Meaning and ostension in great ape gestural communication

Moore, Richard

doi:10.1007/s10071-015-0905-x

Cited by 122 publications

(133 citation statements)

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“…In fact, primates generally display more sophisticated abilities when interpreting and predicting others' behavior than they do in other-directed action. For example, they are able to learn complex tasks through observation despite scant evidence of ostensive teaching (Moore 2013b The ability to recognize goals and intentions is a core area of research in comparative cognition. Though Scott-Phillips differentiates intentionality from ostension, studies that do not make the same distinction may nevertheless bear on his argument.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With respect to informative intentions, production requires only knowing how to produce gestures in pursuit of certain goals, while comprehension requires being able to grasp the goals underlying others' gestures. Again, there is already good evidence that apes do this (e.g., Pelé et al 2009;Yamamoto, Humle, and Tanalan 2009), albeit in fairly limited ways (Herrmann and Tomasello 2006;Moore 2013a).…”

Section: Richard Moorementioning

confidence: 99%

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Nonhuman Primate Communication, Pragmatics, and the Origins of Language

Scott‐Phillips¹

2015

Current Anthropology

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Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Nonhuman Primate Communication, Pragmatics, and the Origins of Language by Thomas C. Scott-PhillipsComparisons with the cognition and communication of other species have long informed discussions of the origins and evolution of human communication and language. This research has often focused on similarities and differences with the linguistic code, but more recently there has been an increased focus on the social-cognitive foundations of linguistic communication. However, exactly what these comparisons tell us is not clear because the theoretical concepts used in the animal communication literature are different from those used in the corresponding literature on human communication, specifically those used in linguistic pragmatics. In this article, I bridge the gap between these two areas and in doing so specify exactly what great ape communication tells us about the origins of human communication and language. I conclude that great ape communication probably does not share the same socialcognitive foundations as linguistic communication but that it probably does involve the use of metacognitive abilities that, once they evolved to a more sophisticated degree, were exapted for use in what is an evolutionarily novel form of communication: human ostensive communication. This in turn laid the foundations for the emergence of linguistic communication. More generally, I highlight the often-neglected importance of pragmatics for the study of language origins.The origin of human communication and language is a topic that has exercised many generations of scholars (Stam 1976). Since Darwin, an important source of data has been comparisons between linguistic communication and the communication systems of other species (Fitch 2010). A great deal of research has thus focused on the extent to which nonhuman primates' natural communication systems have the same or similar properties as human languages (e.g., Arnold and Zuberbühler 2006;Seyfarth, Cheney, and Marler 1980a). More recently, it has been argued that despite these similarities, many forms of great ape communication are probably based on different cognitive mechanisms from human language, and hence that the evolutionary conclusions we can draw from comparisons with the surface form of these systems (e.g., their "syntax," "semantics," etc.) are either unclear or limited (Deacon 1997;Rendall, Owren, and Ryan 2009;Tomasello 2008;Wheeler and Fischer 2012). Consequently, the focus of much current research on great ape communication i...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Richard Moorementioning

confidence: 99%

Nonhuman Primate Communication, Pragmatics, and the Origins of Language

Scott‐Phillips¹

2015

Current Anthropology

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“…There is broad agreement about the importance of such pragmatic interpretation in language (cf. Moore, 2016;Scott-Phillips, 2016;Sperber & Wilson, 1986), but debate about the degree to which the logical principles laid out by Grice are in fact cognitively represented by ordinary language users (Bar-On, 2013).…”

Section: Semantic and Pragmatic Components Of Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, a fundamental aspect of human communication (not just language) is ostension-the signaling of signalhood-and there is an ongoing debate about the degree to which ostensive signaling is unique to humans or shared with apes (Moore, 2016;Scott-Phillips, 2014. At present, it seems likely that our human propensity to generate communicative acts, and explicitly mark them as such, is quantitatively more highly developed, and perhaps a true qualitative difference, but more research will be required to demonstrate this conclusively.…”

Section: Semantic and Pragmatic Components Of Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution

2017

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The study of language evolution, and human cognitive evolution more generally, has often been ridiculed as unscientific, but in fact it differs little from many other disciplines that investigate past events, such as geology or cosmology. Well-crafted models of language evolution make numerous testable hypotheses, and if the principles of strong inference (simultaneous testing of multiple plausible hypotheses) are adopted, there is an increasing amount of relevant data allowing empirical evaluation of such models. The articles in this special issue provide a concise overview of current models of language evolution, emphasizing the testable predictions that they make, along with overviews of the many sources of data available to test them (emphasizing comparative, neural, and genetic data). The key challenge facing the study of language evolution is not a lack of data, but rather a weak commitment to hypothesistesting approaches and strong inference, exacerbated by the broad and highly interdisciplinary nature of the relevant data. This introduction offers an overview of the field, and a summary of what needed to evolve to provide our species with language-ready brains. It then briefly discusses different contemporary models of language evolution, followed by an overview of different sources of data to test these models. I conclude with my own multistage model of how different components of language could have evolved.

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“…For example, Green (2007) and Bar-On (2013) argue that a class of 'expressive' behaviours -including gaze behaviour, emotional expressions, and emotionally charged body postures and intonations -give us direct, noninferential knowledge of others' mental states. Such behaviours can make some acts of intentional communication more easily interpretable than others, by providing rich evidence for a speaker's communicative intentions (Moore, 2013b). Additionally, Sperber and Wilson (1995;2002) propose the existence of a cognitive module, unique to humans, that processes food, they respond appropriately to requests produced using an ambiguous begging gesture (Yamamoto et al, 2012).…”

Section: Iii(b) the Complex Inferences Objectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gricean Communication and Cognitive Development

Moore¹

2016

Phil. Quart.

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On standard readings of Grice, Gricean communication requires (a) possession of a concept of belief, (b) the ability to make complex inferences about others' goal-directed behaviour, and (c) the ability to entertain fourth order meta-representations. To the extent that these abilities are pre-requisites of Gricean communication they are inconsistent with the view that Gricean communication could play a role in their development. In this paper, I argue that a class of 'minimally Gricean acts' satisfy the intentional structure described by Grice, but require none of abilities (a)-(c). As a result, Gricean communicative abilities may indeed contribute to the development of (a)-(c) -in particular, by enabling language development. This conclusion has important implications for our theorising about cognitive development.

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Meaning and ostension in great ape gestural communication

Cited by 122 publications

References 53 publications

Nonhuman Primate Communication, Pragmatics, and the Origins of Language

Nonhuman Primate Communication, Pragmatics, and the Origins of Language

Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution

Gricean Communication and Cognitive Development

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