Abstract
Exactly what makes an interaction between two organisms a case of communication is contentious. Historically, debate has taken place between definitions of communication invoking information transmission vs definitions invoking causal influence. More recently, there has been some convergence on a hybrid definition: invoking (co-adapted) causal influence mediated via the transmission of information. After proposing an understanding of what it means to say that a receiver is causally influenced by the transmission of information, I argue that an information-mediated influence definition overextends to include most, indeed maybe all, co-adapted interactions. This is because the transmission of correlational information is actually a feature of most, if not all, co-adapted interactions. I end by considering whether adding an arbitrariness criterion to an information-mediated influence definition helps. After giving an account of what arbitrariness amounts to, I argue that it swings things too far in the opposite direction: we go from a definition of communication that is too liberal to one that is too restrictive. This is because many signal kinds are not arbitrary. It turns out to be extremely difficult to capture what makes communication unique.
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Notes
‘Informing’ is meant in a loose sense here: as causing a response in a receiver that is adaptive for the receiver, given the state of the world.
Of course, behaviours that are adapted for advertising or accentuating one’s size might be signals. But here we are not dealing with such adaptations: only size as such.
Carazo and Font (2010) also argue for a hybrid definition of communication invoking both (co-adapted) influence and information transmission. However, their reasons are mostly different to those of Scarantino.
See Stegmann 2013 for an overview.
There is then the further foundational question of what facts make it the case that an utterance has this or that truth-condition. One influential view comes from Grice (1957), and takes the content of utterances to be grounded by the content of mental states. Roughly speaking, my utterance means what it does because of my particular goal in using it; and you understand my utterance by (accurately) inferring my goal in using it.
If leopard alarms did not correlate with the presence of a leopard over the learning period, receivers wouldn’t respond to them by climbing trees.
This is not to say that vervet alarm calls are completely arbitrary, in the sense I am beginning to outline. As Owren et al. (2010) rightly note, the physical form of alarm calls is constrained to some degree. They must allow for detection and localization. Also, they must prime listeners by engaging low-level attention and arousal mechanisms. However, there seems to be no necessary connection between the physical form of a leopard call, on the one hand, and behavioural responses that are adaptive in the presence of leopards as opposed to eagles or snakes, on the other. In other words, there is nothing special about the physical form of leopard calls, qua signals designating leopards, as opposed to that of eagle or snake calls.
This includes the nervous systems of senders and receivers.
In work currently underway with Ron Planer we intend to analyse a counterfactual notion of arbitrariness in considerable detail, separating it from the notion of iconicity (more precisely, a lack thereof). We plan to argue that iconicity is only one way out of a number of different ways arbitrariness can be constrained.
Including an information-mediated influence definition that includes an arbitrariness feature.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me.
As Carazo and Font (2010, p. 663) highlight, “the function... and information content of a signal are not the same thing, as evinced by the fact that the same effect (e.g. to intimidate a rival) can be achieved by a signal with different informative content (e.g. size, social or residential status).”
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Acknowledgements
I thank Ron Planner, Kim Sterelny, audience members at the 2016 Sydney-ANU philosophy of biology workshop, and two anonymous reviewers for useful feedback. This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship
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Kalkman, D. New problems for defining animal communication in informational terms. Synthese 196, 3319–3336 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1598-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1598-2