LEC talk: Dorit Bar-On

We’re back on schedule for our LEC talks next week, with a guest lecture from Dorit Bar-On, visiting Edinburgh very briefly. This is a great opportunity to hear about Dorit’s work, which is extremely relevant to many of us in the LEC! We’ll be going out to lunch afterwards, so please do join us.

Tuesday March 29th, 11:00-12:30, 3.10/3.11 Dugald Stewart Building

Dorit Bar-On, UNC-Chapel Hill

Several leading theorists have recently presented the task of explaining language evolution in explicitly Gricean terms. (For example, see Fitch (2010), Tomasello (2008), and Hurford (2007).) I present an alternative, non-Gricean conceptualization of the task. We may accept that all nonhuman animals lack the ‘motive to share information’ and to “tell each other in detail about events and scenes in the world” (Hurford 2007: 332). But nonhuman animals do express states of mind they are in through complex nonlinguistic behavior. On a proper, non-Gricean construal of expressive communi cation, this means that they show to their designated audience (without intentionally telling) — and their designated audience recognizes (without inferring) – both how things are in the world and how things are with them. Recognizing that our nonhuman predecessors were already proficient –though non-Gricean – sharers of information may free us to focus on a more tractable problem. This is the problem of explaining how linguistic expressive vehicles came to replace, augment, and transform the nonlinguistic expressive means to which nonhuman animals are consigned.