WEBVTT

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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?,

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

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which revealed to my friend that,

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

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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

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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.

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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

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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,

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

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then you can have communication in the code-model type of way.

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We see this all over the natural world.

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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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And this is made possible—what defines it as a type of communication—

00:16:57.297 --> 00:17:01.279
is the fact that is a type of meta-psychology,

00:17:01.279 --> 00:17:04.210
is a type of manipulating others' minds,

00:17:04.210 --> 00:17:08.790
and mind-reading and manipulation. So, as a speaker, I'm trying to

00:17:08.801 --> 00:17:14.117
change your mental state right now. I'm manipulating your minds and you are trying to read my mental states.

00:17:14.117 --> 00:17:16.845
I have intentions and you're trying to read them.

00:17:16.845 --> 00:17:21.007
Made possible by our mechanisms of meta-psychology.

00:17:21.007 --> 00:17:24.099
And the difference here... I want to stress that the difference here

00:17:24.099 --> 00:17:26.685
is not one of degree; it's one of kind.

00:17:26.685 --> 00:17:31.465
And a way to make that graphic is to contrast it with an entirely different domain,

00:17:31.465 --> 00:17:37.386
namely locomotion. Flying and walking are two different types of locomotion.

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.

00:17:42.405 --> 00:17:48.792
They're the same sort of thing, they're locomotion, but they're totally different ways

00:17:48.792 --> 00:17:51.302
of going about it, a difference in kind.

00:17:51.302 --> 00:17:55.292
Similarly, ostensive communication and code mode communication

00:17:55.292 --> 00:17:57.222
are differences in kind.

00:18:02.782 --> 00:18:06.673
So where does language fit into this distinction?

00:18:06.673 --> 00:18:12.143
It's a very assumption to make, a common assumption, that with linguistic communication

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.

00:18:17.102 --> 00:18:22.171
And then on top of it you plug in all this meta-psychology, this pragmatics,

00:18:22.171 --> 00:18:24.721
and then you get language.

00:18:27.019 --> 00:18:31.282
Many people, both those inside linguistics and those outside,

00:18:31.282 --> 00:18:35.122
have said that, sometimes linguists have "physics envy".

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

00:18:39.685 --> 00:18:44.242
clearly identifiable. And they try to do the same thing with language, so

00:18:44.242 --> 00:18:48.041
you've got these individual phonemes and they are distinct from each other,

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.

00:18:52.152 --> 00:18:57.885
And so the object of study for linguistics becomes –well, in addition, the object to study

00:18:57.885 --> 00:19:01.885
for linguistics are the languages themselves, the linguistic code.

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,

00:19:06.475 --> 00:19:10.795
is a type of communication made possible by associations—i.e. a code model—

00:19:10.795 --> 00:19:16.595
and then the meta-psychology, the pragmatics is the bonus, that's what makes it more expressively powerful.

00:19:16.595 --> 00:19:21.153
The reality is exactly the other way around. This common assumption is upside down.

00:19:21.153 --> 00:19:24.015
What's going on here, in linguistic communication,

00:19:24.015 --> 00:19:28.696
is that our communication is made possible by ostention, inference, meta-psychology.

00:19:28.696 --> 00:19:32.827
And then on top of that, what we've done is creating a linguistic code

00:19:32.827 --> 00:19:37.130
which allows us to be much more expressive, and more precise than we otherwise could be.

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

00:19:41.066 --> 00:19:44.726
remote in time and space, and I do that because I've got these tools, what

00:19:44.726 --> 00:19:48.632
we call the linguistic code, the conventions that allow me to do that.

00:19:48.632 --> 00:19:55.566
It's vital that our terminology reflects this; the difference between the sort of codes

00:19:55.566 --> 00:20:00.776
that are making ostensive communication more powerful and the natural code we had earlier.

00:20:00.776 --> 00:20:05.673
So natural codes make communication possible –that's the point I was making earlier.

00:20:05.673 --> 00:20:09.373
The linguistic code, on the other hand, is a different type of code.

00:20:09.373 --> 00:20:13.606
It's a type of code that makes a different type of communication, ostensive communication,

00:20:13.606 --> 00:20:17.167
more powerful. So I use this label: conventional codes.

00:20:17.167 --> 00:20:22.226
The linguistic code is a conventional code. It makes another type of communication—ostensive communication—

00:20:22.226 --> 00:20:25.246
more powerful than otherwise would be.

00:20:31.023 --> 00:20:34.706
OK, so now we understand what language is.

00:20:34.706 --> 00:20:41.166
Languages are conventional codes designed to make a type

00:20:41.166 --> 00:20:44.892
of communication more expressively powerful than otherwise would be.

00:20:44.892 --> 00:20:48.593
And with that thought in mind we can be very clear about what it is

00:20:48.593 --> 00:20:51.192
we're trying to explain the origins and evolution of.

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

00:20:55.622 --> 00:21:00.122
how we evolved the social-cognitive mechanisms that make ostensive communication

00:21:00.122 --> 00:21:05.853
possible in first place. That's one challenge. And the other challenge is to explain

00:21:05.853 --> 00:21:09.810
the creation, the cultural evolution of the conventional code itself.

00:21:09.810 --> 00:21:13.977
How, when we're interacting with each other, do we create these codes, converge upon

00:21:13.977 --> 00:21:17.952
shared meanings for those codes. And how do they change in the way they're used

00:21:17.952 --> 00:21:20.892
in interaction, passed between generations, to come to take the

00:21:20.892 --> 00:21:23.802
structural features that we associate with languages.

00:21:23.802 --> 00:21:28.902
They're really, to my mind, the two big questions for evolutionary linguistics.

00:21:28.903 --> 00:21:31.473
I'm going to talk in the rest of the talk about number one.

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

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

00:21:39.829 --> 00:21:42.189
for the rest of the talk on number one.

00:21:45.158 --> 00:21:51.028
There's a whole body of research looking at, comparing the cognitive abilities

00:21:51.028 --> 00:21:57.863
of humans, in particular human children, with those of our primate relatives, particularly chimpanzees.

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,

00:22:05.325 --> 00:22:09.868
when we look at it from the pragmatic perspective.

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.

00:22:15.497 --> 00:22:19.079
It's a very central idea about how human communication works.

00:22:19.079 --> 00:22:23.155
And people looking at non-human primate communication certainly recognize the

00:22:23.155 --> 00:22:26.233
importance of pragmatics –there's no question of that.

00:22:26.233 --> 00:22:30.628
The idea that intentions are critical is central to that literature.

00:22:30.628 --> 00:22:34.838
But what people have been studying for the most part is not this,

00:22:34.838 --> 00:22:39.348
but something else that is called intentional communication.

00:22:39.348 --> 00:22:45.488
The question is, well, are these the same thing? If not, how do they differ?

00:22:48.378 --> 00:22:51.118
And I think they're different things.

00:22:51.118 --> 00:22:55.509
When people look for intentional communication in the primate literature,

00:22:55.509 --> 00:22:59.460
there's a whole bunch of different criteria that are used,

00:22:59.460 --> 00:23:02.519
sometimes consistently, sometimes inconsistently,

00:23:02.519 --> 00:23:03.899
between different studies.

00:23:03.899 --> 00:23:07.769
And sometimes that inconsistency is for good methodological reasons.

00:23:07.769 --> 00:23:12.037
It's easier to look for certain of these criteria in one domain,

00:23:12.037 --> 00:23:16.166
say in the vocal domain rather than in the gesture domain and so on.

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

00:23:21.786 --> 00:23:25.976
as measures of intentional communication.

00:23:27.419 --> 00:23:32.059
And some of these might be stronger or weaker than others.

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

00:23:35.706 --> 00:23:39.084
is that all of these are really about goal-directedness.

00:23:39.084 --> 00:23:41.912
They're about how the signal itself is used.

00:23:41.912 --> 00:23:46.989
So, is the signal used in a goal-directed way, in an intentional way?,

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,

00:23:54.012 --> 00:23:57.242
less meta-psychology involved?

00:23:59.397 --> 00:24:03.607
Now, thinking back to what ostensive communications is, ostensive communication is defined

00:24:03.607 --> 00:24:07.834
as the expression of intentions. So what intentions are doing here,

00:24:07.834 --> 00:24:11.797
they're the thing that is being expressed, they're what is expressed.

00:24:11.797 --> 00:24:15.877
I express my informative intentions and my communicative intentions.

00:24:15.877 --> 00:24:19.717
When I point in a stylized way rather than an incidental way, I'm expressing

00:24:19.717 --> 00:24:21.557
a communicative intention.

00:24:21.557 --> 00:24:25.435
Whereas what's been studied in the primate literature, it seems to me,

00:24:25.435 --> 00:24:30.465
is "how" signals are being produced: are they produced in an intentional way or not?

00:24:30.465 --> 00:24:32.644
So these are not quite the same thing.

00:24:32.644 --> 00:24:39.017
Having said that, you'll often see the language used in the literature conflating the two.

00:24:39.017 --> 00:24:44.977
So, these communicative intentions (this phrase) has a technical definition in pragmatics,

00:24:44.977 --> 00:24:50.397
is the thing that expresses the signaling signalhood, the fact that you're trying to communicate.

00:24:50.767 --> 00:24:55.537
But this paper is certainly very much talking about an intention to communicate,

00:24:55.537 --> 00:24:58.017
actually about this sort of thing.

00:24:58.017 --> 00:25:01.517
It is not obvious to me that these are the same things.

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?

00:25:09.357 --> 00:25:13.162
That's what ostensive communication is at bottom.

00:25:13.162 --> 00:25:15.725
And so that's really the question we should be asking.

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...

00:25:20.767 --> 00:25:22.978
That's where we're going now.

00:25:22.978 --> 00:25:28.383
So, the expression and the recognition of communicative intentions and informative intentions.

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.

00:25:35.739 --> 00:25:39.223
And first we're going to look at the expression of informative intention.

00:25:39.223 --> 00:25:43.433
An informative intention is an intention to manipulate a mental state.

00:25:43.433 --> 00:25:47.119
I have an intention to change your mental states right now

00:25:47.119 --> 00:25:50.208
about what informative attentions are, and so on and so forth.

00:25:50.208 --> 00:25:52.683
So how might we go about testing this in the lab?

00:25:52.683 --> 00:25:54.173
Here's one way.

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

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

00:26:05.173 --> 00:26:07.799
for an object. In this case a ball.

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.

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.

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.

00:26:24.714 --> 00:26:29.751
So in this case the child has the material goal satisfied

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,

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.

00:26:41.644 --> 00:26:44.432
Whereas in this case that has happened.

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.

00:26:48.644 --> 00:26:52.155
"No, you didn't understand"; "No, I want the ball"; "But you have the ball;"

00:26:52.155 --> 00:26:54.514
"but, but, but..." And you can see where this goes.

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,

00:27:00.714 --> 00:27:04.984
but change the mental state of the adult, which in turn will get them the ball.

00:27:04.984 --> 00:27:10.784
So children understand, they have some understanding, of what an informative intention is,

00:27:10.784 --> 00:27:16.204
and are able to express it, and understand when that intention has been satisfied or not.

00:27:17.354 --> 00:27:20.994
Nobody's done the comparable experiment with great apes.

00:27:24.784 --> 00:27:29.421
Recognition of an informative intention... Well, actually, here nobody's done the experiment

00:27:29.421 --> 00:27:31.240
with great apes or with children.

00:27:31.240 --> 00:27:34.751
And the sort of experiment that could be done would be

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...

00:27:42.801 --> 00:27:45.741
Hold on, my thoughts have gone blank, sorry...

00:27:52.217 --> 00:27:53.947
Sorry --I have a mind blank.

00:27:59.731 --> 00:28:01.531
No, my mind's gone blank.

00:28:01.531 --> 00:28:05.026
Hopefully you're doing the work for me and you're on your own!

00:28:05.026 --> 00:28:05.881
Sorry?

00:28:05.881 --> 00:28:07.046
[...unintelligible...]

00:28:07.046 --> 00:28:08.894
--Yeah, maybe so yes

00:28:08.894 --> 00:28:18.094
[(...unintelligible...) the wrong thing is given and the observer says bad-bad-bad or something?]

00:28:18.742 --> 00:28:21.194
Good, good okay, yes twice! Coming back now...!

00:28:21.194 --> 00:28:25.344
So, let's say... Let's go back to the previous one...

00:28:28.554 --> 00:28:32.760
Let's say we're in this situation and then the child doesn't complain,

00:28:32.760 --> 00:28:36.404
or another adult—there are two adults—and this adult asks for the ball,

00:28:36.404 --> 00:28:39.820
gets the ball, even though they we're misunderstood.

00:28:39.820 --> 00:28:44.201
Does the observer say, "Hold on!!, something's not up, something's not right here..."?

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.

00:28:49.354 --> 00:28:51.905
Nobody's done that experiment with kids or with apes.

00:28:52.994 --> 00:28:55.424
So we don't know the answer to that.

00:28:55.424 --> 00:29:00.874
Let's look now at communicative intentions. Communicative intentions are intentions to make it

00:29:00.874 --> 00:29:05.837
apparent to your audience that you have an informative intention. It's signaling signalhood.

00:29:05.837 --> 00:29:11.227
Making apparent to somebody that you want to communicate with them in the first place.

00:29:13.634 --> 00:29:18.346
And the recognition of communicative intentions has been studied in several different ways.

00:29:18.346 --> 00:29:22.404
I think the clearest demonstration is in this paper. What happens here...

00:29:22.404 --> 00:29:25.236
(This is where the example of the point, the incidental point

00:29:25.236 --> 00:29:28.316
because I'm looking at my watch, and the direct point come from).

00:29:28.316 --> 00:29:33.719
In this study the children and the experimenter play a game and they

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.

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.

00:29:44.611 --> 00:29:50.974
And the child is (...), and the experimenter points at the toy.

00:29:50.974 --> 00:29:58.084
And the experimenter either points at the toy in a very ostensive, deliberate, stylized way

00:29:58.084 --> 00:30:00.817
—i.e. with expression of communicative intention—

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.

00:30:08.574 --> 00:30:12.460
So, superficially similar behaviors but one expresses a communicative intention,

00:30:12.460 --> 00:30:14.110
the other one doesn't.

00:30:14.110 --> 00:30:18.494
And what happens is that children are far more likely to go and fetch the toy

00:30:18.494 --> 00:30:22.038
and put it away when the communicative intention has been expressed.

00:30:22.038 --> 00:30:25.133
So it seems that the children are able to recognize the communicative intention

00:30:25.133 --> 00:30:27.803
when is expressed by an adult.

00:30:28.813 --> 00:30:32.363
Again, not been done in great apes.

00:30:32.363 --> 00:30:40.869
[So what about meta communication and play (…unintelligible…) What about in another domain? —

00:30:40.869 --> 00:30:45.139
(….) multi component signals where part of it is what follows is going to be

00:30:45.139 --> 00:30:49.455
(...potentially informative...), which has been demonstrated in lots of studies?

00:30:49.555 --> 00:30:50.835
Right...

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"?

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

00:31:06.783 --> 00:31:08.313
to be able to answer the question.

00:31:08.833 --> 00:31:13.443
[(...Playouts....), you know, things like that… that all animals would engage in

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]

00:31:17.503 --> 00:31:20.963
These things are akin to attention-getters I guess…

00:31:20.963 --> 00:31:26.003
[…and then you can think about multi-component signals (...) (...that later...) become informative in same way.]

00:31:26.883 --> 00:31:31.473
So it seems to me… I’m more familiar with the idea of attention-getters…

00:31:31.473 --> 00:31:34.473
that seems to be similar to what you’re pointing to.

00:31:34.473 --> 00:31:37.607
That seems describable to me in terms of a natural code.

00:31:37.607 --> 00:31:44.743
So you can form associations between those behaviors and a subsequent behavior,

00:31:44.743 --> 00:31:48.143
and hence you can say, well, this would be a natural code.

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,

00:31:55.176 --> 00:32:00.356
if it was something that was.... uncontroversially could not have been said

00:32:00.356 --> 00:32:06.835
that any convention could have been formed. And that's really the Litmus test, right?

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...

00:32:11.516 --> 00:32:18.666
There's no pre-established convention or anything else there... When you do see... Yes?

00:32:19.021 --> 00:32:28.117
[unintelligible] Are (...) necessary? In the sense that, if you take a more continuous view of

00:32:28.117 --> 00:32:32.737
the evolution of signals or the evolution of meaning or the evolution of manipulation,

00:32:32.737 --> 00:32:42.756
arbitrariness is great, that was (X)'s criteria, but you can imagine pressures, structure,

00:32:42.756 --> 00:32:49.237
form-follows-function, function-follows-design criteria, things sound and look certain ways to be

00:32:49.237 --> 00:32:55.619
effective—efficacy—and it's nice to sort of say that humans are (...great...) because

00:32:55.619 --> 00:33:02.849
we can (...have arbitrary...) signals, but is that a necessary component of thinking about these intentional...

00:33:02.865 --> 00:33:05.172
No no, I'm not saying...

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.

00:33:11.672 --> 00:33:16.662
What I'm saying is that the best way to test the true expression and

00:33:16.662 --> 00:33:20.400
recognition of communicative intentions is in a context where

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.

00:33:24.853 --> 00:33:28.007
I'm interested in the question of how you test for these things,

00:33:28.007 --> 00:33:30.760
and the best way to do that would be in that way.

00:33:30.760 --> 00:33:33.470
Coming back to the attention-getters, I mean...

00:33:33.470 --> 00:33:37.760
Most of them seem to be iconic?, from my knowledge of them...

00:33:37.760 --> 00:33:40.363
It's conceivable that they don't have to be.

00:33:40.363 --> 00:33:44.187
But either way, they can be described in terms of a natural code.

00:33:44.187 --> 00:33:45.410
[I agree with that.]

00:33:45.410 --> 00:33:46.900
Well, OK.

00:33:49.131 --> 00:33:53.341
OK, finally, the expression of communicative intention:

00:33:53.341 --> 00:33:59.531
expressing the fact that you want to communicate with somebody else.

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),

00:34:04.621 --> 00:34:07.641
but in children is much straight forward.

00:34:08.391 --> 00:34:11.851
A few years ago, I spent some time in Mike Tomasello's lab and

00:34:11.851 --> 00:34:15.429
we looked into something that is not strictly speaking the expression of

00:34:15.429 --> 00:34:20.060
communicative intentions but it shows exactly the same sort of thing.

00:34:20.060 --> 00:34:23.701
We were interested in something called "hidden authorship".

00:34:23.701 --> 00:34:26.830
With hidden authorship –this is providing a stimulus for someone

00:34:26.830 --> 00:34:30.173
but hiding the fact that you're actually proving it for them.

00:34:30.173 --> 00:34:34.102
Imagine you are at a polite dinner party and you want some more wine but

00:34:34.102 --> 00:34:37.448
is impolite for you to ask your host for more wine directly.

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

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

00:34:46.641 --> 00:34:48.688
the see the wine glass and they fill it up.

00:34:48.688 --> 00:34:53.098
So you provided a stimulus for someone but you hidden the fact that is for them.

00:34:53.098 --> 00:34:55.518
And this is interesting because...

00:34:56.808 --> 00:35:01.398
it expresses an intention, or is evidence of an intention which has

00:35:01.398 --> 00:35:05.922
the same relationship to an informative intention that communicative intention does.

00:35:05.922 --> 00:35:07.125
It just is a negative.

00:35:07.125 --> 00:35:08.875
So rather than,

00:35:08.875 --> 00:35:12.189
"I intend that you understand that I have an informative intention",

00:35:12.189 --> 00:35:16.297
"I intend that you don't understand that I have an informative intention towards you".

00:35:16.297 --> 00:35:18.424
Otherwise, it is the same sort of thing.

00:35:18.424 --> 00:35:21.822
So we wanted to test whether children could hide authorship.

00:35:21.822 --> 00:35:24.039
So here is how we went about it.

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.

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

00:35:31.972 --> 00:35:34.376
is representative of what happened.

00:35:34.376 --> 00:35:39.029
So... there's Experimenter 1 here, and the child, this is Experimenter 2.

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

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.

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.

00:35:52.689 --> 00:35:56.919
And, "Oh, I like the hiding and finding game, we need to find these objects that

00:35:56.919 --> 00:35:59.682
are hidden around the room so let's go and find them".

00:35:59.682 --> 00:36:02.212
So the experimenter and the child find the objects.

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,

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

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".

00:36:14.164 --> 00:36:17.503
They go about that. So the child now knows where all the objects are.

00:36:17.503 --> 00:36:20.853
Then the child sits down just here, next to Experimenter 1.

00:36:20.853 --> 00:36:25.757
Experimenter 2 comes in and is going to play the hiding-and-finding game.

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

00:36:30.108 --> 00:36:33.647
is hidden just behind this barrier, just next to where the child sits down.

00:36:33.647 --> 00:36:36.977
This barrier here is the same as this barrier here.

00:36:36.977 --> 00:36:41.490
And Experimenter 2 comes in and says, "Oh, is the hiding-and-finding game,

00:36:41.490 --> 00:36:45.393
I really like the game," and then she says "but" and she says

00:36:45.393 --> 00:36:48.463
one of two different things depending on condition:

00:36:48.463 --> 00:36:52.233
She either says, "Oh, I really don't like it if I can't complete it,"

00:36:52.233 --> 00:36:55.513
in which case she's given the child reasons to help her, or she says:

00:36:55.513 --> 00:36:59.013
"But I really don't like it if anyone helps me complete it,"

00:36:59.013 --> 00:37:02.762
so now she's forbidden the child to help her find the object.

00:37:02.762 --> 00:37:06.693
So then she goes around and finds a couple of the objects.

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.

00:37:10.963 --> 00:37:13.334
"Oh, where's the ball, I cant find it, I'm looking everywhere."

00:37:13.334 --> 00:37:17.181
She spends plenty of time with her back to the child so the child can do

00:37:17.181 --> 00:37:19.600
various things to help her without her knowing.

00:37:19.600 --> 00:37:22.026
And the question is what the childs going to do.

00:37:22.026 --> 00:37:25.306
So keep your eye on this child here and what he does with ball.

00:37:31.501 --> 00:37:35.645
So he takes the ball, moves it in front, and the experimenter turns around and says,

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",

00:37:39.317 --> 00:37:41.097
and the child is very happy.

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]

00:37:46.707 --> 00:37:53.401
They do things like: Ahem! [laughs] and, in various ways, try to have it both ways.

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

00:37:57.924 --> 00:38:02.926
an informative intention—providing the stimulus for someone—and a communicative intention:

00:38:02.926 --> 00:38:05.512
the fact that youre trying to communicate with them.

00:38:05.512 --> 00:38:10.552
We find very clear differences in both in 3- and 5-year olds

00:38:10.552 --> 00:38:17.862
in terms of the number of times they suppress that intention in various trials.

00:38:20.612 --> 00:38:25.222
OK, so here's our provisional conclusions... Go ahead.

00:38:25.222 --> 00:38:29.432
[Oh, after you do your provisional conclusions...]

00:38:29.432 --> 00:38:32.191
OK. Is it going to be about this slide, is it? or...

00:38:32.191 --> 00:38:35.112
[It's about this experiment as a whole, so...]

00:38:35.112 --> 00:38:36.552
Go now

00:38:36.552 --> 00:38:38.352
[No (...unintelligible...)]

00:38:38.352 --> 00:38:44.379
My provisional conclusion is that children are ostensive communicators.

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

00:38:51.434 --> 00:38:58.547
for this here perhaps could be done without pointing, with some other behavior

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.

00:39:03.827 --> 00:39:08.287
The answer for great apes we don't know and there are clear methodological challenges to

00:39:08.287 --> 00:39:11.037
doing these sorts of studies with chimps, I mean I see that.

00:39:11.037 --> 00:39:16.177
Nevertheless, when I've spoken to relevant experts of chimpanzee communication and cognition,

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.

00:39:21.012 --> 00:39:27.057
Now, that's an entirely provisional conclusion, could be overturn by data, of course it could.

00:39:27.057 --> 00:39:29.526
But my provisional conclusion...

00:39:29.526 --> 00:39:34.126
–well, I should add also, it's also interesting that the studies haven't been done.

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,

00:39:38.580 --> 00:39:40.650
big methodological challenges.

00:39:40.661 --> 00:39:47.071
But the first study—about when the ball... and receiving the right object

00:39:47.071 --> 00:39:50.071
for the wrong reason and so on and so forth—

00:39:50.071 --> 00:39:55.071
that is perhaps amountable, but nobody seems to have done it.

00:39:55.079 --> 00:40:00.523
And I do wonder if the reason why nobody's done that is because

00:40:00.523 --> 00:40:04.766
researchers are skeptical that chimps are going to pass it and if you get negative

00:40:04.766 --> 00:40:07.894
results is perhaps difficult to interpret, difficult to publish...

00:40:07.894 --> 00:40:11.722
Maybe little motivation to pursuing such an experiment if you're skeptical about

00:40:11.722 --> 00:40:16.742
the possible outcome. Entirely provisional. Totally, these conclusions could be overturned by data,

00:40:16.742 --> 00:40:20.744
but for now, it seems to me that the data suggest that non-human primates

00:40:20.744 --> 00:40:24.274
are not communicating in an ostensive, inferential way.

00:40:24.682 --> 00:40:29.684
[I don't know if you have maybe just 30 seconds, depending upon your time...

00:40:29.684 --> 00:40:35.971
(...unintelligible...)

00:40:35.971 --> 00:40:39.091
... but the division you spoke of…

00:40:41.494 --> 00:40:47.604
You’re looking at the social aspects… of the subject here, right?

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…

00:40:56.404 --> 00:41:02.853
Beyond a certain age—in humans of course—culture is very strong.]

00:41:02.853 --> 00:41:04.698
Of course, yes.

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

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….

00:41:23.655 --> 00:41:26.955
So my basic question is…

00:41:30.465 --> 00:41:33.465
What is your justification for

00:41:33.465 --> 00:41:42.487
separating the social from the cultural… And perhaps if you have time (….),

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?]

00:41:51.397 --> 00:41:55.934
I'm not trying to separate social from cultural, that's the first thing to say.

00:41:55.934 --> 00:42:01.318
What I am separating out is the social-cognitive mechanisms—cognitive mechanisms—

00:42:01.318 --> 00:42:05.374
that make ostensive communication possible in the first place.

00:42:05.374 --> 00:42:10.314
So they're mechanisms of meta-psychology which (...gives rise...) to these sorts of behaviors...

00:42:10.314 --> 00:42:15.994
[My question is how can you, particularly with teenagers and adults,

00:42:15.994 --> 00:42:22.184
take out the strong cultural influences (...)?]

00:42:22.184 --> 00:42:23.274
I'm not trying to.

00:42:23.274 --> 00:42:31.434
[You're not? So if you had time (...) to talk a little bit about the

00:42:31.434 --> 00:42:35.154
cultural aspects of your research in this area]

00:42:35.154 --> 00:42:41.174
I still have three slides to go... Can I do that in the question session?

00:42:41.174 --> 00:42:45.374
[OK, so that'd be my first question] [laughs]

00:42:47.924 --> 00:42:52.374
So I've made this dichotomy earlier between two different ways of thinking about the

00:42:52.374 --> 00:42:54.674
possibility of communication.

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

00:42:59.273 --> 00:43:03.879
only seems to be present in humans... And on the other hand code-model communication.

00:43:03.879 --> 00:43:07.034
So if it is the case that non-human primates don't communicate ostensibly

00:43:07.034 --> 00:43:10.267
then it should be the case that they communicate using natural codes.

00:43:10.267 --> 00:43:13.440
But we should check that. Let's look at the data here.

00:43:13.440 --> 00:43:15.774
Do they communicate using natural codes?

00:43:15.774 --> 00:43:20.734
It's certainly true that great apes gestural communication is accepted to be intentional.

00:43:20.734 --> 00:43:24.064
And there's a live debate in the literature at the moment about the origins of

00:43:24.064 --> 00:43:27.064
the the codes that are being used.

00:43:27.064 --> 00:43:31.694
On the one hand, you have researchers arguing that processes of ontogenetic ritualization

00:43:31.694 --> 00:43:37.214
can give rise to these codes; others saying that there's more of a perhaps innate

00:43:37.214 --> 00:43:39.594
or, in some ways, species-wide repertoire.

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

00:43:44.234 --> 00:43:47.234
an argument about the origins of associations

00:43:47.234 --> 00:43:51.575
between states of the world and behaviors and between behaviors and responses.

00:43:51.575 --> 00:43:54.044
In other words, the origins of natural codes.

00:43:54.044 --> 00:43:57.314
So, they're not using the language of the natural codes,

00:43:57.314 --> 00:44:00.450
but they're talking about associations of certain types.

00:44:00.450 --> 00:44:04.760
That's pervasive through the discussions that are going on in this literature.

00:44:04.760 --> 00:44:10.549
Here is a quote: "We conducted naturalistic observations of wild East African chimpanzee...

00:44:10.549 --> 00:44:14.761
Our results indicate that chimpanzees are able to respond flexibly"

00:44:14.761 --> 00:44:17.561
Why did I put that quote there? I've no idea [laughs].

00:44:17.561 --> 00:44:20.542
That might be lost ignore that!

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.

00:44:24.979 --> 00:44:29.031
Oh yeah –this is why. OK, let me go back, now I know why...

00:44:29.031 --> 00:44:31.559
Sorry. Let's go down to here.

00:44:31.559 --> 00:44:36.028
OK, so there's the natural code. What's particularly interesting about these natural codes

00:44:36.028 --> 00:44:38.209
is that they seem to be used in a very flexible way.

00:44:38.209 --> 00:44:42.089
So we can describe for example bacterial communication in terms of a natural code

00:44:42.089 --> 00:44:48.959
and that'd be a very fixed natural code governed by various, relatively simple, mechanisms.

00:44:50.839 --> 00:44:54.233
But it seems to be more flexible in chimpanzees, so there's the question of

00:44:54.233 --> 00:44:56.783
where that flexibility comes from.

00:44:56.783 --> 00:44:59.013
And the natural answer would be some sort of Theory of Mind,

00:44:59.013 --> 00:45:02.013
meta-psychological abilities of some sort.

00:45:02.013 --> 00:45:07.712
Obviously, as I'm sure many or most or all of you are aware,

00:45:07.712 --> 00:45:11.781
there are live debates about exactly what the extent of

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

00:45:16.142 --> 00:45:19.675
Theory of Mind but some sort of awareness of the goals of others

00:45:19.675 --> 00:45:23.145
that does seem to be present in some of our primate relatives.

00:45:23.145 --> 00:45:26.553
So the answer to the question here is a kind of "Yes, but..."

00:45:26.553 --> 00:45:31.720
Yes, they seem to use natural codes, but they're natural codes which

00:45:31.720 --> 00:45:36.870
are being made more expressively powerful by forms of meta-psychology.

00:45:36.870 --> 00:45:40.210
This, interestingly, appears to be the very opposite of

00:45:40.210 --> 00:45:43.210
what we actually see in linguistic communication.

00:45:43.210 --> 00:45:49.930
So linguistic communication is made possible by mechanisms of meta-psychology,

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.

00:45:54.390 --> 00:45:59.177
And then it's made more precise and expressively powerful by mechanisms of association;

00:45:59.177 --> 00:46:01.537
by the fact that we can create these conventions.

00:46:01.537 --> 00:46:03.990
Great-ape communication seems to be entirely the other way up.

00:46:03.990 --> 00:46:06.590
It's made possible by these natural codes,

00:46:06.590 --> 00:46:09.830
but then it's used in a particularly flexible way which makes it richer

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.

00:46:16.470 --> 00:46:21.717
So, how would we tell the difference between these two different types of communication?

00:46:21.717 --> 00:46:25.758
Well, if you have a set of associations made more powerful by meta-psychology,

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...

00:46:35.019 --> 00:46:39.279
that's the base of associations, but then is used in more flexible ways.

00:46:39.297 --> 00:46:42.845
And it seems to me that the quote from that paper and other papers

00:46:42.845 --> 00:46:45.845
seem to be pointing in that direction.

00:46:45.845 --> 00:46:52.411
Papers that are looking at cataloguing what non-human primate communication systems look like

00:46:52.411 --> 00:46:55.087
are converging upon this sort of conclusion.

00:46:55.087 --> 00:46:58.837
On the other hand, if you have a system made possible by meta-psychology,

00:46:58.837 --> 00:47:01.341
and then made more powerful by associations,

00:47:01.341 --> 00:47:05.089
then essentially anything goes! If it's made possibly by meta-psychology,

00:47:05.089 --> 00:47:09.220
then you can create new signals at will.

00:47:09.220 --> 00:47:13.599
You can have associations that can be used in all sorts of ways.

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.

00:47:19.379 --> 00:47:22.200
This seems to be what we see in language. 


00:47:24.040 --> 00:47:29.240
These points have important implications for how we think about continuity and discontinuity

00:47:29.240 --> 00:47:31.390
in human communication and language.

00:47:31.390 --> 00:47:34.920
As said earlier, it's a common assumption in evolutionary linguistics,

00:47:34.920 --> 00:47:38.643
or in linguistics in general and in evolutionary linguistics,

00:47:38.643 --> 00:47:42.830
that the code is the thing that makes everything possible and the pragmatics

00:47:42.830 --> 00:47:46.534
goes on top as if the messy stuff goes on top to make it more powerful.

00:47:46.534 --> 00:47:50.910
And you can see that... This is James Hurfords two books, 2007, 2012.

00:47:50.910 --> 00:47:55.761
"We may see in alarm calls a skeletal version of our own shared codes"

00:47:55.761 --> 00:47:59.576
–so the continuity there, between the monkeys calls and human languages.

00:47:59.576 --> 00:48:03.616
"It seems quite plausible that the earlier precursors of language were much more,

00:48:03.616 --> 00:48:06.668
perhaps entirely, coding-decoding in nature".

00:48:06.668 --> 00:48:10.486
So language starts as a code model then you have the pragmatics on later.

00:48:10.486 --> 00:48:12.976
I think this is a big mistake.

00:48:12.976 --> 00:48:19.596
The emphasis on continuity here is taking the Darwinian lesson that form changes very gradually,

00:48:19.596 --> 00:48:22.525
but then applying it to function too.

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,

00:48:29.584 --> 00:48:34.857
Darwin tells us these things change gradually, so one must have evolved from the other.

00:48:34.857 --> 00:48:36.182
That doesn't fly.

00:48:36.182 --> 00:48:38.749
The real continuity here is in social intelligence.

00:48:38.749 --> 00:48:42.004
So, non-human primate communication is made more expressively powerful by

00:48:42.004 --> 00:48:45.004
forms of meta-psychology.

00:48:45.004 --> 00:48:50.074
When they're made even more rich, they allow a whole new type of communication system:

00:48:50.074 --> 00:48:55.224
ostensive communication. When you start adding the layers, the recursive mind-reading layers,

00:48:55.224 --> 00:49:01.204
then from the total that was being used to make a natural code more powerful,

00:49:01.204 --> 00:49:04.950
you suddenly get a quite new form of communication: ostensive communication,

00:49:04.950 --> 00:49:09.750
which really opens the flood gates to all sorts of communicative richness.

00:49:11.459 --> 00:49:13.182
OK , let me wrap up.

00:49:13.182 --> 00:49:19.543
Human communication is ostensive and inferential. We're expressing and recognizing intentions;

00:49:19.543 --> 00:49:22.314
informative and communicative intentions.

00:49:22.314 --> 00:49:26.584
It's critical when we're thinking about the evolution of language to distinguish

00:49:26.584 --> 00:49:29.104
between natural codes and conventional codes.

00:49:29.104 --> 00:49:32.292
Natural codes make communication possible in the first place.

00:49:32.292 --> 00:49:36.324
Computers communicate in that way, bacteria do, and so on and so forth.

00:49:36.324 --> 00:49:40.044
Conventional codes do something quite different. They make an already-existing,

00:49:40.044 --> 00:49:45.134
different type of communication systems more powerful than otherwise would be.

00:49:46.511 --> 00:49:50.694
Something I didn't talk about in detail was that point number two from earlier.

00:49:50.694 --> 00:49:53.344
If we're going to look at cultural evolution of conventional codes,

00:49:53.344 --> 00:49:58.594
the right framework I think to do that, is cultural attraction.

00:50:00.794 --> 00:50:04.874
Non-human primate communication is probably using natural codes.

00:50:04.874 --> 00:50:08.467
That is a conclusion that could be overturned by more data.

00:50:08.467 --> 00:50:15.567
But it is made more expressive by some limited forms of meta-psychological abilities.

00:50:15.567 --> 00:50:21.241
What that tells us is that the continuity between non-human primates and humans

00:50:21.241 --> 00:50:23.530
is really in social intelligence.

00:50:23.530 --> 00:50:27.314
It goes from limited forms of mind-reading and manipulation to

00:50:27.314 --> 00:50:32.140
a form of mind-reading and manipulation where we're actually helping each other do that.

00:50:32.140 --> 00:50:36.154
I'm encouraging you to read my mind right now, and you're allowing me to

00:50:36.154 --> 00:50:39.704
manipulate your mental states. More generally, pragmatics

00:50:39.704 --> 00:50:46.410
—the messy reality of using language out there in communication in real-world language use—

00:50:46.410 --> 00:50:49.870
is solely neglected in language evolution research.

00:50:49.870 --> 00:50:51.980
Thank you very much for your time.

00:50:52.217 --> 00:50:56.387
[Applause]

00:51:02.513 --> 00:51:08.341
[Just if perhaps... 2 or 3 minutes to give an example of your research on

00:51:08.341 --> 00:51:13.741
that question which you call cultural attraction. I'd never heard that term before.]

00:51:13.741 --> 00:51:20.112
OK. The idea of cultural attraction is... The thing to explain...

00:51:21.116 --> 00:51:26.456
So, there are ... OK, two or three minutes is long enough.

00:51:27.585 --> 00:51:31.070
Culture consists of two types of things:

00:51:31.070 --> 00:51:35.600
mental representations and public expressions of those mental representations.

00:51:35.600 --> 00:51:39.318
Some mental representations are widely shared in the community and

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.

00:51:43.658 --> 00:51:47.583
So we might all have similar ideas of, you know, God or whatever might be...

00:51:47.583 --> 00:51:51.538
And if we have similar versions of that mental representation we call it culture.

00:51:51.538 --> 00:51:56.089
The thing that needs explaining is why some mental representations are

00:51:56.089 --> 00:52:00.227
common in a population, some are not common. And...

00:52:03.397 --> 00:52:07.124
And I guess the key insight in cultural attraction theory is that

00:52:07.124 --> 00:52:12.110
as these mental representations and their public expressions are passed through a community...

00:52:12.110 --> 00:52:17.012
As I'm taking to you, I'm taking my mental representations, forming a public expression,

00:52:17.012 --> 00:52:20.868
and you're taking that public expression and forming your own mental representations.

00:52:20.868 --> 00:52:23.852
There's no guarantee that those two mental representations are the same and

00:52:23.852 --> 00:52:27.084
in fact our mechanisms of communication and cognition are actually

00:52:27.084 --> 00:52:30.154
going to manipulate them to fit them with our existing mental representation

00:52:30.154 --> 00:52:32.294
and so on and so forth...

00:52:32.294 --> 00:52:37.832
And those changes are often going to be common through a population.

00:52:37.832 --> 00:52:41.364
So you might change in a very similar way to many other people.

00:52:41.364 --> 00:52:45.015
And if many of us are making similar changes,

00:52:45.015 --> 00:52:49.325
then those mental representations tend to gravitate in certain directions and not in others.

00:52:49.445 --> 00:52:51.137
[...unintelligible...]

00:52:51.137 --> 00:52:57.335
Well, there are subtle though I think very important differences between the labels,

00:52:57.335 --> 00:53:00.335
which I'm not going to go into the details...

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.

00:53:05.005 --> 00:53:09.205
Do you know who (...is going to read...) on kin selection?]

00:53:09.326 --> 00:53:20.096
[...unintelligible...]

00:53:25.846 --> 00:53:36.867
[Taking your argument for Darwinian gradualism seriously, I actually have objections to your flight analogy

00:53:36.867 --> 00:53:40.057
(... that'd like to put as an aside...) (...)]

00:53:41.132 --> 00:53:45.678
Yes, yes, I realize that... It was more to make a point than to...

00:53:45.678 --> 00:53:53.086
[I understand... But so, the same concern applies more substantively to your conclusions for

00:53:53.086 --> 00:53:56.240
the very differences between the great apes and humans,

00:53:56.240 --> 00:53:59.199
which is: How do we get from here to there...?

00:53:59.199 --> 00:54:04.789
That is, if Theory of Mind abilities and social reasoning in general...

00:54:06.263 --> 00:54:11.423
appear progressively across apes and,

00:54:11.423 --> 00:54:15.797
presumably (...keeping in time...) across hominids, right?,

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

00:54:21.837 --> 00:54:27.616
communicative abilities in parallel with mind-reading abilities in, you know,

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

00:54:40.106 --> 00:54:47.229
to manipulate the natural codes, but (...isn't the...) the driver of much of the behavior,

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...

00:54:53.796 --> 00:54:58.566
If what we see is more limited abilities in both extents in (...us...)

00:54:58.566 --> 00:55:01.566
and great apes, and if we're (...taking them into

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,

00:55:07.986 --> 00:55:13.399
according to Darwinian gradualism, wouldn't we expect to see the same kind of linear progression?

00:55:13.399 --> 00:55:16.790
That is, there's no half-a-wing problem there, you know.

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

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...]

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

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.

00:55:36.941 --> 00:55:40.232
You get into the details of ostensive communication... It's

00:55:40.232 --> 00:55:45.492
an intention that you understand I have an intention that you understand X.

00:55:45.492 --> 00:55:50.055
You don't get ostensive communication until all that apparatus is in place.

00:55:50.055 --> 00:55:54.705
There aren't... It doesn't seem to me that there are...

00:55:54.705 --> 00:55:58.284
It doesn't seem to me that there are partly ostensive forms of communication;

00:55:58.284 --> 00:56:02.364
you've got to have the whole apparatus in place in the first place.

00:56:02.364 --> 00:56:08.025
So you can build ever small sophisticated ways of reasoning about each others' minds.

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

00:56:13.304 --> 00:56:15.690
ostensive communication happening

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...]

00:56:19.164 --> 00:56:23.674
Yes, which would be some sort of Social Brain Hypothesis.]

00:56:23.674 --> 00:56:28.854
[So, good. Well, it's a Machiavellian intelligence argument with no communication in their (...)]

00:56:28.854 --> 00:56:30.664
Not in the first place.

00:56:30.664 --> 00:56:35.394
[(...) does necessarily depend upon your idea of gradualism?]

00:56:38.317 --> 00:56:41.744
Does what depend on my idea of gradualism?

00:56:41.744 --> 00:56:44.699
[Does your argument really depend on gradualism?]

00:56:44.699 --> 00:56:46.947
So...

00:56:46.947 --> 00:56:55.698
[I only ask that because I think there are lots of situations (...) where the edifice

00:56:55.698 --> 00:56:59.758
doesn't fall on (...) rise and fall (...on...) gradualism.]

00:56:59.758 --> 00:57:04.128
Oh, no, I'm not saying my argument rises or falls on gradualism But, you know, (...)

00:57:09.688 --> 00:57:14.055
[I found that really interesting and convincing.

00:57:14.055 --> 00:57:17.055
Although one thing that was left unstated, it was implicit,

00:57:17.055 --> 00:57:21.459
was why you think that testing these things in human children is important?

00:57:21.459 --> 00:57:26.999
And I'm wondering, you know, are there particular ages that you think are, you know...

00:57:26.999 --> 00:57:30.572
Do we have to push it back to the earliest point possible in order to

00:57:30.572 --> 00:57:35.000
provide the strongest test? Could you say some things about that?]

00:57:35.000 --> 00:57:37.118
The general motivation of that sort of...


00:57:37.118 --> 00:57:39.687
[... and what you think the research on the young kids tells us

00:57:39.687 --> 00:57:42.077
with respect to the evolution of language]

00:57:42.077 --> 00:57:44.530
It controls for other types of intelligence,

00:57:44.530 --> 00:57:47.530
in particular physical intelligence, intelligence with the physical world.

00:57:47.530 --> 00:57:51.887
So, children at about... —(...) knows better than I exactly at what sort of ages— 

00:57:51.887 --> 00:57:56.337
but around 2 or 3 years of age, adult chimpanzees and young children

00:57:56.337 --> 00:58:01.277
have similar powers for understanding the physical world (...)

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

00:58:06.619 --> 00:58:11.519
other general type of intelligence, when you're comparing their social intelligence.

00:58:11.519 --> 00:58:16.249
[And... could you say just a little bit more about that? Why is that important?]

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

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,

00:58:26.087 --> 00:58:28.516
that there's any particularly social intelligence or

00:58:28.516 --> 00:58:31.516
particularly meta-psychological-community intelligence;

00:58:31.516 --> 00:58:35.506
it's just the general intelligence that's being applied to a particular problem at hand.

00:58:35.506 --> 00:58:43.176
You can control for that by dealing with humans that have similar powers in those regards.

00:58:49.947 --> 00:58:50.477
Go on

00:58:51.161 --> 00:58:57.176
[The argument you're making for a shift in terms of associative, ostensive (...)

00:58:57.176 --> 00:59:02.036
that characterize your argument with great apes and the reversal with humans,

00:59:02.036 --> 00:59:06.886
and particularly the notion that this is not gradual transition,

00:59:06.886 --> 00:59:10.725
(...you said that...) is not a gradual transition,

00:59:10.725 --> 00:59:13.725
implies there must be a set the conditions under which

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

00:59:19.025 --> 00:59:22.980
presumably there would have been the same (...transition...) in terms of (...).

00:59:22.980 --> 00:59:24.870
Do you have any sorts of thoughts on

00:59:24.870 --> 00:59:31.340
what might be those conditions that would generate that kind of phase change?]

00:59:32.344 --> 00:59:36.185
I'm generally sympathetic to some version of Social Brain Hypothesis.

00:59:36.185 --> 00:59:39.905
Humans are an incredibly social species, they live in very large social groups...

00:59:39.905 --> 00:59:46.298
That seems to select for a whole lot of forms of social intelligence.

00:59:46.298 --> 00:59:49.828
Now, the Social Brain Hypothesis/Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis,

00:59:49.828 --> 00:59:51.768
whatever you want to call it,

00:59:51.768 --> 00:59:54.318
exists in various different forms, and people are still arguing on the nuances,

00:59:54.318 --> 00:59:57.290
but it does seem to me that there is quite a lot of agreement that

00:59:57.290 --> 01:00:01.699
the hyper sociality of humans has driven a particular social intelligence,

01:00:01.699 --> 01:00:05.989
which gives you the meta-psychology that I've been talking about.

01:00:05.989 --> 01:00:10.596
[Possibly the further development (...that could be made about your argument is to state the...)

01:00:10.596 --> 01:00:17.416
necessary condition with the argument (...) (...sufficient argument...)

01:00:17.416 --> 01:00:20.556
in a sense that (... something well-argued would say...)

01:00:20.556 --> 01:00:25.168
Well, why did we continue in this trajectory towards our present communicative capacities;

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

01:00:33.315 --> 01:00:39.848
development of communication abilities (...) and not to be reaching a new plateau (...)

01:00:39.848 --> 01:00:45.168
something a little bit smarter than the great apes but well below modern humans...]

01:00:45.168 --> 01:00:49.953
That's why this line here. The real continuity is in social intelligence.

01:00:49.953 --> 01:00:52.953
And one thing that I say in the book is that,

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

01:00:57.716 --> 01:01:03.026
is not as a communication system, but as a form of social intelligence/social cognition.

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

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

01:01:12.076 --> 01:01:15.076
allow us to do it in a particularly rich way.

01:01:15.076 --> 01:01:17.991
So, it's not the case that there is a kind of simple form of communication

01:01:17.991 --> 01:01:22.051
(...that I stop telling you, that once you get it, you stop there...).

01:01:22.051 --> 01:01:28.078
This whole communication thing is on the cline of social intelligence,

01:01:28.078 --> 01:01:30.266
it's at one particular end.

01:01:30.266 --> 01:01:33.396
[But it did stop in the apes. That is, presumably...]

01:01:33.396 --> 01:01:35.936
No, no. Because... Oh, sorry yes!

01:01:35.936 --> 01:01:40.482
[Social intelligence... The argument is also, to whatever extent it was advantageous

01:01:40.482 --> 01:01:43.482
for our hominid ancestors,

01:01:43.482 --> 01:01:49.416
presumably is advantageous for our almost identical chimpanzees ancestors

01:01:49.416 --> 01:01:52.446
close to the divergence of (...Hominoidea...)]

01:01:52.446 --> 01:01:56.466
Would you buy any version of the Machiavellian Intelligence/Social Brain Hypothesis?

01:01:56.466 --> 01:02:01.025
[I don't have any objections with the Machiavellian argument as long as

01:02:01.025 --> 01:02:03.935
one introduces what would be the conditions

01:02:03.935 --> 01:02:10.096
under which further development of Machiavellian intelligence has a payoff, rather than just

01:02:10.096 --> 01:02:12.986
presuming that somehow it just naturally develops that way.

01:02:12.986 --> 01:02:15.986
Because once that you start down that route,

01:02:15.986 --> 01:02:21.731
you must follow it all the way to human kinds of communication.

01:02:21.731 --> 01:02:24.723
It seems to me what's missing in the argument is,

01:02:24.723 --> 01:02:29.763
what are those external conditions that would be driving the continued development of

01:02:29.763 --> 01:02:35.607
Machiavellian intelligence. Because, certainly, it's hard to imagine (...it as...)

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.]

01:02:43.229 --> 01:02:47.639
[But if communication is socially beneficial...?]

01:02:47.639 --> 01:02:51.678
[But what would be the conditions under which it is socially beneficial for

01:02:51.678 --> 01:02:56.320
hominid ancestors but not chimpanzee ancestors?

01:02:56.320 --> 01:02:59.850
That question... I would reframe it as...

01:02:59.850 --> 01:03:05.980
[The ability of the individual chimpanzees didn't also...

01:03:08.889 --> 01:03:12.979
... evolve (...) by accident?]

01:03:14.079 --> 01:03:18.189
[(...mutations...) didn't actually have to occur, you know.]

01:03:18.930 --> 01:03:25.780
[...unintelligible...]

01:03:25.992 --> 01:03:29.813
So, the answer in the Social Brain Hypothesis is that humans are more social because

01:03:29.813 --> 01:03:35.303
we do live in larger groups. We do have, you know, a richer array of interactions...

01:03:35.303 --> 01:03:37.993
[Why can't it be a happy accident?]

01:03:37.993 --> 01:03:40.703
[If we look down at the development of human evolution that's true,

01:03:40.703 --> 01:03:43.703
that's what we've come to at present, yes,

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

01:03:49.383 --> 01:03:54.673
our hominid ancestors up in the Serengeti Plain or whatever, the size of the social groups

01:03:54.673 --> 01:03:58.959
(....follows no difference from...) the size of the chimpanzees social groups.]

01:03:58.959 --> 01:04:02.706
[So that's the thing that differ. So, you know, specialty in hominids is

01:04:02.706 --> 01:04:05.706
very very old and predates encephalization,

01:04:05.706 --> 01:04:09.416
and our specialty is going to favor biparental care.

01:04:09.416 --> 01:04:12.416
We're the only primate that has extensive biparental care

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

01:04:19.217 --> 01:04:23.717
an upper ceiling that isn't there in apes that was there in hominids...]

01:04:24.206 --> 01:04:27.996
[I don't disagree with (...),

01:04:27.996 --> 01:04:31.616
...but I just want to bring attention to the fact that, in this kind of arguments,

01:04:31.616 --> 01:04:35.556
we also need to also be able to identify why was it that

01:04:35.556 --> 01:04:38.606
our particular lineage was driven in this direction

01:04:38.606 --> 01:04:44.657
whereas the ape lineage was not. What was different that was going on in our linage?]

01:04:44.657 --> 01:04:46.863
[But to be honest, that's not Thom...]

01:04:46.863 --> 01:04:50.892
[ I didn't want to say that, but (...)] (laughs)

01:04:50.892 --> 01:04:56.527
[He's saying you get human communicative abilities once

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

01:05:04.057 --> 01:05:09.257
that threshold, because—as we agreed—there are many things that might have contributed to it]

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

01:05:13.857 --> 01:05:17.017
it is or not (...we're not going to decide...) for him.

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

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

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

01:05:34.843 --> 01:05:41.544
mechanisms one is talking about presumably were also operating (...) social intelligence, presumably

01:05:41.544 --> 01:05:44.364
was also beneficial in the context of chimpanzees (...)

01:05:44.364 --> 01:05:47.364
argument about social intelligence development (...)

01:05:47.364 --> 01:05:52.177
we're looking at changes in primates in terms of social complexity and then response to (...)

01:05:52.177 --> 01:05:56.567
(...that developing of...) social intelligence. Why does that particular trajectory terminate

01:05:56.567 --> 01:05:59.567
whereas ours doesn't? I'm not saying that you

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

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

01:06:09.878 --> 01:06:14.088
the reasons for them (....) carrying the debate as well.]

01:06:14.927 --> 01:06:17.207
Can I take a different question?

01:06:18.717 --> 01:06:21.637
[This is a comment, not a question]

01:06:21.637 --> 01:06:22.647
OK

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

01:06:28.017 --> 01:06:33.647
even when you've never seen or heard that particular behavior before.

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

01:06:38.653 --> 01:06:41.653
addresses this directly, where the task is to choose

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

01:06:48.025 --> 01:06:51.616
from each other. So, there's two experimenters, one directly facing the subject,

01:06:51.616 --> 01:06:54.616
the other standing is behind the subject,

01:06:54.616 --> 01:06:59.339
who communicates something to the subject, maybe a child or an ape,

01:06:59.339 --> 01:07:01.755
either by pointing at the right box

01:07:01.755 --> 01:07:05.505
—and that, of course, both the apes and the children have seen lots of pointing—

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.

01:07:08.808 --> 01:07:11.808
And those, presumably, the child has never seen before

01:07:11.808 --> 01:07:16.115
and yet the children are much better at picking the correct box

01:07:16.115 --> 01:07:19.757
–much better than chance, whereas the apes don't do better than chance.

01:07:19.757 --> 01:07:23.787
So that's the issue that (...Dan Bornstein...) was debating with you about (...)]

01:07:24.407 --> 01:07:26.257
Well...

01:07:28.217 --> 01:07:32.397
So the thing with the object-choice task is... Yeah...

01:07:37.288 --> 01:07:41.775
So, it's clear that chimps struggle with points in the object-choice task;

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

01:07:46.599 --> 01:07:49.939
whether that's a failure to recognize that somebody's communicating

01:07:49.939 --> 01:07:53.829
in the first place or some sort of...

01:07:55.669 --> 01:08:00.976
Actually, I don't know what the alternative might look like. I kind of feel

01:08:00.976 --> 01:08:06.006
like there's an alternative that is some sort of cultural explanation there...

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

01:08:17.854 --> 01:08:22.274
is consistent with what I'm saying, so in a way I'm looking for (...)

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,

01:08:28.754 --> 01:08:32.794
whenever the adult is looking at the child or

01:08:32.794 --> 01:08:35.794
in other way indicating that (...the child should pay attention...),

01:08:35.794 --> 01:08:40.420
no matter what the adult does—even if is something the kid has never seen before—

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.]

01:08:44.938 --> 01:08:48.888
I certainly think that kids are communicating ostensively and

01:08:48.888 --> 01:08:53.156
are understanding ostensive communication, which is what you're describing.

01:08:53.156 --> 01:08:56.606
You won't find me (...arguing against that...). I mean, I'm agreeing that

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

01:09:03.256 --> 01:09:07.059
the 4 things that I wanted to point, that I'm trying to address, and

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.

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

01:09:28.103 --> 01:09:33.803
I'm just wondering, how much of this (...whole dual thing...) is dependent on

01:09:33.803 --> 01:09:41.593
this picture of communication that heavily emphasizes mental representation.

01:09:41.593 --> 01:09:45.773
I missed the beginning of your talk so maybe you mentioned something about this,

01:09:45.773 --> 01:09:53.759
but Wittgenstein once said something about how, you know, tools all serve to modify something,

01:09:53.759 --> 01:10:02.063
so the chisel modifies the piece of wood and, you know... the hammer modifies the nail...

01:10:02.063 --> 01:10:08.256
What does it take to modify (...) my idea of the (...length of the thing...)?

01:10:08.256 --> 01:10:13.336
And then Wittgenstein says, What is accomplished by this assimilation of expressions?

01:10:13.336 --> 01:10:20.623
So, I'm just wondering, what is done by... What is the consequence of viewing

01:10:20.623 --> 01:10:25.913
everything in terms of mental representations and intentions?

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...

01:10:35.735 --> 01:10:38.925
That the point of continuity between earlier primates

01:10:38.925 --> 01:10:42.941
and us is social communication.

01:10:42.941 --> 01:10:48.191
But there have been a lot of patterns found by conversation analysts that

01:10:48.191 --> 01:10:56.641
don't emphasize mental representations. They sort of emphasize adjacency pairs, more of a "dance",

01:10:56.641 --> 01:11:03.938
which may involve keeping track of things and maybe involves keeping track of intentions.

01:11:05.160 --> 01:11:10.991
And, I guess... (how do you pronounce his name, Federico Rossano?)

01:11:10.991 --> 01:11:16.891
Rossano has found that in a lot of primates there are

01:11:16.891 --> 01:11:20.360
sort of similar timings, some similar stuff.

01:11:20.360 --> 01:11:24.680
So, maybe this (...conversationalist analysts stuff...) is just the

01:11:24.680 --> 01:11:29.843
(...conventionalized content...) that you're kind of setting to the side,

01:11:29.843 --> 01:11:32.843
but I'm just wondering –if you focused more

01:11:32.843 --> 01:11:38.759
on that kind of pattern you come up with slightly different take on things...]

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

01:11:48.591 --> 01:11:51.345
forms of the conventions, and focusing on

01:11:51.345 --> 01:11:55.245
the mental representation as being in any way (...on a par...) (...).

01:11:55.245 --> 01:11:57.885
So the former is a consequence of the latter.

01:11:57.885 --> 01:12:01.876
[Wait, which is a consequence? Just spell it out]

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...

01:12:11.040 --> 01:12:14.286
[And that leads to the conversational (...)?]

01:12:14.286 --> 01:12:17.878
That with lead to—well, that and many other things that are involved:

01:12:17.878 --> 01:12:20.889
the cultural attraction and so on and so forth—would lead to conversational patterns that

01:12:20.889 --> 01:12:24.519
you do observe in conversational analysis and so on and so forth.

01:12:24.519 --> 01:12:26.129
I don't see any reason to...

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.]

01:12:31.547 --> 01:12:38.260
Well, the patterns that we might observe in ape communication and in human communication

01:12:38.260 --> 01:12:41.719
are not themselves cognitive traits that could be subjected by biological evolution.

01:12:41.719 --> 01:12:45.589
They're not patterns of...

01:12:45.589 --> 01:12:48.026
[The ability to produce such patterns!]

01:12:48.026 --> 01:12:53.600
Sure!... No, no, no! No individual produces patterns; these are patterns of exchange...

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

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

01:13:06.129 --> 01:13:11.497
if they might be both be driving each other and if it's necessary always to...

01:13:11.497 --> 01:13:15.722
I'm not one of these anti-representationalist people...

01:13:15.722 --> 01:13:19.122
but I wonder if it's always necessary or even necessarily helpful.

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)]

01:13:28.061 --> 01:13:32.056
I guess there's two points I want to make.

01:13:32.056 --> 01:13:35.111
Let me draw on the conversation analysis and the patterns.

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

01:13:39.801 --> 01:13:42.051
the fact that you we combine things together...

01:13:42.051 --> 01:13:46.171
They're very basic syntax, is taking things together in various ways.

01:13:46.171 --> 01:13:51.981
Human language is full of this. And some people have started to uncover

01:13:51.981 --> 01:13:56.744
simple forms of this, in some non-human primate communication. So there's a

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

01:14:01.784 --> 01:14:03.532
some microbiologists.

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

01:14:06.532 --> 01:14:12.062
a continuity there. So I got talking to some microbiologists who work on bacterial communication.

01:14:12.062 --> 01:14:19.051
And we did an experiment basically replicating the playback experiments done with various monkey species.

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.

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,

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,

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

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.

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

01:14:55.796 --> 01:14:59.036
the patterns that you're pointing to.

01:14:59.759 --> 01:15:02.699
[Well, maybe true, I don't know]

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]

01:15:13.743 --> 01:15:15.856
(...) (...patterns of communication...)

01:15:16.646 --> 01:15:18.386
(...)

01:15:18.856 --> 01:15:20.896
[Sure, I got that (laughs).

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

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

01:15:42.978 --> 01:15:48.229
(...where surely...) conventions are not special for language... it all depends on cultural conventions

01:15:48.229 --> 01:15:50.420
(...that are not linguistic...) ]

01:15:50.420 --> 01:15:51.768
Yeah, sure.

01:15:51.768 --> 01:15:57.685
[(...certainly ontogeny is not special for language...). Is there anything, in your view... –for instance,

01:15:57.685 --> 01:16:05.425
emergent thing that hasn't particularly... There's no linguistic trace that specifically (...have been selected...)?]

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

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,

01:16:16.278 --> 01:16:21.555
people have long observed that languages have various (...differences...) in structural properties,

01:16:21.555 --> 01:16:25.981
(...independent of...) the relations. And we need to explain why certain, you know,

01:16:25.981 --> 01:16:29.241
word orders are common while other ones are not.

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

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

01:16:40.093 --> 01:16:41.803
so on and so forth. And various other things,

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

01:16:47.673 --> 01:16:48.678
[ or bacteria (...)]

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,

01:16:54.133 --> 01:16:58.055
as this one is only working in language. I dont have any reasons to do that...

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.

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—

01:17:09.437 --> 01:17:17.015
what has there been selected for? (...) I mean, natural selection is selecting for a thing...

01:17:18.726 --> 01:17:22.909
Is any of the things that (...being...) selected for specifically because of (...) ?]

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

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.

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

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.

01:17:47.544 --> 01:17:50.348
If there's such a thing, that is what we should be calling

01:17:50.348 --> 01:17:53.348
an LAD [Language Acquisition Device] or a UG [Universal Grammar] or whatever.

01:17:53.348 --> 01:17:57.267
In fact (...I quote you...),you say much the same thing in the book.

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

01:18:03.509 --> 01:18:04.379
[OK]

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...).

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".

01:18:19.688 --> 01:18:20.738
Yes.

01:18:20.738 --> 01:18:24.748
But I'd like, to kind of, just bang on about that for a second.]

01:18:24.748 --> 01:18:25.539
OK

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

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,

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.

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

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

01:19:05.677 --> 01:19:11.869
certain communicative repertoires in primate systems, are heavily influenced by, you know, the kind of,

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"]

01:19:16.690 --> 01:19:19.020
Yes, I agree, and I think its a mistake, yes.

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

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

01:19:33.292 --> 01:19:42.628
interactions and (...), and you know... Apes spend a huge amount of time, you know, doing this

01:19:43.008 --> 01:19:45.498
(laughs)

01:19:45.628 --> 01:19:48.051
None of that is provable,]

01:19:48.051 --> 01:19:49.701
Sure, I understand.

01:19:49.701 --> 01:19:53.971
[None of that is objective and replicable... There's a lot of discussion about,

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,

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

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

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

01:20:21.838 --> 01:20:27.628
(...thing that...) sort of faults with linguistics and (...thinking of...) what makes human language special

01:20:27.640 --> 01:20:30.462
that you criticized in the first half of your talk.]

01:20:30.852 --> 01:20:34.490
So that's why there are question marks on these (laughs)

01:20:34.900 --> 01:20:39.350
[I'd preferred it if you'd offered them as series of (...)](laughs)

01:20:40.980 --> 01:20:44.598
(...)

01:20:44.598 --> 01:20:48.871
[(...) I wanted to know what you thought in terms of the OI [ostensive inferential] model...

01:20:48.871 --> 01:20:51.688
Can you have ostension without a code?]

01:20:51.688 --> 01:20:55.473
Yes, sure. Point... That chip gesture...

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

01:21:01.214 --> 01:21:06.364
without having either a very developed natural or conventional code system?]

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

01:21:16.881 --> 01:21:20.221
precedes linguistic communication in development.

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

01:21:32.895 --> 01:21:40.635
as communicative intent follows informative intent. I mean, if informative intent relies to some extent on

01:21:40.635 --> 01:21:45.022
there being conventional or natural codes. Doesn't it or was I...?]

01:21:45.022 --> 01:21:46.488
No, I'm not following, sorry

01:21:46.488 --> 01:21:47.805
[I'll argue about that later]

01:21:47.805 --> 01:21:49.045
OK

01:21:49.045 --> 01:21:53.445
[The difference between meaningful and symbolic, right?]

01:21:53.945 --> 01:21:55.309
I've lost track now (laughs)

01:21:56.793 --> 01:22:00.603
[The difference between meaningful and symbolic]

01:22:00.925 --> 01:22:07.224
[We should take this up after (...) because we're now at the end of our discussion.

01:22:07.224 --> 01:22:09.604
Thank you very much] (applause)