Ostensive Marking as a Distinctive Feature of Human Communication

Abstract

Human communication possesses far more expressive power than any other communicative system in nature. This feat is believed to be due to ostensive (or Gricean) communication. Nonetheless, there is no consensus in the literature on the defining features of this communicative system. Here, I aim to offer an account of ostensive communication that avoids the complications of dominant accounts and facilitates discussions on the origins of this unique trait. I suggest that the notions usually used to explain ostension and ostensive communication (e.g., higher-order intentionality and attention manipulation) are committed to specific proximate, mechanistic formulations. This commitment renders comparative and developmental research cumbersome and fails to shed light on the open-ended properties of human communication. For instance, higher-order metarepresentations are unlikely to be found in infants, and attention manipulation is limited only to cases where communication is about perceptually accessible entities. I propose, instead, that we define ostension using ultimate, functional terms that clearly specify the adaptive problem. Thus, I suggest, ostension involves markingNN, i.e., marking entities (e.g., objects and actions) as communicative. This ability permits humans to produce novel communicative means open-endedly and to establish channels of communication. Moreover, the markingNN function could be implemented through mentalistic, inference-oriented processes as well as coded ostensive signals. Therefore, its presence in infancy is less controversial.