Against the prior view that primate communication is based only on signal decoding, comparative evidence suggests that primates are able, no less than humans, to intentionally perform or understand impulsive or habitual communicational actions with a structured evaluative nonconceptual content. These signals convey an affordance-sensing that immediately motivates conspecifics to act. Although humans have access to a strategic form of propositional communication adapted to teaching and persuasion, they share with nonhuman primates the capacity to communicate in impulsive or habitual ways. (...) They are also similarly able to monitor fluency, informativeness and relevance of messages or signals through nonconceptual cues. (shrink)

Speakers are confused about identity if they mistake one thing for two or two things for one. I present two plausible models of confusion, the Frege model and the Millikan model. I show how a prominent objection to Fregean models fails and argue that confusion consists in having false implicit beliefs involving the identity relation. Further, I argue that confused identity has characteristic corruptive effects on singular cognition and on the proper function of singular terms in linguistic communication.

It is a common view that radical contextualism about linguistic meaning is incompatible with a compositional explanation of linguistic comprehension. Recently, some philosophers of language have proposed theories of 'pragmatic' compositionality challenging this assumption. This paper takes a close look at a prominent proposal of this kind due to François Recanati. The objective is to give a plausible formulation of the view. The major results are threefold. First, a basic distinction that contextualists make between mandatory and optional pragmatic processes needs (...) to be revised. Second, the pragmatic theory can withstand a Davidsonian objection only by rejecting the importance of a distinction between primitive and non-primitive semantic items. Thirdly, however, the theory is now open to a worry about how it should be understood: either the theory consists in a very broad functionalist generalization about communication, which makes it explanatorily inert, or it boils down to a highly particularist view about linguistic meaning. Finally, I argue that Recanati's notion of 'occasion meaning' is problematic and suggest replacing it with the notion of speaker meaning, which is explanatorily more basic. (shrink)

Critical Discourse Analysis has recently begun to consider the implications of research in Evolutionary Psychology for political communication. At least three positions have been taken: i) that this research requires Critical Discourse Analysis to re-examine and defend some of its foundational assumptions ; ii) that this research provides a useful explanatory framework for Critical Discourse Analysis in which questions can be addressed as to why speakers might pursue particular discursive strategies and why they might be so persuasive ; and iii) (...) that findings bare little or no relevance for Critical Discourse Analysis. In this article, I take up the first two of these positions and in doing so, of course, implicitly disagree with the third. I consider the positions in i) and ii), then, specifically in relation to Sperber’s notion of a ‘logico-rhetorical’ module. Taking the argument that Chilton makes concerning this module one stage further, I suggest that the logico-rhetorical module evolved as much for persuasion as it did for vigilance. I further suggest that the semantic category of evidentiality operationalized in media discourse serves to satisfy the conditions of acceptance laid down by the logico-rhetorical module. I show how this semantic category therefore performs a legitimizing function in media discourse on immigration. (shrink)

Human syntactic language has no close parallels in other systems of animal communication. Yet it seems to be an important part of the cultural adaptation that serves to make humans the earth’s dominant organism. Why is language restricted to humans given that communication seems to be so useful? We argue that language is part of human cooperation. We talk because others can normally trust what we say to be useful to them, not just to us. Models of gene-culture coevolution give (...) one plausible explanation for how language, cooperative institutions, and the genetic basis for both could have evolved. Why did the coevolutionary process come to rest leaving a huge space for the cultural evolution of language? We argue that language diversity functions to limit communication between people who cannot freely trust one another or where even truthful communications from others would result in maladaptive behavior on the part of listeners. (shrink)

I argue that we can reconcile two seemingly incompatible traditions for thinking about concepts. On the one hand, many cognitive scientists assume that the systematic redeployment of representational abilities suffices for having concepts. On the other hand, a long philosophical tradition maintains that language is necessary for genuinely conceptual thought. I argue that on a theoretically useful and empirically plausible concept of 'concept', it is necessary and sufficient for conceptual thought that a thinker be able to entertain many of the (...) potential thoughts produced by recombining her representational abilities apart from a direct confrontation with the states of affairs being represented. Such representational abilities support a cognitive engagement with the world that is flexible, abstract, and active. (shrink)

This paper explores a variety of different versions of the thesis that natural language is involved in human thinking. It distinguishes amongst strong and weak forms of this thesis, dismissing some as implausibly strong and others as uninterestingly weak. Strong forms dismissed include the view that language is conceptually necessary for thought (endorsed by many philosophers) and the view that language is _de facto_ the medium of all human conceptual thinking (endorsed by many philosophers and social scientists). Weak forms include (...) the view that language is necessary for the acquisition of many human concepts, and the view that language can serve to scaffold human thought processes. The paper also discusses the thesis that language may be the medium of _conscious_ propositional thinking, but argues that this cannot be its most fundamental cognitive role. The idea is then proposed that natural language is the medium for non-domain-specific thinking, serving to integrate the outputs of a variety of domain-specific conceptual faculties (or central-cognitive ‘quasi-modules’). Recent experimental evidence in support of this idea is reviewed, and the implications of the idea are discussed, especially for our conception of the architecture of human cognition. Finally, some further kinds of evidence which might serve to corroborate or refute the hypothesis are mentioned. The overall goal of the paper is to review a wide variety of accounts of the cognitive function of natural language, integrating a number of different kinds of evidence and theoretical consideration in order to propose and elaborate the most plausible candidate. (shrink)

In this paper, I am going to cast doubt on an idea that is shared, explicitly or implicitly, by most contemporary pragmatic theories: that the inferential interpretation procedure described by Grice, neo-Griceans, or post-Griceans applies only to the interpretation of ostensive stimuli. For this special issue, I will concentrate on the relevance theory (RT) version of this idea. I will proceed by putting forward a dilemma for RT and argue that the best way out of it is to accept that (...) the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure ap- plies to certain non-ostensive stimuli, contrary to what is generally claimed within RT. In particular, I will argue that relevance theorists should accept that (ceteris paribus) non- ostensive emotional expressions in interactions guarantee a presumption of relevance such that they are interpreted through the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure. This leads me to propose what I call 'the expressive principle of relevance'. (shrink)

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”. After distinguishing two different conceptions of pragmatics that advocates of the pragmatics-first approach have implicitly relied on, 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’. I then develop this insight using key elements from the anti-Gricean ‘biosemantic’ account of linguistic communication due to Ruth Millikan, Philosophical Perspectives 9, Ridgeview Publishing, Atascedero CA, 1995, Millikan R Varieties of Meaning. Mass.: The MIT Press, 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. (shrink)

This dissertation may be divided into two parts. The first is about the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission. This model, introduced here, is meant to better explain how humans communicate and understand each other. It has been developed to apply to cases that were left unexplained by the two main models of communication found in contemporary philosophy and linguistics, i.e. the Gricean (pragmatic) model and the code (semantic) model. I discuss cases involving emotional reactions, ways of clothing, speaking, or (...) behaving that are not intended for communication but whose effects on the audience are controllable to some extent. I show why prevailing code and Gricean models cannot explain them and how my Extended Gricean Model does. The second part of the dissertation is about what emotional signs mean, in various senses of the term ‘mean'. I review existing theories of meaning and see how they apply to emotional signs, i.e. signs which give us information about the affective state of the sign producer. (shrink)

Music and language are universal human abilities with many apparent similarities relating to their acoustics, structure, and frequent use in social situations. We might therefore expect them to be understood and processed similarly, and indeed an emerging body of research suggests that this is the case. But the focus has historically been on the individual, looking at the passive listener or the isolated speaker or performer, even though social interaction is the primary site of use for both domains. Nonetheless, an (...) important goal of emerging research is to compare music and language in terms of acoustics and structure, social interaction, and functional origins to develop parallel accounts across the two domains. Indeed, a central aim of both of evolutionary musicology and language evolution research is to understand the adaptive significance or functional origin of human music and language. An influential proposal to emerge in recent years has been referred to as the social bonding hypothesis. Here, within a comparative approach to animal communication systems, I review empirical studies in support of the social bonding hypothesis in humans, non-human primates, songbirds, and various other mammals. In support of this hypothesis, I review six research fields: (i) the functional origins of music; (ii) the functional origins of language; (iii) mechanisms of social synchrony for human social bonding; (iv) language and social bonding in humans; (v) music and social bonding in humans; and (vi) pitch, tone and emotional expression in human speech and music. I conclude that the comparative study of complex vocalizations and behaviors in various extant species can provide important insights into the adaptive function(s) of these traits in these species, as well as offer evidence-based speculations for the existence of “musilanguage” in our primate ancestors, and thus inform our understanding of the biology and evolution of human music and language. (shrink)

I address here the question what sense to make of the idea that there can be thought prior to language. I begin by juxtaposing two familiar and influential philosophical views, one associated with the work of Paul Grice, the other associated with the work of Donald Davidson. Grice and Davidson share a broad, rationalist perspective on language and thought, but they endorse conflicting theses on the relation between them. Whereas, for Grice, thought of an especially complex sort is a precondition (...) of linguistic meaning, for Davidson, there can be no genuine thought without language. I argue that both views present us with unpalatable alternatives concerning our understanding of the natural origins of objective thought and meaningful language. Drawing on what I take to be key insights from Grice and Davidson, I then lay out some broad desiderata for an intermediate position. I finally turn to a certain form of nonlinguistic communication of the sort of which both prelinguistic children and languageless animals are capable, viz., expressive communication. I propose that a proper appreciation of the character and function of expressive communication can help us trace the outlines of the desired intermediate position. (shrink)

This paper investigates the complicated relations between various versions of naturalism, behaviorism, and mentalism within the framework of W. V. O. Quine's thinking. It begins with Roger Gibson's reconstruction of Quine's behaviorisms and argues that it lacks a crucial ontological element and misconstrues the relation between philosophy and science. After getting clear of Quine's naturalism, the paper distinguishes between evidential, methodological, and ontological behaviorisms. The evidential and methodological versions are often conflated, but they need to be clearly distinguished in order (...) to see whether Quine's argument against mentalism is cogent. The paper argues that Quine's naturalism supports only the weakest version of behaviorism, that is, the evidential one, but this version is compatible with mentalistic semantics. Quine's opposition to mentalism is an overreaction from the behaviorist camp. By contrast, Jerry Fodor's objection to Jose Luis Bermudez is an overreaction from the opposite direction. (shrink)

Linguistic meaning underdetermines what is said. This has consequences for philosophical accounts of meaning, communication, and propositional attitude reports. I argue that the consequence we should endorse is that utterances typically express many propositions, that these are what speakers mean, and that the correct semantics for attitude reports will handle this fact while being relational and propositional.

I argue for a theory of the optimal function of the speech act of referring, called the edenic theory. First, the act of singular reference is defined directly in terms of Gricean communicative intentions. Second, I propose a doxastic constraint on the optimal performance of such acts, stating, roughly, that the speaker must not have any relevant false beliefs about the identity or distinctness of the intended object. In uttering a singular term on an occasion, on this theory, one represents (...) oneself as not having any confused beliefs about the object to which one intends to refer. This paves the way for an intentionalist theory of reference that circumvents well-known problems, which have not been adequately addressed before in the literature. (shrink)

In the domain of evolutionary cognitive archaeology, the early body ornaments from the Middle Stone Age/Palaeolithic are generally treated as mere by-products of an evolved brain-bound cognitive architecture selected to cope with looming social problems. Such adaptive artefacts are therefore taken to have been but passive means of broadcasting a priori envisaged meanings, essentially playing a neutral role for the human mind. In contrast to this epiphenomenalist view of material culture, postphenomenology and the Material Engagement Theory have been making a (...) case for the active role of artefacts on the count that they can actually shape and restructure the human mind. By bringing these dissenting voices together, the paper at hand employs an enactive way of thinking in order to challenge the epiphenomenalist take on early body ornaments. In fact, two variants of enactivism are presented, each advancing a unique explanation of how the engagement of early humans with body ornaments transformed their minds along the two postphenomenological categories of embodied and hermeneutic cognition. Our theoretical frameworks specifically seek to explore how early beadworks could have scaffolded the creation of semiotic categories and the development of cognitive processes. Despite relying on inherently different premises, both theories suggest that beads fostered the emergence of an epistemic apparatus which thoroughly transformed the way humans engaged with the world. Having concurred on the ornaments’ transformative effects, we ultimately conclude that the epiphenomenalist paradigm best be replaced with an enactive approach grounded on the dictates of postphenomenology and the MET. (shrink)

This paper advances a cognitive account of the rhetorical effectiveness of fallacious arguments and takes the example of source-related fallacies. Drawing on cognitive psychology and evolutionary linguistics, we claim that a fallacy enforces accessibility and epistemic cognitive constraints on argument processing targeted at preventing the addressee from spotting its fallaciousness, by managing to prevent or circumvent critical reactions. We address the evolutionary bases of biases and the way that these are exploited in fallacious argumentation.

This chapter probes the connections between the metaphysics of meaning and the investigation of human communication. It first argues that contemporary philosophy of mind has inherited most of its metaphysical questions from Brentano's puzzling definition of intentionality. Then it examines how intentionality came to occupy the forefront of pragmatics in three steps. By investigating speech acts, Austin and ordinary language philosophers pioneered the study of intentional actions performed by uttering sentences of natural languages. Based on his novel concept of speaker's (...) meaning and his inferential view of human communication as a cooperative and rational activity, Grice developed a three-tiered model of the meaning of utterances: the linguistic meaning of the uttered sentence; the explicit truth-conditional content of the utterance; the implicit content conveyed by the utterance. Finally, the new emerging truth-conditional trend in pragmatics urges that not only the implicit content conveyed by an utterance but its explicit content as well depends on the speaker's communicative intention. (shrink)

The evolution of human language, and the kind of thought the communication of which requires it, raises considerable explanatory challenges. These systems of representation constitute a radical discontinuity in the natural world. Even species closely related to our own appear incapable of either thought or talk with the recursive structure, generalized systematicity, and task-domain neutrality that characterize human talk and the thought it expresses. W. Tecumseh Fitch’s proposal (2004, in press) that human language is descended from a sexually selected, prosodic (...) proto-language that approximated its syntactic complexity, and later acquired semantics thanks to kin selection for its use as a means of pedagogical transmission, has the promise of meeting these explanatory challenges. However, Fitch’s theory raises two problems of its own: (1) according to Boyd and Richerson (1996, Proc. Br. Acad. 88: 77–93), circumstances in which pedagogy is adaptive are inevitably rare in nature, and (2) it is unlikely that our non-discursive precursors had generally systematic, task-domain neutral thoughts to communicate to their offspring. I propose solutions to these problems. Pedagogy would be favored in a population where complex rituals dominated diverse aspects of life. Prosodic proto-language could emerge as the medium of pedagogic transmission. As this medium was used to teach a greater variety of tasks, it would become increasingly general and domain neutral. The presence and importance of such a system of communication in hominid populations could then drive, via Baldwinian mechanisms, the evolution of a kind of ‘thinking for speaking’ (Slobin 1991, Pragmatics 1: 7–25) characterized by recursive structure, generalized systematicity, and task-domain neutrality. (shrink)

Philosophical views of language have traditionally been focused on notions of truth. This is a reconstructive view in that we try to extract from an utterance in context what the sentence and speaker meaning are. This focus on meaning extraction from word sequences alone, however, is challenged by utterances which combine different types of figures. This paper argues that what appears to be a special case of ironic utterances—ironic metaphorical compounds—sheds light on the requirements for psychological plausibility of a theory (...) of communication and thus presents a different view of communication and language to that dominant in philosophy of language. In the view presented here, the hearer does not extract the speaker’s communicative intention from the sequence of words in the utterance, but from other channels, so as to constrain the inferential space for the sentence and speaker meaning. Specifically, we examine an example of ironic metaphor discussed by Stern. He argues that ironic content is logically dependent on metaphorical content, but makes no claims about how psychologically plausible this is in terms of the processing order. We argue that a straightforward translation of logical order into temporal order makes little sense. The primary sticking point is that without a prior understanding of the speaker’s communicative intentions, it is computationally more challenging to process the sub-component meanings. An alternative solution based on communicative channels leads us to a more psychologically plausible account of the structure of communicative acts and intentions. This provides support for the psychological realism of a richer theory of communicative intent. (shrink)

In evolutionary cognitive archaeology, the school of thought associated with the traditional framework has been deeply influenced by cognitivist intuitions, which have led to the formulation of mentalistic and disembodied cognitive explanations to address the emergence of artifacts within the archaeological record of ancient hominins. Recently, some approaches in this domain have further enforced this view, by arguing that artifacts are passive means to broadcast/perpetuate meanings that are thoroughly internal to the mind. These meanings are conveyed either in the form (...) of a Language of Thought, constituted by sub-personal, content-bearing mental representations, or in that of a natural language. In both cases, however, material culture stands as the physical derivative of computations run over representations, which include abstract concepts, semantic relationships, and meta-representations about intensional states, a conception hereby indicated as “representational apriorism”. In this paper, I will argue that such mentalistic models are plagued by the fundamental problems of content, substance, and origin, which affect the representational substrates required for the production of artifacts. At the same time, these models fail the criterion of minimalism at the crux of conditional cognitive archaeology, because they propose overly costly explanations which are insufficiently constrained by material evidence. An alternative proposal, based on the principles of radical enactive cognitive science, is hereby introduced in order to counter this mentalistic drift. It is concluded that a radical enactive cognitive archaeology is able to dissolve the deep problems confronting the mentalistic paradigm, while providing minimalistic cognitive explanations about the emergence of Paleolithic artifacts. (shrink)

Carruthers considers and rejects a mixed position according to which we have interpretative access to unconscious thoughts, but introspective access to conscious ones. I argue that this is too hasty. Given a two-level view of the mind, we can, and should, accept the mixed position, and we can do so without positing additional introspective mechanisms beyond those Carruthers already recognizes.

Our target article argued that a genetically specified Universal Grammar (UG), capturing arbitrary properties of languages, is not tenable on evolutionary grounds, and that the close fit between language and language learners arises because language is shaped by the brain, rather than the reverse. Few commentaries defend a genetically specified UG. Some commentators argue that we underestimate the importance of processes of cultural transmission; some propose additional cognitive and brain mechanisms that may constrain language and perhaps differentiate humans from nonhuman (...) primates; and others argue that we overstate or understate the case against co-evolution of language genes. In engaging with these issues, we suggest that a new synthesis concerning the relationship between brains, genes, and language may be emerging. (shrink)

Considering the close relation between language and theory of mind in development and their tight connection in social behavior, it is no big leap to claim that the two capacities have been related in evolution as well. But what is the exact relation between them? This paper attempts to clear a path toward an answer. I consider several possible relations between the two faculties, bring conceptual arguments and empirical evidence to bear on them, and end up arguing for a version (...) of co-evolution. To model this co-evolution, we must distinguish between different stages or levels of language and theory of mind, which fueled each other’s evolution in a protracted escalation process. (shrink)

In the evolutionary theory, a central tenet is that complex forms evolved from simpler ones, according to a bottom-up process. When it comes to the evolution of language, however, a bottom-up approach is problematic. In this case, such an approach often assumes that minimal units that are inflexibly associated to their meaning come first, where the wider discourse is only a later product. In the present paper, I shall argue that we need to assume a top-down perspective on language evolution, (...) which claims that the wider discourse is the evolutionary starting point rather than the final achievement. This approach involves the necessity to focus on the pragmatic abilities of our ancestors and on the biological mechanisms underlying them. Combining a top-down model of language evolution with an embodied account of cognition, I shall argue that a basic mechanism of affordance perception supports core pragmatic processes by enabling the individual to determine not only her own action possibilities in the physical environment but also the action possibilities of others and, thereby, enabling her to determine other people’s intentions. As a result, I shall introduce the notion of an embodied pragmatics as a key to account for the evolution of language. (shrink)

Growing suspicions were raised however that an exclusively language-oriented view of the mind, focussing on the characterization of anhistorical, static mental states through their propositional contents, was hardly compatible with what is currently known of brain architecture and did not fare well when confronted with results from many behavioral studies of mental functions. My aim in what follows is to show that these forms of dissatisfaction stem from the fact that brain evolution and development were either entirely ignored, or insufficiently (...) taken into account in inquiries about the structure of mental contents. I will discuss how evolutionary and developmental approaches to human cognition are now in a position to substantially alter the central paradigms currently used in cognitive science. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between brain and language in terms of coevolution. Nowadays, the thesis of coevolution is defended by the exponents of the neoculturalist paradigm to claim that language is the product of cultural (not biological) evolution. In our opinion, this claim is misleading. From our point of view, in fact, we can refer to the relationship between brain and language in terms of coevolution only if we are prepared to maintain that (...) language is the product of natural selection. In our opinion, in other words, the coevolution thesis involves the idea of language as biological (not cultural) adaptation. (shrink)

There are many interesting empirical and theoretical issues concerning the evolution of cognition. Despite this, recent books on the topic concentrate on two problems. One is mental modularity. The other is what distinguishes human from non-human minds. While it is easy to understand why people are interested in human uniqueness, it is not clear why modularity is the centre of attention. Fodor (2000) has a nice argument for why people _should_ be interested in modularity.

Language is at the core of the cognitive revolution that has transformed that discipline over the last forty years or so, and it is also the central paradigm for the most prominent attempt to synthesise psychology and evolutionary theory. A single and distinctively modular view of language has emerged out of both these perspectives, one that encourages a certain idealisation. Linguistic competence is uniform, independent of other cognitive capacities, and with a developmental trajectory that is largely independent of environmental input (...) (Pinker 1994; Pinker 1997). Thus language is seen as a paradigm of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides’ concept of “evoked culture”: linguistic experience serves only to select a specific item from a menu of innately available options (Tooby and Cosmides 1992). In explaining this concept, they appeal to the metaphor of a jukebox. The human genome pre-stores a set of options, and the different experiences provided by different cultures select different elements out of this option set. I think an appropriate evolutionary perspective on language substantially undercuts this idealisation and the evoked culture model of language. Variability between speakers; the sensitivity of linguistic development to environmental input; and the limits of encapsulation are not noise. They are central to the language and its evolution. (shrink)

This paper questions the widespread view that verbal communication is governed by a maxim, norm or convention of truthfulness which applies at the level of what is literally meant, or what is said. Pragmatic frameworks based on this view must explain the frequent occurrence and acceptability of loose and figurative uses of language. We argue against existing explanations of these phenomena and provide an alternative account, based on the assumption that verbal communication is governed not by expectations of truthfulness but (...) by expectations of relevance, raised by literal, loose and figurative uses alike. Sample analyses are provided, and some consequences of this alternative account are explored. In particular, we argue that the notions of ‘literal meaning’ and ‘what is said’ play no useful theoretical role in the study of language use, and that the nature of explicit communication will have to be rethought. (shrink)

The main intent of this paper is to give an account of the relationship between bio-cognition and culture in terms of coevolution, analysing religious beliefs and language evolution as case studies. The established view in cognitive studies is that bio-cognitive systems constitute a constraint for the shaping and the transmission of religious beliefs and linguistic structures. From this point of view, religion and language are by-products or exaptations of processing systems originally selected for other cognitive functions. We criticize such a (...) point of view, showing that it paves the way for the idea that cultural evolution follows a path entirely autonomous and independent from that of biological evolution. Against the by-product and exaptation approaches, our idea is that it is possible to interpret religion and language in terms of coevolution. The concept of coevolution involves a dual path of constitution: one for which biology (cognition) has adaptive effects on culture, the other for which, in turn, forms of culture have adaptive effects on biology (cognition). This dual path of constitution implies that religion and language are (at least in some aspects) forms of biological adaptations. (shrink)

As it seems impossible to find reliable evidence to back up hypotheses on the origin of our use of the linguistic tool in our acts of communication, I believe that we may start by pointing as accurately as possible to the processes involved, using a methodology that attempts to reach the levels of adequacy proposed by Chomsky, complemented by those suggested by David Marr. If we conclude that human communication and human language may have had different origins, we might find (...) a new perspective which opens a vast field of research. (shrink)

Résumé J’examine la thèse défendue par Donald Davidson selon laquelle un être ne peut avoir des pensées que s’il a été en communication linguistique avec quelqu’un d’autre par le passé. Cette thèse, que j’appelle « l’interprétationnisme radical », dérive de la thèse A selon laquelle il est nécessaire d’avoir les concepts de croyance et de vérité objective pour avoir des croyances, et de la thèse B voulant que la communication linguistique soit requise pour l’acquisition du concept de vérité objective. En (...) réponse à A, je préconise un point de vue contextualiste, selon lequel les normes d’attribution de croyances dépendent du contexte conversationnel. Le contextualisme entraîne non pas que A est fausse, mais qu’elle doit être relative à un contexte. Je montre par ailleurs que contrairement à ce qu’affirme B, l’interaction avec autrui n’est pas nécessaire pour acquérir le concept de vérité objective. Je conclus que les arguments de Davidson soutiennent au mieux l’interprétationnisme modéré, c’est-à-dire l’idée selon laquelle un être a des pensées si et seulement si ces pensées sont interprétables par un interprète pleinement informé.I examine Donald Davidson’s thesis that a creature cannot have thoughts unless it has had a linguistic communication with another creature. This thesis, which I call “Radical Interpretationism”, derives from the claim that it is necessary to have the concepts of belief and objective truth in order to have beliefs and the claim that linguistic communication is required to acquire the concept of objective truth. In response to, I put forward a contextualist viewpoint, according to which the norms of belief attribution are context-dependent. Contextualism entails not that is false, but that it must be relativised to a context. I then show that contrary to what says, interaction with others is not necessary to acquire the concept of objective truth. I conclude that Davidson’s arguments at best support moderate interpretationism, that is, the view that a creature has thoughts if and only if these thoughts are interpretable by a fully-informed interpreter. (shrink)

In this paper we propose a narrative hypothesis on the nature of language and a proto-discursive hypothesis on the origin of our communicative abilities. Our proposal is based on two assumptions. The first assumption, concerning the properties of language, is tied to the idea that global discourse coherence governs the origin of our communicative abilities as well the functioning of these abilities. The second assumption, concerning processing devices, is connected to the idea that the systems of spatial and temporal navigation (...) are implicated in discourse coherence processing. Analysis of the relationship between these two assumptions allows us to integrate the model of language based on clues proposed by Sperber and Wilson with Relevance Theory with the discursive foundation of human communication. In this respect, our proposal can be considered as a tentative extension of Relevance Theory. (shrink)

Modeling work by Brian Skyrms and others in recent years has transformed the theoretical role of David Lewis's 1969 model of signaling. The latter can now be understood as a minimal model of communication in all its forms. In this article, we explain how the Lewis model has been generalized, and consider how it and its variants contribute to ongoing debates in several areas. Specifically, we consider connections between the models and four topics: The role of common interest in communication, (...) signaling within the organism, meaning, and the evolution of human communication and language. (shrink)

A theoretical divide exists on the study of the adapted psychological mechanisms underlying human culture. It has been said for instance that we evolved a brain for all seasons and that this is opposed to the framework of the modularity of mind. We approach the nature of these explanatory differences based on what we judge to be a misunderstanding with respect to the evolution of domain-specific modules. We underline the fact that the input-domain of a module and its ecological function (...) should not be conflated. We propose a more generous way of considering how evolutionary functions in mental architecture account for the possibility of general adaptations for cultural cognition. We show that modularity happens to be a good tool to research and decompose mechanisms with plastic functions such as in some forms of social learning. The idea of "modules for all seasons" is so vindicated. Existe una divisoria teórica en el estudio de los mecanismos psicológicos biológicamente adaptados que subyacen a la cultura humana. Se ha dicho, por un lado, que hemos evolucionado un cerebro para todas las estaciones, lo que se opone, por el otro, al marco de la modularidad de la mente. Consideramos la naturaleza de estas diferencias explicativas sobre la base de lo que nos parece un error de comprensión acerca de la evolución de módulos específicos de dominio. Subrayamos el hecho de que el dominio de entrada de un módulo y su función ecológica no deben ser confundidos. Proponemos una manera más generosa de considerar cómo las funciones evolutivas de la arquitectura mental pueden dar cuenta de la posibilidad de adaptaciones generales a la cognición cultural. Mostramos que la modularidad resulta ser un buen instrumento para investigar y descomponer mecanismos con funciones plásticas, como las que encontramos en algunas formas de aprendizaje social. De este modo, se defiende la idea de "módulos para todas las estaciones". (shrink)

Some contemporary theories about the origin and the nature of language resort to concepts with no bearing on Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis or evo-devo perspective which are both based on the reconstruction of species morphological structure transformation. These theories, which evoke qualitative leap, cultural evolution, structure/function coevolution as esplicative principles for human evolution, in our opinion, result compatible in some points with the most recent Intelligent Design accounts. Attempting to substantiate itself as a scientific theory, the contemporary ID is ready to (...) give up creationist explanation just to impeding Darwin’s fundamental idea according to which it’s possible to explain evolution only through a gradual material modification of structures. For comprehending a complex phenomenon as human language – according to ID – it’s necessary appealing to a second substance, whatever it is. This idea seems to be at the bottom of all those theories which have rejected monistic structural explanation for embracing functional, psychological or cultural accounts. We consider these kinds of explanation real unresolved residuals of ID, residuals nested in the heart of the most accredited scientific theories. (shrink)

Although there is widespread agreement that our epistemic dependence on other people's knowledge is a key ingredient of our cognitive life, the role of trust in this dependence is much more open to debate. Is trust in epistemic authority—or “epistemic trust” for short—an epistemological notion in any sense, or is it simply a bridge-concept that connects our epistemological concerns to moral issues? Should we depict it in terms of the more familiar sociological notion of trust as a basis for cooperation?

According to one currently influential line of thinking, the evolution of ostensive communication was a prerequisite for the evolution of human language. In this article, I distinguish between a strong and a weak version of this view and offer a sustained argument against the former. More specifically, the strong version of this view would have it that ostensive communication was a prerequisite not just for the evolution of fully modern language but for any language-like system of communication. I argue that (...) this version is too strong: I show how some distinctive and important features of language may well have been assembled prior to the evolution of ostensive communication. Put another way, I argue that a protolanguage before ostensive communication scenario is a real possibility. I conclude by briefly arguing that such an evolutionary scenario coheres better with archaeological evidence from the early Pleistocene as well as evidence from developmental psychology pertaining to the nature of our mind reading abilities. (shrink)

In spite of contemporary theoretical disagreement on the nature of language, there is a widespread informal agreement about what linguistic facts are. This article argues that a functional approach to language can provide the foundation for an explicit account of what the informal consensus implies. The account bridges the ‘internalist’ and the ‘externalist’ views of language by understanding mental constructs such as those involved in human languages as aspects of a dynamic social equilibrium. As in evolutionary biology, processes of selection (...) can work to stabilize certain features while others vary; and this process (in which ‘function’ plays a key role) is a necessary supplement to a purely mentalist account. This position is seen as a development of the position of Searle on social facts and Keller on language change. (shrink)