look like
are converging upon this sort of conclusion.
On the other hand, if you have a system made possible by meta-psychology,
and then made more powerful by associations,
then essentially anything goes! If it's made possibly by meta-psychology,
then you can create new signals at will.
You can have associations that can be used in all sorts of ways.
And you have the one-off use of novel behaviors like the twisting of my wrist for communicative ends.
This seems to be what we see in language.
These points have important implications for how we think about continuity and discontinuity
in human communication and language.
As said earlier, it's a common assumption in evolutionary linguistics,
or in linguistics in general and in evolutionary linguistics,
that the code is the thing that makes everything possible and the pragmatics
goes on top as if the messy stuff goes on top to make it more powerful.
And you can see that... This is James Hurfords two books, 2007, 2012.
"We may see in alarm calls a skeletal version of our own shared codes"
–so the continuity there, between the monkeys calls and human languages.
"It seems quite plausible that the earlier precursors of language were much more,
perhaps entirely, coding-decoding in nature".
So language starts as a code model then you have the pragmatics on later.
I think this is a big mistake.
The emphasis on continuity here is taking the Darwinian lesson that form changes very gradually,
but then applying it to function too.
It's a bit like saying, Well, flying is a very powerful form of locomotion, walking is less powerful,
Darwin tells us these things change gradually, so one must have evolved from the other.
That doesn't fly.
The real continuity here is in social intelligence.
So, non-human primate communication is made more expressively powerful by
forms of meta-psychology.
When they're made even more rich, they allow a whole new type of communication system:
ostensive communication. When you start adding the layers, the recursive mind-reading layers,
then from the total that was being used to make a natural code more powerful,
you suddenly get a quite new form of communication: ostensive communication,
which really opens the flood gates to all sorts of communicative richness.
OK , let me wrap up.
Human communication is ostensive and inferential. We're expressing and recognizing intentions;
informative and communicative intentions.
It's critical when we're thinking about the evolution of language to distinguish
between natural codes and conventional codes.
Natural codes make communication possible in the first place.
Computers communicate in that way, bacteria do, and so on and so forth.
Conventional codes do something quite different. They make an already-existing,
different type of communication systems more powerful than otherwise would be.
Something I didn't talk about in detail was that point number two from earlier.
If we're going to look at cultural evolution of conventional codes,
the right framework I think to do that, is cultural attraction.
Non-human primate communication is probably using natural codes.
That is a conclusion that could be overturned by more data.
But it is made more expressive by some limited forms of meta-psychological abilities.
What that tells us is that the continuity between non-human primates and humans
is really in social intelligence.
It goes from limited forms of mind-reading and manipulation to
a form of mind-reading and manipulation where we're actually helping each other do that.
I'm encouraging you to read my mind right now, and you're allowing me to
manipulate your mental states. More generally, pragmatics
—the messy reality of using language out there in communication in real-world language use—
is solely neglected in language evolution research.
Thank you very much for your time.
[Applause]
[Just if perhaps... 2 or 3 minutes to give an example of your research on
that question which you call cultural attraction. I'd never heard that term before.]
OK. The idea of cultural attraction is... The thing to explain...
So, there are ... OK, two or three minutes is long enough.
Culture consists of two types of things:
mental representations and public expressions of those mental representations.
Some mental representations are widely shared in the community and
some are only shared sometimes. The ones that are widely shared are the ones we call culture.
So we might all have similar ideas of, you know, God or whatever might be...
And if we have similar versions of that mental representation we call it culture.
The thing that needs explaining is why some mental representations are
common in a population, some are not common. And...
And I guess the key insight in cultural attraction theory is that
as these mental representations and their public expressions are passed through a community...
As I'm taking to you, I'm taking my mental representations, forming a public expression,
and you're taking that public expression and forming your own mental representations.
There's no guarantee that those two mental representations are the same and
in fact our mechanisms of communication and cognition are actually
going to manipulate them to fit them with our existing mental representation
and so on and so forth...
And those changes are often going to be common through a population.
So you might change in a very similar way to many other people.
And if many of us are making similar changes,
then those mental representations tend to gravitate in certain directions and not in others.
[...unintelligible...]
Well, there are subtle though I think very important differences between the labels,
which I'm not going to go into the details...
[I understand that. I think we can stop there as far as I am concern, cause I understand.
Do you know who (...is going to read...) on kin selection?]
[...unintelligible...]
[Taking your argument for Darwinian gradualism seriously, I actually have objections to your flight analogy
(... that'd like to put as an aside...) (...)]
Yes, yes, I realize that... It was more to make a point than to...
[I understand... But so, the same concern applies more substantively to your conclusions for
the very differences between the great apes and humans,
which is: How do we get from here to there...?
That is, if Theory of Mind abilities and social reasoning in general...
appear progressively across apes and,
presumably (...keeping in time...) across hominids, right?,
then why do we get a reversal, why don't we see the same sort of emergence of
communicative abilities in parallel with mind-reading abilities in, you know,
co-extinct apes now rather than the reverse (...you claim...)? So, you're claiming that social cognition adds to the ability
to manipulate the natural codes, but (...isn't the...) the driver of much of the behavior,
and the reverse is true in humans. And I would say, well, why don't we see the two emerging...
If what we see is more limited abilities in both extents in (...us...)
and great apes, and if we're (...taking them into
some winter into the past...) (...), then why the reversal? Wouldn't you expect to see, you know,
according to Darwinian gradualism, wouldn't we expect to see the same kind of linear progression?
That is, there's no half-a-wing problem there, you know.
There's a little bit of a forelimb with some feathers on it, then there's a bit more
and a bit more, and stops being a forelimb and starts being a wing and so on...]
OK, good yes. So... In a way, the point where my analogy with locomotion and wings falls down is
exactly where, how I want to answer the question. So, that analogy isn't perfect, I grant.
You get into the details of ostensive communication... It's
an intention that you understand I have an intention that you understand X.
You don't get ostensive communication until all that apparatus is in place.
There aren't... It doesn't seem to me that there are...
It doesn't seem to me that there are partly ostensive forms of communication;
you've got to have the whole apparatus in place in the first place.
So you can build ever small sophisticated ways of reasoning about each others' minds.
But once they... It's only once they start to become recursive in quite a rich way that you actually get
ostensive communication happening
[OK, so you have to have all of the selection for the mind-reading abilities coming from something else...]
Yes, which would be some sort of Social Brain Hypothesis.]
[So, good. Well, it's a Machiavellian intelligence argument with no communication in their (...)]
Not in the first place.
[(...) does necessarily depend upon your idea of gradualism?]
Does what depend on my idea of gradualism?
[Does your argument really depend on gradualism?]
So...
[I only ask that because I think there are lots of situations (...) where the edifice
doesn't fall on (...) rise and fall (...on...) gradualism.]
Oh, no, I'm not saying my argument rises or falls on gradualism But, you know, (...)
[I found that really interesting and convincing.
Although one thing that was left unstated, it was implicit,
was why you think that testing these things in human children is important?
And I'm wondering, you know, are there particular ages that you think are, you know...
Do we have to push it back to the earliest point possible in order to
provide the strongest test? Could you say some things about that?]
The general motivation of that sort of...
[... and what you think the research on the young kids tells us
with respect to the evolution of language]
It controls for other types of intelligence,
in particular physical intelligence, intelligence with the physical world.
So, children at about... —(...) knows better than I exactly at what sort of ages—
but around 2 or 3 years of age, adult chimpanzees and young children
have similar powers for understanding the physical world (...)
but they seem to have very different powers with the social world. So you're controlling for that
other general type of intelligence, when you're comparing their social intelligence.
[And... could you say just a little bit more about that? Why is that important?]
Oh, well, because let's say we did this on adults, or with teenagers or whatever. Then somebody
could turn around and say, Well they're just generally more intelligent. So it's not the fact that,
that there's any particularly social intelligence or
particularly meta-psychological-community intelligence;
it's just the general intelligence that's being applied to a particular problem at hand.
You can control for that by dealing with humans that have similar powers in those regards.
Go on
[The argument you're making for a shift in terms of associative, ostensive (...)
that characterize your argument with great apes and the reversal with humans,
and particularly the notion that this is not gradual transition,
(...you said that...) is not a gradual transition,
implies there must be a set the conditions under which
that shift is being driven, that is unique to humans but it's not found in the great apes, otherwise
presumably there would have been the same (...transition...) in terms of (...).
Do you have any sorts of thoughts on
what might be those conditions that would generate that kind of phase change?]
I'm generally sympathetic to some version of Social Brain Hypothesis.
Humans are an incredibly social species, they live in very large social groups...
That seems to select for a whole lot of forms of social intelligence.
Now, the Social Brain Hypothesis/Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis,
whatever you want to call it,
exists in various different forms, and people are still arguing on the nuances,
but it does seem to me that there is quite a lot of agreement that
the hyper sociality of humans has driven a particular social intelligence,
which gives you the meta-psychology that I've been talking about.
[Possibly the further development (...that could be made about your argument is to state the...)
necessary condition with the argument (...) (...sufficient argument...)
in a sense that (... something well-argued would say...)
Well, why did we continue in this trajectory towards our present communicative capacities;
why didn't we plateau at some (...more novel...) model of communicative ability (…) as well as driving further
development of communication abilities (...) and not to be reaching a new plateau (...)
something a little bit smarter than the great apes but well below modern humans...]
That's why this line here. The real continuity is in social intelligence.
And one thing that I say in the book is that,
in a way—this isn't strictly true, but in a way—the way to think about human communication
is not as a communication system, but as a form of social intelligence/social cognition.
I am trying to manipulate your mind right now, you are letting me, and—equally—you're trying
to read my mind –we're just helping each other, because we've got the set of tools that
allow us to do it in a particularly rich way.
So, it's not the case that there is a kind of simple form of communication
(...that I stop telling you, that once you get it, you stop there...).
This whole communication thing is on the cline of social intelligence,
it's at one particular end.
[But it did stop in the apes. That is, presumably...]
No, no. Because... Oh, sorry yes!
[Social intelligence... The argument is also, to whatever extent it was advantageous
for our hominid ancestors,
presumably is advantageous for our almost identical chimpanzees ancestors
close to the divergence of (...Hominoidea...)]
Would you buy any version of the Machiavellian Intelligence/Social Brain Hypothesis?
[I don't have any objections with the Machiavellian argument as long as
one introduces what would be the conditions
under which further development of Machiavellian intelligence has a payoff, rather than just
presuming that somehow it just naturally develops that way.
Because once that you start down that route,
you must follow it all the way to human kinds of communication.
It seems to me what's missing in the argument is,
what are those external conditions that would be driving the continued development of
Machiavellian intelligence. Because, certainly, it's hard to imagine (...it as...)
a self-generating process that couldn't stop until it got to the level of our human communication.]
[But if communication is socially beneficial...?]
[But what would be the conditions under which it is socially beneficial for
hominid ancestors but not chimpanzee ancestors?
That question... I would reframe it as...
[The ability of the individual chimpanzees didn't also...
... evolve (...) by accident?]
[(...mutations...) didn't actually have to occur, you know.]
[...unintelligible...]
So, the answer in the Social Brain Hypothesis is that humans are more social because
we do live in larger groups. We do have, you know, a richer array of interactions...
[Why can't it be a happy accident?]
[If we look down at the development of human evolution that's true,
that's what we've come to at present, yes,
we live in larger groups, but certainly initially we weren't. That is, at the time of divergence of
our hominid ancestors up in the Serengeti Plain or whatever, the size of the social groups
(....follows no difference from...) the size of the chimpanzees social groups.]
[So that's the thing that differ. So, you know, specialty in hominids is
very very old and predates encephalization,
and our specialty is going to favor biparental care.
We're the only primate that has extensive biparental care
in large groups, so, you know, we can go on all day about things that might have lead to
an upper ceiling that isn't there in apes that was there in hominids...]
[I don't disagree with (...),
...but I just want to bring attention to the fact that, in this kind of arguments,
we also need to also be able to identify why was it that
our particular lineage was driven in this direction
whereas the ape lineage was not. What was different that was going on in our linage?]
[But to be honest, that's not Thom...]
[ I didn't want to say that, but (...)] (laughs)
[He's saying you get human communicative abilities once
you reach a threshold of social intelligence. Then the answer is not on him to explain how you reach
that threshold, because—as we agreed—there are many things that might have contributed to it]
[Well, obviously it might not be on Thom's.. It's up to him to decide whether
it is or not (...we're not going to decide...) for him.
But the answer is on somebody. Or at least to recognize that this is obviously a critical aspect of
the argument in the sense of (...) . At least to recognize that there needs to be some way of
accounting for why did occur this linage and it did not in others where the specific kinds of
mechanisms one is talking about presumably were also operating (...) social intelligence, presumably
was also beneficial in the context of chimpanzees (...)
argument about social intelligence development (...)
we're looking at changes in primates in terms of social complexity and then response to (...)
(...that developing of...) social intelligence. Why does that particular trajectory terminate
whereas ours doesn't? I'm not saying that you
have to have the answer (...) rather it seems to me that this part of the argument at some point needs
to be addressed (...). Of course, we might all come up with just-so stories about what might be
the reasons for them (....) carrying the debate as well.]
Can I take a different question?
[This is a comment, not a question]
OK
[It's about this issue of the ability of attribute communicative intent to an interlocutor's behavior
even when you've never seen or heard that particular behavior before.
And I'm sure you know about this –it's an experiment out of Tomasello's group that
addresses this directly, where the task is to choose
the box that has a reward when the reward's been hidden and there are three boxes, visually different
from each other. So, there's two experimenters, one directly facing the subject,
the other standing is behind the subject,
who communicates something to the subject, maybe a child or an ape,
either by pointing at the right box
—and that, of course, both the apes and the children have seen lots of pointing—
or holding up a little replica of the box or putting on a marker on the box.
And those, presumably, the child has never seen before
and yet the children are much better at picking the correct box
–much better than chance, whereas the apes don't do better than chance.
So that's the issue that (...Dan Bornstein...) was debating with you about (...)]
Well...
So the thing with the object-choice task is... Yeah...
So, it's clear that chimps struggle with points in the object-choice task;
you can point at one or the other one and they still choose at chance level. It's not clear
whether that's a failure to recognize that somebody's communicating
in the first place or some sort of...
Actually, I don't know what the alternative might look like. I kind of feel
like there's an alternative that is some sort of cultural explanation there...
I'm not sure what methods (….). It’s certainly the case that the results of the object-choice task
is consistent with what I'm saying, so in a way I'm looking for (...)
[You see, to me is very convincing. It seems to indicate that a child, even a 3-year-old child, will,
whenever the adult is looking at the child or
in other way indicating that (...the child should pay attention...),
no matter what the adult does—even if is something the kid has never seen before—
whatever this is, it's got to be something that is intended to make me understand something.]
I certainly think that kids are communicating ostensively and
are understanding ostensive communication, which is what you're describing.
You won't find me (...arguing against that...). I mean, I'm agreeing that
what you're observing is entirely consistent with what I am arguing. I guess (...) a direct test of
the 4 things that I wanted to point, that I'm trying to address, and
that's why (...I haven't talked about it in the book but...) I do get a passing mentioning.
[I'm just wondering... You keep saying you're trying to modify our mental representations, (...) modify yours
I'm just wondering, how much of this (...whole dual thing...) is dependent on
this picture of communication that heavily emphasizes mental representation.
I missed the beginning of your talk so maybe you mentioned something about this,
but Wittgenstein once said something about how, you know, tools all serve to modify something,
so the chisel modifies the piece of wood and, you know... the hammer modifies the nail...
What does it take to modify (...) my idea of the (...length of the thing...)?
And then Wittgenstein says, What is accomplished by this assimilation of expressions?
So, I'm just wondering, what is done by... What is the consequence of viewing
everything in terms of mental representations and intentions?
And one reason I'm thinking about this is, you may well be right that social communication and people...
That the point of continuity between earlier primates
and us is social communication.
But there have been a lot of patterns found by conversation analysts that
don't emphasize mental representations. They sort of emphasize adjacency pairs, more of a "dance",
which may involve keeping track of things and maybe involves keeping track of intentions.
And, I guess... (how do you pronounce his name, Federico Rossano?)
Rossano has found that in a lot of primates there are
sort of similar timings, some similar stuff.
So, maybe this (...conversationalist analysts stuff...) is just the
(...conventionalized content...) that you're kind of setting to the side,
but I'm just wondering –if you focused more
on that kind of pattern you come up with slightly different take on things...]
I don't see the two... I don't see (...as foxing...) on the conversational patterns and
forms of the conventions, and focusing on
the mental representation as being in any way (...on a par...) (...).
So the former is a consequence of the latter.
[Wait, which is a consequence? Just spell it out]
We're engaged in the mental manipulation and mind-reading that I was talking about earlier and...
[And that leads to the conversational (...)?]
That with lead to—well, that and many other things that are involved:
the cultural attraction and so on and so forth—would lead to conversational patterns that
you do observe in conversational analysis and so on and so forth.
I don't see any reason to...
[But you said the apes have that patterns and don't have the other stuff, then that doesn't work.]
Well, the patterns that we might observe in ape communication and in human communication
are not themselves cognitive traits that could be subjected by biological evolution.
They're not patterns of...
[The ability to produce such patterns!]
Sure!... No, no, no! No individual produces patterns; these are patterns of exchange...
[Right, (...the ability to...) participate in such patterns. I just wonder if... Again, you seem to be saying that
the representations are driving everything, and I'm just wondering if it might be the other way round or
if they might be both be driving each other and if it's necessary always to...
I'm not one of these anti-representationalist people...
but I wonder if it's always necessary or even necessarily helpful.
And I just think it might be fun to think of it in a different way just for (...kicks...) (laughs)]
I guess there's two points I want to make.
Let me draw on the conversation analysis and the patterns.
Let me draw on an analogy in a different area of language which I worked on, which is
the fact that you we combine things together...
They're very basic syntax, is taking things together in various ways.
Human language is full of this. And some people have started to uncover
simple forms of this, in some non-human primate communication. So there's a
natural Darwinian story to (...be told there...). So the last couple of years I've been collaborating with
some microbiologists.
Cause I've been skeptical, for all the reasons I've highlighted here, that there's actually
a continuity there. So I got talking to some microbiologists who work on bacterial communication.
And we did an experiment basically replicating the playback experiments done with various monkey species.
We found the same results. We found combinatorial communication of the same sort you find in monkeys in bacteria.
Now, the point here is that you can see these patterns... This is a system, right?, a communication system,
like the patterns (...) is not a trait that is subjected to biological evolution (...) The capacity to engage in patterns,
the capacity to combine things together might be. But there's no reason why that isn't very phylogenetically deep
I don't see them as cognitively demanding. Bacteria stick symbols together. So do monkeys, so do humans.
That's not the thing to explain. And it seems to me quite possible the same thing is true of
the patterns that you're pointing to.
[Well, maybe true, I don't know]
[So... You started out by talking about what is the invention, alluded to, that you might get to]
(...) (...patterns of communication...)
(...)
[Sure, I got that (laughs).
The claim, (... further into the taxonomazing game....) people seem to like to talk about what's special
for language. And I was wondering what your position was there. Because most of the ingredients that you've given
(...where surely...) conventions are not special for language... it all depends on cultural conventions
(...that are not linguistic...) ]
Yeah, sure.
[(...certainly ontogeny is not special for language...). Is there anything, in your view... –for instance,
emergent thing that hasn't particularly... There's no linguistic trace that specifically (...have been selected...)?]
Right. So, it seems to me that the point number two, the (...join with...) cultural attraction and languages is to explain
why we see these the sorts of properties, the structural properties, that we associate with languages. So,
people have long observed that languages have various (...differences...) in structural properties,
(...independent of...) the relations. And we need to explain why certain, you know,
word orders are common while other ones are not.
And those explanations..., well, that's where cultural attraction come in, and the sorts of factors of attraction that
are going to be important are the ability to stick things together, the ability to engage in patterns, patterns of interactions and
so on and so forth. And various other things,
which might well be phylogenetic indeed, might well shared with other human behaviors and so on and so forth
[ or bacteria (...)]
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,
as this one is only working in language. I dont have any reasons to do that...
But that's not to say that there isn't one; there might be but I don't know what it is.
[So I guess what I'm getting at is—and I confess that don't like when people ask these kinds of questions—
what has there been selected for? (...) I mean, natural selection is selecting for a thing...
Is any of the things that (...being...) selected for specifically because of (...) ?]
Oh, I see . Maybe, maybe not. Once you've got ostensive communication and you've got conventions which are
making it more expressively powerful –this is an extremely powerful tool, right? It allows us to do all sorts of things.
It seems quite plausible to me that you could have the natural selection for mechanisms that make the acquisition of
those conventions and the use of those conventions much more fluent and easy than otherwise might be.
If there's such a thing, that is what we should be calling
an LAD [Language Acquisition Device] or a UG [Universal Grammar] or whatever.
In fact (...I quote you...),you say much the same thing in the book.
Whether there is such thing of that sort... I actually dont know. That's why I said maybe maybe
[OK]
[I will try to keep this really brief because I'll take a lot of your time during the (...rest of your stay...).
So, you already know that I disagree with you about a whole "how much do apes do".
Yes.
But I'd like, to kind of, just bang on about that for a second.]
OK
[Because I think that the example that you started up with, with—you know: "I'd like a chip please"—none of that
would be capture in any of the (...published literature...) about apes, and I think that you're relaying somewhat heavily on,
you know, the body of work that manages to get published about primatology, and the meaning of primate signals.
And I think that the onus there is really on primatologists to discuss and to really sort of open up our thinking about
primate communication. But I'd say that the experiments that are done, and certainly the work that is published about
certain communicative repertoires in primate systems, are heavily influenced by, you know, the kind of,
"Oh, what makes human language special?! Oh, let's look at primates and the (...) models and (...) models"]
Yes, I agree, and I think its a mistake, yes.
[But, I'd say that, you know, certainly in ape gesture literature, 80% of the communication gets thrown out
because we don't have enough examples of X leads to Y to say anything about it. And so the vast majority of
interactions and (...), and you know... Apes spend a huge amount of time, you know, doing this
(laughs)
None of that is provable,]
Sure, I understand.
[None of that is objective and replicable... There's a lot of discussion about,
Well... is it anecdote...? data...? I don't really know where I fall; I've written things about, you know,
[sarcastic tone:] Semantics of the Gesture Repertoire. I'm completely guilty of this, but I think that is very hard to
make a claim where you say, "ape communications is this way" and "human communication is this way" when
this (...) the published claims about ape communication is being this way are very strongly influenced by exactly the same kind of
(...thing that...) sort of faults with linguistics and (...thinking of...) what makes human language special
that you criticized in the first half of your talk.]
So that's why there are question marks on these (laughs)
[I'd preferred it if you'd offered them as series of (...)](laughs)
(...)
[(...) I wanted to know what you thought in terms of the OI [ostensive inferential] model...
Can you have ostension without a code?]
Yes, sure. Point... That chip gesture...
[No, I know, but I mean do you think could you have the cognitive capacities as a species
without having either a very developed natural or conventional code system?]
Yes, and you can see it in the natural world. We see it in kids. So ostensive communication
precedes linguistic communication in development.
[Yeah, no, I agree with you, but I am not sure about this ordering of ...... informational intent and communicative intent
as communicative intent follows informative intent. I mean, if informative intent relies to some extent on
there being conventional or natural codes. Doesn't it or was I...?]
No, I'm not following, sorry
[I'll argue about that later]
OK
[The difference between meaningful and symbolic, right?]
I've lost track now (laughs)
[The difference between meaningful and symbolic]
[We should take this up after (...) because we're now at the end of our discussion.
Thank you very much] (applause)