Speaking Our Minds

Why human communication is different, and how language evolved to make it special

Thom Scott-Phillips

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137334565
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350312241
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

Language is an essential part of what makes us human. Where did it come from? How did it develop into the complex system we know today? And what can an evolutionary perspective tell us about the nature of language and communication?

Drawing on a range of disciplines including cognitive science, linguistics, anthropology and evolutionary biology, Speaking Our Minds explains how language evolved and why we are the only species to communicate in this way.

Written by a rising star in the field, this groundbreaking book is required reading for anyone interested in understanding the origins and evolution of human communication and language.

Chapter 1

Two Approaches to Communication

1.1 “A good old fiddle”

The BBC radio series The Ape That Got Lucky was a series of spoof lectures on human evolution. The first episode concentrated on the origins of language and communication. One point made by the presenter, Chris Addison, is that context is critical to successful communication. He illustrates this with an example of a keen but shy violinist who, while at a party, says to you, “Wait until these people have all gone and I’ll dig her out and have a good old fiddle”. In the context his meaning seems clear but, Addison points out, the same sentence might be understood very differently if uttered at a funeral.

Jokes of this sort make use of the fact that context is critical to understanding what a speaker means. The example that the psycholinguist Steven Pinker uses to make this point comes from the 1960s American comedy Get Smart, in which the central character, Maxwell Smart, was assisted by a humanoid robot called Hymie. One of Hymie’s most distinctive traits was that he interpreted commands in a highly literal way. The trademark case was “Give me a hand”, in response to which Hymie would remove his own hand and pass it to Maxwell. Others included “Kill the light!” (Hymie uses his pistol to shoot the lightbulb), “Get hold of yourself!” (Hymie grasps each of his arms with the other), and “Knock that stuff off!” (Hymie knocks all the paper off the desk). There is a clear difference between Hymie’s interpretation of the command and the meaning that Maxwell intended to communicate – and so when Hymie takes Maxwell’s words literally, our expectations are violated in a humorous way.

What these and many other examples show is that there is sometimes a big difference between the literal meaning of what is said (sometimes called sentence meaning or linguistic meaning or utterance meaning), and the speaker’s intended meaning (sometimes called speaker meaning or utterer’s meaning). The literal meaning is the ‘decoded’ meaning, based upon the dictionary definitions of the words used, and the speaker meaning is the meaning that was actually intended. Sometimes the difference between these two is obvious and large, such as in sarcasm, and other times the difference is not so big – but it is always there to some degree. Even an utterance as apparently simple as “It’s raining” can have multiple different intended meanings, such as ‘I don’t want to go out after all’, or ‘Get the umbrella’. In fact, “It’s raining” does not even specify where or when there is rain, yet these facts are critical if the utterance is to be relevant. In short, even the most simple, straightforward utterance can be interpreted in different ways, depending on the context. The technical term for this is underdeterminacy: the literal meaning of an utterance underdetermines the speaker meaning (Carston, 2002a; Atlas, 2005). In other words, linguistic communication is never just literal meaning. Literal meaning helps us understand speaker meaning, but it is not the same thing.

My thesis in this book is that the origin of language was the consequence of the creation of an evolutionarily novel form of communication, in which underdeterminacy is an inherent and inevitable feature. Underdeterminacy is often seen as a defective quality for a communication system, one that creates ambiguity and misunderstanding. It is true that such vagaries do follow in its wake, but these characteristics are also assets, since they allow communication to be used in incredibly flexible, creative and indeed funny ways. It was, I will argue, the emergence of such a communication system that allowed our ancestors to create the expressively rich form of communication that we call language. This evolutionarily novel form of communication is called ostensive-inferential communication, or just ostensive communication for short.

In this opening chapter I will describe exactly what ostensive communication is, and how it differs from other types of communication. To do this, I will describe two different ways of thinking about the very possibility of communication. The first is called the code model. It is an intuitive way of thinking about communication, and it provides a good description of most and perhaps all animal communication. However, it is unable to handle the underdeterminacy that is inherent to human communication. In contrast, the second way of thinking about communication, called the ostensive-inferential model (or just ostensive model, for short), was developed to account for these realities. Having described these two approaches, I will then expand on several important preliminary issues, including the precise difference between code and ostension, how they interact with one another, the role of ‘codes’ in language, and the meaning of meaning, among others. These discussions will set the stage for my discussion, in Chapter 2, of exactly why the transition to ostensive communication was so revolutionary.

1.2 The code model

When presented with questions such as ‘What is communication?’ or ‘How does communication work?’, most people’s intuitions are typically along the following lines: that communication involves the transmission of information, via some communication channel. Information is encoded into a signal, sent along this channel, and then decoded at the other end. If the algorithms for encoding and decoding are appropriately calibrated to one another, then what is encoded at one end is the same as what is decoded at the other end. The result is that information has been transferred, from the signaller to the receiver. This way of thinking about communication is called the code model.

The code model combines at least two metaphors of how communication works (Blackburn, 2007). The first is the idea that signals contain messages that are packaged up and sent along some channel, to be unwrapped at the other end. This metaphor is called the conduit metaphor (Reddy, 1979; Figure 1.1). (A conduit is a channel for conveying things from one location to another.) The power of this metaphor is illustrated by the degree to which it pervades our everyday language about communication: ‘Get your message across’; ‘His feelings came through clearly’; ‘I couldn’t extract the meaning from your writing’; ‘I gave you that idea’, and so on.

The second metaphor that contributes to the code model is the information-theoretic approach to communication developed by Claude Shannon (1948). Here, signals are seen as strings that are to be transmitted along a communication channel (Figure 1.2). The intellectual challenge comes from devising a way to do this that overcomes the presence of noise and error in the transmission process – particular problems for electrical engineering, telecommunications, and other areas that involve the transmission of digital information.

It is not difficult to see how the conduit metaphor and information theory combine to form the essence of the code model: ‘information’ is packaged up and then transmitted along a conduit, to be unwrapped at the other end. Having said that, the code model is not so much the precise summation of these two metaphors, but rather a general background assumption about how communication works that has been greatly influenced by them.

Figure 1.1 The conduit metaphor. In the conduit metaphor, communication involves the packaging of messages, which are then to be passed along a conduit, to be unwrapped at the other end.

Figure 1.2 The information-theoretic approach to communication. Information is encoded, and then transmitted as a signal. During the transmission process, the signal may become distorted due to noise. The received signal is then decoded. Information theory provided a way for the processes of encoding and decoding to counteract the effect of the noise.

The code model has had impact on a great many researchers in a diverse range of disciplines. One particularly salient example is in the study of animal communication, where there are many examples of this way of thinking (Rendall et al., 2009). Here are three definitions of communication taken from that literature: “the provision of information from a sender to a receiver” (Bradbury & Vehrencamp, 1998, p. 2); “... the transmission of information from one animal to another. Information is encoded by one individual into a signal. When received by another animal, this information undergoes decoding ...” (Green & Marler, 1979, p. 73); “the transfer of information via signals sent in a channel between a sender and a receiver” (Hailman, 1977, p. 52). And here is a definition of animal communication from a linguist: “One organism has a message in mind that he or she wants to communicate to another organism. He or she emits some behavior ... that encodes that message. The other organism ... perceives the behavior, identifies it in terms of the meaning encoded, and treats the result of that decoding as the meaning of the message” (Anderson, 2006, p. 17). There are many more definitions with a similar flavour.

The code model is highly intuitive, and can be used as a way to describe many instances of communication in a very simple and general way. As an example, consider bacterial communication. Many species of bacteria communicate by a process known as quorum sensing, in which individual bacterial cells produce small diffusible signal molecules in particular local environments (Schuster et al., 2003; Wagner et al., 2003). These molecules bind to cognate receptors on other bacteria, and in doing so effectively reveal the presence of the bacterium in the local environment. When the concentration of these molecules reaches a threshold level (the quorum), it triggers population-wide behaviour, such as gene regulation (Williams et al., 2007; Ng & Bassler, 2009). Such interactions are most easily described in terms of a code. The encoding algorithm is something like ‘If in environment X, produce molecule Y’, and the decoding algorithm something like ‘If the concentration of molecule Y is above the threshold t, then perform behaviour Z’.

Following this logic, one student of animal communication once compiled a six-signal ‘dictionary’ for grasshoppers (Moles, 1963, pp. 125–126). It reads:

Signal I: It is fine, life is good.

Signal II: I would like to make love.

Signal III: You are trespassing on my territory.

Signal IV: She’s mine.

Signal V: Oh, how nice it would be to make love!

Signal VI: How nice to have made love!

A dictionary like this is, in effect, a description of a code.

Communication of this sort depends upon mechanisms of association. In signallers, certain states of the world are associated with the production of particular signals; and in receivers, the reception of those same signals is associated with particular behaviours. In fact, this associativity is the defining feature of the code model. If communication is made possible by associations, it is, by definition, an instance of code model communication.

These associations can be more or less complex. For example, in many species signal production depends in part on whether an audience is around, and if so, what sort of audience that is. This is called audience design (see e.g. Gyger et al., 1986 for a review of audience design in chickens). Sensitivity to the existence and nature of the audience does not, however, imply that the system is not explicable in associative terms. It just means that the associations are nuanced to these environmental cues (i.e. the code might be ‘if there is a leopard in the environment, and also members of my group/kin, then produce the relevant alarm call’).

Some cases of human communication are explicable in the same associative terms. The ring of pigmented skin that surrounds nipples is called the areola. The areolar glands of new mothers secrete chemical compounds, which signal to newborns the location of the nipple, and hence of milk and its various nutrients (Doucet et al., 2009). In effect, this ‘chemosignal’ allows the mother’s body to communicate with the infant’s body. In terms of the code model, the encoding algorithm is ‘if having just given birth, secrete chemical X’, and the decoding algorithm is ‘if X is detected, then move towards it’. Tears are also thought to contain a chemosignal, one that causes sympathy in others (Gelstein et al., 2011). It is likely that there are many more signals, chemical or otherwise, by which human bodies communicate with one another.

Another instance of code model communication in humans is involuntary laughter. Involuntary laughter is often called ‘Duchenne’ laughter, after the French physician who first distinguished the different muscles used in ‘real’ and ‘faked’ smiles. Several strands of research suggest that involuntary laughter serves a communicative function, namely to express social solidarity (Gervais & Wilson, 2005). Evidence also suggests that laughter in humans and laughter in the other great apes are evolutionary homologues of one another; that is, they both descended from the same common ancestral behaviour (van Hooff, 1972; Davila Ross et al., 2009; Bryant & Aktipis, 2014).

The same is likely to be true of several other behaviours such as snorting, smiling, frowning, sighing, pouting, and so on, which all occur in both humans and other animals, and have been hypothesized to serve a communicative function of some kind, typically one that involves managing social relations (Darwin, 1872; Owren & Bachorowski, 2003; Davila Ross et al., 2009). Monkey alarm calls fall into this box too: several lines of evidence, in particular common neural organization, suggest that these calls are homologous to spontaneous human emotional vocalizations, and not speech (Owren et al., 2011). The term ‘gesture-calls’ has been proposed as a label for the human forms of these behaviours, because of the evolutionary relationship that they share with the communicative gestures and calls of our primate cousins (Burling, 1993; 2005). The term has not caught on, but the idea that this class of behaviours should have an identifying label is correct. Regardless, the key point for the present purposes is that we communicate with these behaviours, and this communication is describable with the code model.

The point I am making is not that chemosignals and involuntary laughter operate by similar mechanisms. On the contrary, there are plainly many differences. The point I am making is instead that despite these differences, chemosignals and involuntary laughter (and grasshopper calls, and quorum sensing) do share one basic quality in common, which is that they depend upon associations of one sort or another, and are hence describable in the terms of the code model. This will be important shortly, when we come to contrast these examples with language and some other forms of human communication.

There are two final points that I should make about code model communication. The first is that it does not require that encoding and decoding be fully deterministic. Production and reception may be more flexible than this. For example, they could be used probabilistically instead. In this case, the code might read: if X, then do Y with a certain probability, and Z with some other probability (rather than simply ‘if X, then do Y’). Computational models of the evolution of communication show that signalling systems can still emerge and be useful when these probabilistic codes are used (Vogt, 2002; Smith, 2005; Steels, 2011). Indeed, it seems likely to me that many cases of animal communication operate at least to some extent in this way. Because they are not fully deterministic, such systems have been described as inferential (e.g. Smith, 2005). However they are still, strictly speaking, instances of the code model, because the basic paradigm remains one in which producers are prompted to transmit signals for particular meanings, which receivers then decode. Both production and reception are still associative, albeit in a probabilistic way.

The other point I want to make is that the competent use of code model communication systems is not necessarily a cognitively trivial task. For one thing, probabilistic codes can involve a great deal of complexity. But more than that, this type of communication can, in some cases, also involve a great deal of social intelligence. Of particular relevance to my concerns in this book is the possibility that code model communication systems can be used in an intentional way. I will discuss this possibility further in Chapter 4; here, I simply want to use it to make the point that just because a communication system may be predicated on associations, that does not, a priori, make it simple or unsophisticated.

From what I can gather, the label ‘code model’ appears to have been coined by the cognitive scientists Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, in their seminal book Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1995). In that book, not to mention many further publications since, they contrasted the code model with an alternative way of thinking about communication. The next two sections present this alternative.

1.3 The expression and recognition of intentions

The code model depends upon associations, but there are some instances of communication that are simply not explicable in associative terms. For example, suppose that a couple have had a number of conversations about, say, a particular TV show, which many people think is brilliant, but which they both agree is terrible. Now suppose that they head to a party one evening, and a friend of theirs starts telling them how great he thinks the show is. The friend then leaves the conversation. One half of the couple wants to acknowledge to the other half that this is just the sort of thing they had been talking about. To do this, she can improvise and use an indefinite variety of behaviours: a raised eyebrow; puffed cheeks; a glance over the shoulder; sticking her tongue out;...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1. Two Approaches to Communication
• 2. The Emergence of Communication Systems
• 3. Cognition and Communication
• 4. The Origins of Ostensive Communication
• 5. Building a Language
• 6. Evolutionary Adaptation
• Epilogue: The Big Questions Answered
• Glossary
• References
• Index of Names
• Subject Index