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How to do things with nonwords: pragmatics, biosemantics, and origins of language in animal communication

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Abstract

Recent discussions of animal communication and the evolution of language have advocated adopting a ‘pragmatics-first’ approach, according to which “a more productive framework” for primate communication research should be “pragmatics, the field of linguistics that examines the role of context in shaping the meaning of linguistic utterances” (Wheeler and Fischer, Evol Anthropol 21:195–205, 2012: 203). After distinguishing two different conceptions of pragmatics that advocates of the pragmatics-first approach have implicitly relied on (one Carnapian, the other Gricean), I argue that neither conception adequately serves the purposes of pragmatics-first approaches to the origins of human linguistic communication. My main aim in this paper is to motivate–and begin to articulate–an intermediary conception whose scope is narrower than Carnapian pragmatics but broader than Gricean pragmatics. To do so, I first spell out what I take to be the key insight offered by proponents of the Gricean approach concerning the emergence of linguistic communication, namely, its being communication ‘from a psychological point of view’ (Tomasello, Origins of human communication, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2008). I then develop this insight using key elements from the anti-Gricean ‘biosemantic’ account of linguistic communication due to Ruth Millikan (Millikan, Language, thought, and other biological categories: New foundations for realism, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1984, Millikan, Tomberlin (ed), Philosophical Perspectives 9, Ridgeview Publishing, Atascedero CA, 1995, Millikan R (2006) Varieties of Meaning. Mass.: The MIT Press (paperback edition), Cambridge, Millikan, Beyond concepts: unicepts, language, and natural information, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK, 2017, and elsewhere). I argue that the intermediary pragmatics-first approach that I propose, which draws on both Gricean and Millikanian resources, would be better equipped to serve the purposes of those who search for potential precursors of human linguistic communication in animal communication.

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Notes

  1. See, e.g., Bach (1997), Recanati (2002), Carston (2008).

  2. For an illuminating discussion, see Millikan, e.g. (1984: 39–49,116–117); (1995: 190); (2017: Ch. 11).

  3. As explained in Bar-On (under review), the proponents ought to give some evidence that primate call interpreters are sensitive to at least some aspects of ‘wide’ context (as understood in Recanati 2002).

  4. Bar-On (under review) develops this argument in connection with the formal semantic-pragmatic analysis of monkey calls offered in Schlenker et al. (2014) and elsewhere.

  5. Although Grice himself may well not have been committed to the ‘psychological reality’ of his proposed analysis, proponents of a Gricean pragmatics-first approach deploy the Gricean conception precisely to extract cognitive requirements that would have to be met by any legitimate precursor of human linguistic communication. (For relevant discussion, see Bar-On 1995, 2013.).

  6. See Sperber & Wilson (1986/1995) and Sperber & Wilson (2015); see also Moore (2017).

  7. See, e.g., Moore (2017) and (2018). Notably, however, Moore’s ‘minimally Gricean’ communication is still ostensive communication; so it may still set the bar too high for a pragmatics-first approach. (And see fn. 10 below).

  8. He adds: “Evidence for this interpretation is that on some occasions apes will actually hide a display from others, for example, covering up a facial fear-grimace display with their hands” (ibid.).

    An anonymous referee has pointed out, however, that some researchers (e.g. Hobaiter and Byrne 2014) deny that there is any category of great ape gestures that are used only to solicit attention.

  9. We could also separate a third strand: the idea that what meaningful signs standardly or conventionally mean is ultimately dependent upon what speakers mean by them. (For some discussion and references, see Bar-On 1995.)

  10. Moore’s (2018) ‘minimally Gricean’ communicators are still said to engage in ostensive-inferential communication. They produce utterances with ‘overt’ (i.e., ostensive) ‘communicative intent’; and their receivers are said to attribute intentions to producers and to make inferences about their mental states. It is just that Moore thinks this becomes less cognitively demanding once we abandon Grice’s ‘third-clause’ on speaker meaning, with its fourth-order meta-representations (2018: 8f.) (something that had already been advocated by Neale 1992; and see also, e.g., Sperber & Wilson 2015). By contrast, the intermediary conception I propose below would allow us to divorce the origins of meaningful communication from the presence of even ‘minimally Gricean’ speaker meaning.

  11. Cheney & Seyfarth (2003), Marler (2004), and Snowdon (2008) suggest that the innate and expressive or ‘emotional’ character of calls and other displays is consistent with their having at least functionally referential dimensions. Bar-On (2013) and (2018) argues that the expressive character of calls and other signals is consistent with call users bringing their production under voluntary control and using them intentionally and mindfully.

    As an anonymous referee has remarked, those who advocate a construal of chimpanzee (or other) communication as ‘intentional and minded’ need to establish that chimpanzees rely on representations of each other’s psychological states as opposed to their (anticipated) behaviors. On the Millikanian view to be proposed below (“Psychologically mediated communication: an integrated view”), this would be a matter to be determined by the proper function of the relevant representations. It is arguably a plausible hypothesis that social creatures harbor representations whose proper function is to represent each other’s psychological states. But, on Millikan’s view, this does not mean they have conceptual or theoretical understanding of mental states.

  12. For an illuminating discussion of related experiments to show that chimpanzees meet criteria for intentional (though not fully Gricean) communication, see Schel et al. (2013).

  13. Millikan’s notion of proper function covers what Maynard Smith & Harper refer to as “indices”, as well as “handicaps” (2003: 15). Indeed, Millikan’s 1984 account is, by design, applicable to a very wide range of biological representational devices, including e.g., the magnetosomes that guide certain bacteria to oxygen-poor waters by directing them to magnetic north (2006: 82), as well as signals produced and consumed by sub-systems inside organisms. (See also, e.g. 2006: Ch. 13.).

  14. To be precise, it is correct animal signals (i.e., ones that map onto existing states of affairs) that can serve as natural signs of what they represent.

  15. A complication I am here setting aside is Millikan’s claim that, unlike indicative and imperative utterances, animal representations are (all or most) ‘pushmi-pullyu’ representations. (See e.g. 1995 and 2006: 80ff. and passim. And see Bar-On (under review) for discussion.)

  16. Millikan’s claim here should only be taken to imply that thinking about others’ mental states is not essential to the use of meaningful language, and, by implication, would not have had to precede the emergence of language.

  17. As noted earlier (Sect. 1), this means that a post-Gricean account of the emergence of linguistic communication would incur a problematic burden: to provide an evolutionary explanation of some of the very same capacities whose emergence it seeks to explain–viz., the capacities to form and interpret language-like compositional, recursive, and metarepresentational thoughts (and other propositional attitudes).

  18. In the next section, I provide some possible illustrations from existing forms of animal communication.

  19. See Millikan (1984: Ch. 10) for the relevant notion of improvisation in connection with the analysis of indexicals. Millikan discusses the main implications of her view for the acquisition of language in, e.g., (2006: Ch. 10, esp. pp. 128–133) and (2017: Chapters 13–14, esp. pp. 196–198).

  20. Relevant here are arguments by e.g. de Villiers (2000) for the developmental dependence of the relevant metarepresentational and conceptual capacities on the mastery of certain linguistic structures.

  21. Clearly much more needs to be said about the nature of the dog’s representation of the squirrel’s intention and, more generally, about the possibility of representing mental states without having concepts of–or beliefs about–them. For Millikan, this possibility requires understanding the role of pushmi-pullyu representations (mentioned in footnote 15) in animal cognition as combined with the deployment of what in her (2017) she dubs ‘unicepts’. For relevant discussion, see her (1995), (2017: 7.6 and passim), and (2006: esp. Part IV).

    Millikan’s view on these matters departs from tradition in a number of important ways. But in the present context, the main point that bears emphasis is this. By seeking to establish whether or not infants and nonhuman animals possess a theory of mind (and by taking the representation of mental states to require some conceptual/theoretical understanding of minds) researchers are imposing on the representation of mental states standards that many in philosophy of language and mind believe we should not impose on representation more generally.

  22. Recently, Scarantino has suggested that we can think of what animals do with emotion expressions (including alarm calls) in terms of “analogs” of Austinian speech acts. However, Scarantino himself presents his ‘theory of affective pragmatics’ as “pragmatic in the Carnapian sense only: It aims to capture how the meaning of emotional expressions depends [narrowly] on their context of production…” (2017: 217, emphasis added). It is thus consistent with his view that expressive communication is fully coded communication.

  23. See Progovac (2017) for a systematic and illuminating development of the idea of Protolanguage from a broadly Chomskian perspective on language.

  24. A fuller discussion would, of course, need to make good on the claim made here that the relevant psychological give-and-take need not rely on Gricean mindreading capacities. (See Bar-On (under review) and ms. in-progress.)

  25. It would not even need to appeal to a capacity for ‘minimal Gricean’ communication (as described by, e.g., Moore (2018)–which still relies on overt communicative intentions on the part of speakers and their inferential attribution to speakers by their hearers (see footnote 10 above).

  26. The following description follows Arnold & Bar-On (2020). Bar-On (under review, mentioned in footnote 4 above) offers a critical discussion of a contextual semantic-pragmatic analysis of putty-nosed monkeys’ calls that does not incorporate the features highlighted here under ‘mind-dependence’.

  27. A different–though potentially compatible–‘dynamic’ construal of monkey calls (utilizing Stalnaker’s notion of a ‘common ground’) is proposed in Armstrong (2018: 13f.).

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Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of parts of this paper have been presented at the following venues: ZAS conference on primate linguistics (Berlin, March 2019), Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning (ECOM) Research Group conference on communication, context, conversation, University of Connecticut (May 2019), a conference on thought, language, and communication, Zurich, Switzerland and Psychology Department colloquium at Sheffield, UK (September 2019), the New York Philosophy of Language workshop (October 2019), and the Evolutionary Pragmatics Forum (October 2020). I wish to thank the audiences at these presentations, as well as members of the Summer 2018 and Spring 2021 Ruth Millikan reading groups (organized under the auspices of the ECOM Research Group), for helpful discussions. Kate Arnold, Nimra Asif, Drew Johnson, Bill Lycan, Keith Simmons, and Alison Springle provided very useful feedback on various draft, which helped shape the present version of the paper. I owe special thanks to Robyn Carston for insightful comments and several pivotal discussions. Finally, my gratitude to Ruth Millikan for her ground-breaking work, for her philosophical and personal inspiration, and for several discussions that informed the view articulated in the present paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Connecticut, Manchester Hall, Storrs, CT, 06269-1054, USA

    Dorit Bar-On

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Bar-On, D. How to do things with nonwords: pragmatics, biosemantics, and origins of language in animal communication. Biol Philos 36, 50 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-021-09824-z

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