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On Scott-Phillips’ General Account of Communication

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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to critically engage with a recent attempt by Thom Scott-Phillips to offer a general account of communication. As a general account, it is intended to apply equally well to both non-human and human interactions which are prima facie communicative in character. However, so far, Scott-Phillips has provided little detail regarding how his account is supposed to apply to the latter set of cases. After presenting what I take to be the most plausible way of filling in those details, I argue that his account would appear to be too narrow: it (minimally) fails to capture a range of human interactions which strike us as instances of communication. To wit, these are cases in which some but not all of the information an act is designed to convey to a reactor actually reaches that reactor. An alternative account incorporating Scott-Phillips’ main insights is then sketched, and it is suggested that this account, or something like it, would accommodate the full range of non-human and human interactions that are intuitively communicative.

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Notes

  1. It is debatable whether this case actually constitutes a case of coercion in the above sense. Whether it does depends on us treating overlooking the prey as a kind of behavioural reaction. I won’t worry about this here. Other, albeit more complicated, cases could be provided.

  2. I am skeptical. But I am happy to say that fully-modern humans can and often do communicate in this way. So, it is important that the account cover such cases.

  3. This analysis of human communication has its roots in the work of philosopher Paul Grice (1957). However, it differs from Grice’s analysis in several respects. For a thorough overview of these differences, see Sperber and Wilson (who coined the term “ostensive communication” (1986, 1995); for a briefer overview, see Scott-Phillips (2015).

  4. Thus, communicative intentions are typically thought of as taking the form: [the actor intends that the reactor believes that [the actor intends that the reactor believes that p]inf]com). This is the sense in which informative intentions are embedded or nested within communicative intentions.

  5. In Sect. 4, we will briefly consider a more formal characterization of these intentions owing to Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995).

  6. One might be skeptical of the idea that it is the function of our communicative intentions is to influence others’ mental states. Instead, one might think that these acts really have the function of simply influencing others’ behavior. This is something which proponents of the ostensive communication model of human communication are united in rejecting. There are both theoretical and empirical reasons for doing so. Taking the former first: it is thought that it is the intention to influence another’s mental states—specifically, in a way that depends upon intention-recognition—is what distinguishes human communicative behavior from types of behaviors which are clearly non-communicative in character. For example, Scott-Phillips tells us:

    … a characterization of informative intentions in terms of intentions to manipulate only behavior (and not necessarily mental states) is too broad. Specifically, it includes as communicative some behaviors that are clearly not … [B]oth saying “Stop hitting me!” and moving (in a nonostensive way) to a place where you cannot hit me both satisfy a definition to affect the others’ behavior. But only the former is communicative. It is precisely the intention to affect mental states that distinguishes communication from many other social behaviors. (2015, p. 76)

    Sperber and Wilson (1995) and also Tomasello (2008) say much the same thing. In addition, it is taken as given that some human communicative acts have indicative content (roughly, they report on the state of the world) while others have imperative content (roughly, they request that some behavior be performed). So, if one were to think (as most theorists in this area do think) that the meaning of human communicative acts is inherited from the meaning of the goals/intentions which underlie those acts, it would appear impossible to account for indicative meaning.

    As for the empirical case for conceiving of our communicative intentions in this way: experimental work strongly suggests that even young children form non-instrumental goals to influence others mental states [Shwe and Markman (1997); Grosse et al. (2010)]. What this work shows, in a nutshell, is that children seek to correct misunderstandings even when they receive the objects they have requested. So, for example, a child who has requested the ball but was told “I’m sorry you can’t have the block; but you can have the ball”, and then handed the ball, will often show visible signs of frustration and attempt to bring this misunderstanding to the adult’s attention.

  7. In what follows, I use “her” for the actor and “him” for the reactor.

  8. I here assume that an intention is a goal together with an action plan for satisfying this goal (Bratman 1989). So, when the actor implements the action plan she is chosen, she can be said to possess a communicative intention.

  9. By a “belief-like state”, I have in mind a mental state which purports to represent the true state of the world [i.e., which has a mind-to-world “direction of fit” (Searle 1985)], but plays a somewhat different functional role within one’s cognitive economy. For example, whereas beliefs are decoupled with respect to output behavior (Sterelny 2003), a belief-like state need not be.

  10. That is, the fact that:

    1. (1)

      The reactor believes that the actor intends that the reactor believes that berries are tasty is explained by the following two facts:

    2. (2)

      The reactor believes that the actor intends that the reactor believes that the actor intends that the reactor believes that berries are tasty; and

    3. (3)

      The reactor wants to fulfil the actor’s communicative intention.

  11. It is true, of course, that the physical and/or cognitive changes which constitute the reaction are caused by the act, but why should this mean that the reaction has the function, that it is designed, to be caused by the act?.

  12. Perhaps the most obvious patch here would be to say that the function instantiated by the act simply has to be “reaction-involving” and the function instantiated by the reaction “act-involving”. This would certainly capture the sorts of cases put on the table in the last section as well as cases of ostensive communication (the latter will be ruled in because we can say that the reaction has the function of, e.g., fulfilling the communicative intention expressed by the act, or some such thing). The problem with this condition is that it would appear to be too broad. For example: imagine a case in which the actor wants the reactor to eat some berries, and believes (correctly) that the reactor is disposed to imitate her. As such, she eats some berries herself intending that this cause the reactor to eat some berries. Her act thus has the function of causing the reactor to eat some berries. The reactor sees this and follows suite, doing so because he wants his own behavior to resemble the actor’s and believes that the actor is eating some berries. Accordingly, given this desire on the reactor’s part, we can say that his reaction has the function of resembling the actor’s act. Here, then, would be a case in which the act and reaction instantiate other-involving functions, and yet, I do not think most theorists would wish to treat this as a case of communication.

  13. Scott-Phillips is explicit in maintaining that unless the reaction caused by the act is one that the act has the function of causing, then the reaction does not count as a response, and so the interaction does not count as communicative. For example, he imagines a case in which an actor pushes over one colleague in an attempt to entertain another. This act happens to be observed by the actor’s boss (whose presence the actor is unaware of), leading the boss to form the opinion that the actor is unprofessional. Scott-Phillips says (with respect to the boss), “This is a deliberate (i.e., designed) reaction to the scene [read: the act], but the push itself was certainly not designed to cause this reaction—and so for the boss the push is a cue.” (2014, p. 32). (See also Scott-Phillips and Kirby (2013, pp. 431–432) for a very similar analysis).

  14. On the other hand, it is not as though we do not distinguish between reaching an interpretation which is merely similar to a communicator’s message and that message itself. This is reflected in such pedestrian exchanges as:

    X: Is that what you meant?

    Y: For the most part.

    So, it is certainly possible to take this point about the fuzziness of the fulfillment conditions on communicative intentions too far. Should there turn out to be good reason to insist on an exact or near exact match between the content of the actor’s communicative intention and the belief reached by the reactor (as, for example, Cappelen and Lepore (2007) argue), then the problem of partial communication for Scott-Phillips’ account would obviously have much wider scope.

  15. More fully: consider the proposition birds fly. This proposition is mutually manifest to individual A and B if and only if the proposition it is manifest to A and B that birds fly is manifest to A and manifest to B. And the proposition it is manifest to A and B that birds fly is manifest to A and to B if and only if the proposition it is manifest to A and B that it is manifest to A and B that birds fly is manifest to A and manifest to B. And so on. Sperber and Wilson appeal to mutual manifestness (as opposed to manifestness simpliciter) here so as to block a class of would-be counterexamples to their analysis of human communication. These details need not concern us here, however.

  16. Scott-Phillips (2015) makes this suggestion, though in a different context (specifically, in discussing the conceptual possibility of minimal forms of ostension). He writes, “Manifestness is … critically, a graded term: there are degrees of manifestness. Ideas that are only half understood are, in effect, only partially manifest” [italics mine] (p. 76).

  17. To be clear: I am not imagining that the actor attributes to the actor the informative intention to make (more) manifest the proposition there is a snake in the vicinity, but rather that he attributes to her something like an intention to make (more) manifest that there is a snake located at x, where x ranges over locations in their vicinity.

  18. Note that this is a rather charitable example in that it is not unreasonable to imagine that the reactor mentally represents each of the above propositions. In many cases of partial communication, this will not be the case (as when, for example, the reactor has little or no idea who/what the intended subject of the relevant proposition is).

  19. The most recent substantial work on this vein is without a doubt Sperber and Wilson’s “Beyond Speaker’s Meaning” (2015). However, as far as I can tell, nothing in their discussion of manifestness addresses the kind of case just presented.

  20. See Moore (2016) for a discussion.

  21. Russon and Andrews (2010) discusses a variety of cases of Orangutan communication that are plausibly interpreted in this way.

  22. I thank an anonymous referee for this journal for pointing this out to me. It is true, however, that some of Scott-Phillips’ remarks regarding information suggest that he would personally oppose such a suggestion. For example, Scott-Phillips (2008) tells us that information “is an emergent feature of communication” (p. 392), while Scott-Phillips and Kirby write, “Only once we know what [signals] do can we identify information, conventional meaning and other associated phenomena—since these things simply do not exist until there is functional symbiosis between signals and responses. Effects are methodologically prior” (italics mine) (p. 433). I think these remarks are too metaphysically strong, but it is beyond the scope of this article to address the issues they raise. The important point for present purposes is that such views can be separated out from Scott-Phillips’ account of communication.

  23. I take this to be compatible with Sperber and Wilson’s idea that we often intend for others to recognize just some subset or other of our informative intentions. For even in such cases, it would seem that we want others to fully understand whatever subset of propositions it is that they glom on to.

  24. I say “at a minimum” because I think it is possible for cases of coercion to also fail to satisfy condition (1). Indeed, when we take the full range of intuitively coercive behaviors into consideration (i.e., both non-human and human cases), it is probably true that most of these behaviors lack the function of transmitting certain information to the reactor. (The main set of cases I have in mind where the interaction is intuitively coercive and where the act does have the function of transmitting certain information to the reactor are cases involving so-called “hidden authorship”, i.e., cases in which one intends for the reactor to pick up some piece of information but in which one also intends to hide one’s informative intention from the reactor. Here is such a case: I leave my painting supplies lying around the house intending for you to believe that I am an inspired artist, while also intending to hide from you the former intention [else you will not be moved to think I am actually an inspired artist, but rather a poser]. Assuming that this plan of mine works, I find it plausible to say that my act was coercive, that I have coerced you into thinking I am an inspired artist).

  25. An alternative way to go here would be to require that the act and reaction at least partially achieve their functions, allowing that these functions might not be functions to transmit/pick up information in some cases. However, at a minimum, I suspect it that it is much harder to articulate what it is for an act/reaction to partially achieve a non-informational function as compared with an informational one, at least in a way that will work across the board. Hence, for now anyway, I am inclined to favor an informational formulation of the account.

  26. Above I suggested that a vigilance response to an alarm call selected for causing escape behavior might count as a case of partial communication outside the domain of intentional communication. Here’s how we might begin to flesh out such a case on the present analysis: the alarm call might serve to rule out every state except for those in which it is advantageous to engage in escape-behavior, while the reaction (on the basis of which the vigilance response is performed) might serve to rule out only some of the states ruled out by the act. (So, if we suppose that the set of states ruled out by the act is, say, {w1, w2, w3, w4}, then the idea would be that the reaction rules out only subset of this set, say, {w1, w2}. Then the set of states left open by the reaction would, ex hypothesi, contain some states for which it is not necessarily advantageous to engage in escape behavior).

  27. Skyrms in effect recognizes this point when characterizing the scope of Lewisian sender-receiver games (Lewis 1969). He writes: “The state that the sender observes might be ‘What I want to communicate’ and the receiver’s act might be concluding ‘Oh, she intended to communicate that’” (2010, p. 7).

  28. In the case at hand, this reaction would presumably take the form of a belief or belief-like mental state. But in other cases the information-extracting reaction might take on quite a different form; it might, for example, simply consist in some sub-mental system component assuming a particular value. Thus, there is no reason to think that partial communication is only possible where the relevant reaction is the formation of a bona fide mental state of some kind.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Stephen Mann and Kim Sterelny for comments on an early draft of this article. I would also like to thank Thom Scott Phillips and two anonymous referees for their feedback.

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    Ronald J. Planer

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Planer, R.J. On Scott-Phillips’ General Account of Communication. Acta Biotheor 65, 253–270 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-017-9313-8

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