[This week's reading and pre-lecture quiz are on Learn -- instructions at the bottom of the page.]
This week we want you to read chapters 3 and 4 of Scott-Phillips (2015). Thom Scott-Phillips is currently a Senior Research Fellow in Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Durham University (and was previously a MSc and PhD student here at Edinburgh). Speaking our Minds is his first book.
(Some) key terms and concepts
There are some key terms that Scott-Phillips uses which may be unfamiliar to those of you who haven’t read the previous chapters in his book. The first of these is ostensive-inferential communication (which is often shortened to ostensive communication): the ability to express and recognise informative and communicative intentions. In short, ostension is the provision of evidence (by the signaller) and inference is the interpretation of this evidence (by the receiver). Importantly, Scott-Phillips distinguishes between informative intentions and communicative intentions. An informative intention is when a signaller intends to change the receiver’s representation of the world as a consequence of the signaller’s behaviour. For instance, when asking for directions in the street, you are conveying that you are lost, and need help. Whereas a communicative intention is when a signaller signals that they are trying communicate in the first place (and that the receiver recognises this intention). An example of a communicative intention would be waving down a passer-by for directions: you are making it clear that you wish to establish communication with that particular individual. Another way of looking at this is that an informative intention is the content of a communicative intention. When a signal expresses communicative and informative intentions it is considered an ostensive signal.
Scott-Phillips also contrasts ostensive communication with the code model of communication. The code model of communication is when a message is encoded by a signaller, sent along a channel, and then decoded at the other end by a receiver. The assumption here is that signallers and receivers have some method of packing and unpacking information (as meaning cannot be transmitted via the channel). Under this model, communication is reliant on association: certain states of the world are associated with the production of particular signals and the reception of the same signals is associated with particular behaviours.
Speaking Our Minds aims to challenge is the assumption that languages are codes which are made powerful by ostension and inference. Instead, Scott-Phillips argues for the reverse: that ostension and inference is the crucial aspect of human communication and codes are what makes it powerful. To emphasis this point, the book makes the distinction between natural codes and conventional codes. Natural codes are found in systems that operate according to the code model of communication. Bacterial quorum sensing is an example of a natural code:
Conventional codes are fundamentally different in that the association between a signal and its meaning is negotiated by members of a particular community. The key argument here is that conventional codes emerge from a communication system with ostension and inference already in place. On their own, conventional codes are massively underdetermined, and are always enriched by contextual information and the inferential capacities of the receiver. Under this view, language is “the rich, structured collection of conventional codes that augment ostensive-inferential communication within a given community” (Scott-Phillips, 2015: 41).
About the reading
Chapter 3 begins with the idea of pragmatic competence, and uses this as a springboard for discussing how social cognition is backbone of human communication. In particular, the chapter focuses on two features of social cognition. The first of these is recursive mindreading: the ability to entertain and process multiply embedded representations of mental states. It is this capacity that, for Scott-Phillips at least, makes ostensive communication possible. The second aspect of social cognition is cooperation, with a specific focus on shared intentionality: the ability to mentally represent and pursue a joint activity where two or more individuals work together towards some goal. Whereas Scott-Phillips views recursive mindreading as a crucial precondition for ostensive communication, he remains unconvinced that shared intentionality is necessary. Instead, shared intentionality is used to explain how and why we use ostensive communication as a collaborative, joint activity.
Chapter 4 employs the comparative method to make the claim that only humans have ostensive communication; however, as Scott-Phillips mentions, there are still several outstanding experiments in this area. The crucial claim in this chapter is that some non-human primates show evidence for intentional communication, but appear to lack the necessary social cognitive mechanisms for ostensive communication. Scott-Phillips then outlines how he thinks ostensive communication emerged as a consequence of increased social complexity: here, sophisticated social cognitive mechanisms, such as recursive mindreading, were selected for, thus providing the key stepping stones for our ancestors to transition to ostensive communication.
Below is a video of Thom Scott-Phillips giving a talk on the origin of human communication and language (which is pretty much a summary of Speaking Our Minds):
[If you're interested, there was a recent book club on Speaking our Minds over at the ICCI website, and includes reviews by several leading academics from a wide variety of fields.]
Reading
The reading is available on Learn. To find it:
- Go to http://learn.ed.ac.uk
- In your list of courses click “Origins and Evolution of Language”
- Go to the Other readings folder, and click on the links for Chapters 3 and 4 of Speaking Our Minds.
Post-reading questions
You should take the quiz after doing the reading, but before the lecture. Doing the quiz will enable you to check that you understand key concepts we want you to know, but it’ll also help me figure out what bits of the reading you struggled with, and Kenny can address those in the lecture.
The quiz is on Learn. To find it:
- Go to http://learn.ed.ac.uk
- In your list of courses click “Origins and Evolution of Language”
- Go to the Pre-reading Quizzes folder, and click on the link.
Reference
Scott-Phillips, T. (2015). Speaking Our Minds: Why human communication is different, and how language evolved to make it special. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.