2The origins of human verbal communication
Abstract: This chapter reconstructs that debate around the origins of language focusing in particular on the evolution of verbal communication. The main theories on evolution of language are succinctly presented. The origin of language remain thus a partial mystery: a lucky combination of the evolution of a super-complex modular cognition and of biological characteristics, such as the vocal tract, the larynx and the auditory system that optimized mutual comprehension in our ancestors. The chapter present the central tenet of the debate around Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch’s seminal paper on the evolution of language, that is, to establish whether the key-feature of a language faculty is the universal grammar with its recursive properties, as Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch affirm, or a symbolic competence, that is, the exquisitely human capacity to associate arbitrary signs to referents and intentionally point to the signs to “mean” something, as Tomasello and many others suggest. An analysis of the evolution of the pragmatic dimension of language, so central to verbal communication, concludes the chapter.
Keywords: language instinct, mental organ, evolution of recursive capacities, universal grammar, theory of mind, evolution of pragmatics
1The ‘taboo’ on the origins of language
In 1866 the Linguistic Society in Paris officially banned research on the origins of language. In the article 2 of its legal chart of statutes and regulations it was stated: “The society doesn’t accept communications concerning either the origins of language or the creation of a universal language”.2 The ban was due to various reasons, also ideological ones against positivist thinking and biological approaches to languages that were considered ill founded in general. Whatever the reasons were, the idea of something wrong with the general project of inquiring about the origins of language lasted for more than a century. The most intuitive obstacle to such a research project was of course finding evidence: speech is volatile, verba volant, and doesn’t leave traces on objects and artifacts. Also, the “organs” or speech, like the vocal cords, the larynx etc, aren’t so easy to date and to correlate with a full-fledged linguistic ability. By comparing the vocal tract of newborns, apes and human fossils, Philip Lieberman (1975, 2002) was able to date back the emergence of an adapted vocal tract for speech around 70,000 years ago, but if the presence of such a vocal tract is a necessary condition for speech, it is not sufficient: many other competences should be at work in order to ascribe a linguistic competence. And the particular shape of human vocal tract is one of the most common causes of death in children. Thus, if it was a mutation and occurred in pre-linguistic hominids, it is difficult to imagine to what extent it could have provided any fitness to its bearers.
In the seventies and eighties, many distinguished linguists and biologists argued against the possibility of explaining language through natural selection. For example, Noam Chomsky (1972) and Stephen J. Gould (1987) gave strong arguments on why a biological specification for grammar could not be the product of natural selection: it doesn’t show genetic variations, it cannot come in intermediate forms and it doesn’t confer any selective advantage. Also, it is a too complex and unique ability to be attributed to natural selection, that is, there is nothing to compare with. Chomsky’s skepticism in his 1972 book was well expressed by these following statements:
It is perfectly safe to attribute this development (of an innate language faculty) to “natural selection” so long as we realize that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena. (Chomsky 1972: 97)
or:
(A language faculty) poses a problem for the biologist, since, if true, it is an example of true “emergence” – the appearance of a qualitatively different phenomena at a specific level of complexity of organization. (Chomsky 1972: 70)
According to them, language may have evolved as a by-product of selection of other abilities or just as a by-product of an increase of brain size. Similar points have been made by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (1989), David Premack (1986) and Jacques Mehler (1985).
In 1990, the two psycholinguists Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom, both raised in the Chomskian linguistic paradigm, argued that, given that language has to be considered for many reasons more as a biological organ than a cultural artifact, its peculiarity and unique design should be explained as the product of natural selection “as it is understood within the orthodox theory of synthetic or neo-Darwinian theory of language evolution (Mayr 1982)” (Pinker & Bloom 1992: 452). Most of the arguments presented in their papers on the subject are based on analogy with other complex abilities such as echolocation, that is, the capacity of certain animals like bats to orient themselves through sounds, or stereopsis, that is, the perception of depth. They are unique capacities, qualitatively different from any antecedent. They are highly specific and impressively complex biological organs, and have undoubtedly evolved through selective pressure. As the anatomical structure of complex systems such echolocation or vision show signs of design for some function, according to Pinker and Bloom, the cognitive mechanisms underlying language show the same signs of design for function. Language is a complex of many cognitive mechanisms, each designed to mapping a syntactic, semantic or pragmatic function. The building blocks of grammar are universal and are built around basic lexical categories, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and propositions. Many syntactic constraints and devices, such as the rules of phrase structure, the linear order, etc., allow to maximize the expressive power of language and to reduce the memory load in speech comprehension. The rules of phonological segmentation and prosody rhythm also suggest a system that is maximized for oral comprehension and articulation. The two authors claim that, given the highly specialized function of the language system, it is not just telling a story to argue that it may have been the product of natural selection.
A challenge to their view comes from the variety of languages. If there are cognitive devices that have been selected to govern word order or other grammatical functions, how is such a diversity of languages possible? If the cognitive devices that underlie our linguistic abilities have to allow the realization of very different grammatical forms, it means that they are general-purpose systems and can have evolved for other reasons than for a specific linguistic function. Yet, according to the authors, the variations are at the level of the external language, whereas the selective hypothesis concerns the internal language, or language faculty, that is, the abstract system of rules posited by Chomsky and common to the development of any language. In Chomskyan linguistics, there is a universal grammar that has a set of parameters that gives rise to different linguistic forms. But, essentially, the language faculty is the same for everyone. According to the “principles and parameters” hypothesis on universal grammar put forward by Chomsky in the 80s, the language faculty is a set of modular devices that can be “switched on and off” according to the public linguistic input each learner of language receives.
Although Pinker and Bloom 1990 article was very influential, it provided only indirect arguments for the evolution of language, mainly based on analogies with the evolution of other biological systems. Yet, the paper reflected the air du temps, and a second version of it appeared in the collective volume edited by Barkov, Cosmides and Tooby in 1992: The Adapted Mind3. The book was the first of a long series on the role of evolutionary explanations of complex human cognitive functions and social abilities. It rehabilitated evolution as a relevant dimension for the comprehension of the human mind and inaugurated an intellectual season of debates around the selective pressures that may have played a role in shaping the modular information-processing mechanisms that make our cognition so unique. Given the scarcity of pre-historical evidence about our ancestral thoughts and words, the evolutionary approach to cognition was mainly based on a “reverse engineering” approach under the hypothesis that all evolved psychological mechanisms are adaptations in response to the demands of a “hunters-gatherers” way of life. Our ancestral mind is thus that of hunters and gatherers evolved through the Pleistocene, that is, the geological epoch that lasted from about more than two millions years ago to 11,700 years ago. The evolutionary psychological approach states that we can infer a modular, domain-specific psychological mechanism from an adaptive problem and vice versa: we can infer an adaptive problem from a modular, domain-specific psychological mechanism. Again, given the poor evidence about Pleistocene minds, the second direction of the inference (from the psychological mechanism to the adaptive problem) is the most used in this literature.
Even if many authors condemned the approach as a generator of Just So Stories (Fodor 2007; Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini 2010), evolutionary thinking about language was definitely rehabilitated in the 1990s, and brought a fresh, interdisciplinary air among linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology and evolutionary biology by opening a new research trend in cognitive and social sciences that may be considered mainstream nowadays. The doubts that were casted on the very possibility of understanding language in terms of natural selection faded away progressively and today the evolution of language has become a central topic of contemporary linguistics and cognitive science.
The best evidence of this conceptual change is a 2002 paper co-signed by Noam Chomsky4 and published in Science with the title: “The Faculty of Language. What Is It, Who Has it and How Did It Evolve?” That Chomsky, that is, one of the most convinced adversaries of the evolutionary approaches to language, decided to be involved in this debate was the sign of a profound cultural transformation in linguistics that was paving the way for a new paradigm of research.
2What did evolve?
It is clear that the new start for the debate on the evolution of language is related to the new paradigm in linguistics that owes its major developments to Noam Chomsky. That is because the hypothesis of an adaptive function of language is related to the view of language as a “mental organ”, a set of functionally specific cognitive modules that can have emerged through selective pressure. Positing an I-language (internal language) is thus a key element of an evolutionary approach to language. Yet, many questions are left open by this approach. First of all, what exactly did evolve and for what purposes? An I-language with a sophisticated set of grammatical rules as the one posited by Chomsky is clearly species-specific and doesn’t resemble to any other communicative systems in animals. How then language evolved from other adaptations, if we don’t have any other system to compare with? Which cognitive systems does human language share with other communicative systems present in nature? Second, is the evolution of language the product of a gradual transformation throughout a continuum, as many authors suggest,5 or is it a discontinuous, ‘saltational’6 process that doesn’t have antecedents? And third, which purpose did language evolve for? Is the language faculty an adaptation for communication or for something else? These questions are highly problematic and open many directions of research, such as the comparative study of linguistic capacities and communicative capacities. Given that the evolution of language involves at least three different functional components – the sensory-motor, the conceptual-intentional and the more specific computational component that assures linguistic computations – we may ask the three questions on the evolution of linguistic abilities separately for each component.
As for the first component, many authors think that language evolved as an interface between the conceptual system and the sensorimotor one, allowing a better coordination between the two and a more sophisticated response of the organism. For example, Gardenförs and Osvath7 argue that language as a symbolic interface system may have evolved so differently in humans in order to assure prospective cognition, that is, the capacity to plan and represent events that are not immediately present. This anticipatory ability is typically human and can be related to the unique presence of language and its role in sensory-motor cognition.
Other authors8 argue that the symbolic capacity of humans is the central feature of language role in the evolution of our sensorimotor abilities. The fact that we can refer to aspects of the world through symbols and representations gave us a better representation of the environment and a better capacity to manipulate it. Derek Bickerton argues that language has evolved from forms of proto-language, that is, simpler representational systems that have semantic/ referential properties and a very poor combinatory structure.9
Another hypothesis on the evolution of the sensorimotor component of language argue that language must have preceded speech, because many structural features of communication were already present in gestural communication. Both humans and great apes have been shown to have mirror neurons that connect manual and oral gestures. According to Corballis10, language is a sort of “swallowed” gestural communication and shares many structural features with the sensorimotor components of gestural communication.
Many authors associated the evolution of language to that of cognitive capacities such as theory of mind (Origgi & Sperber 2000; Dunbar 2000), consciousness (Carruthers 2000) and rationality (Papineau 2000).11
Perhaps, the most challenging hypothesis on the evolution of language that was able to account for its high specificity and for its computational power is that put forward in the paper published on Science in 2002 by Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch, centered on the idea that a capacity for recursive thinking is at the core of language evolution.
3Computational mechanisms for recursion as the core feature of the faculty of language: the Hauser-Chomsky-Fitch hypothesis
Humans not only talk: they also count, make complex inferences and are able to manipulate symbolic systems with endless possible combinations. This special computational power of our mind is based on recursion. According to Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (from now on: HCF), it is the most distinctive trait of human cognition. Recursion is the computational property that “takes a finite set of elements and yields a potentially infinite array of discrete expressions” (HCF 2010: 18). Discrete infinity is a property of some computational systems, such as natural numbers, and, of course, of the human language. This trait is truly distinctive and cannot be backed up in animal capacities for manipulating symbols, or animal communicative systems, such as bee dances, bird sings etc.
HCF distinguish between a broad language faculty (FLB) and a narrow one (FLN) claiming that only the FLN is uniquely human. Although they commit to an adaptationist explanation of human cognition, FLN, which includes at least recursion, could have been evolved according to them as a sprandel, that is, a byproduct of preexisting constraints. FLN may be an adaptive computation, given that it allows to communicate an endless variety of thoughts. Nevertheless, FLN can be adaptive without being a specific adaptation for language.
The originality of HCF hypothesis is that the focus of the uniqueness of language is not on the special features of speech. To the eyes of a Martian, what seems to distinguish humans from the rest of animal kingdom is the capacity of verbal communication, that is, of articulated speech. Yet, to what extent speech is so special of humans? Although many authors have argued for the uniqueness of the human apparatus evolved as an adaptation to produce speech12, comparative work on speech abilities has shown that the “organs of speech” are not so specialized for humans: other species show descended larynx, the ability to discriminate among different phonemes and to produce formants in their own species-typical vocalizations13. Hence, the organs of speech don’t seem to be what makes the extraordinary difference of human languages compared to other animal communication systems.
On the contrary, the capacity for recursion, that is, for combining a set of finite symbols to generate infinite strings, is unique of our species. There must be constraints, such as a universal grammar, on our learning in order to explain how, from a finite array of linguistic data to which we are exposed, we are able to extrapolate a potentially infinite language. What makes us humans is the “ability to acquire the unlimited class of generative systems that includes all natural languages”.14
Although there exist interesting results on the capacity of other animals to count and learn numbers,15 it is clear however that what they lack is the capacity to create open-ended generative systems.
The puzzle remains whether recursion was evolved for language or not. According to HCF, it is highly doubtful that recursion was an adaptation for language. It is more plausible that it was a cognitive adaptation for other cognitive tasks and, by interacting with proto-systems of human communication, opened the possibility to construct natural languages. It is also possible that animals have recursion for domain specific abilities, such as navigation. In this case, what would be special about humans is that the recursive capacity is domain-general instead of domain specific, and can be applied to a variety of class of cognitive tasks.
4Chomsky and his critics: the UG hypothesis under scrutiny
Many contributors to the ongoing debate on the evolution of language reject the central idea put forward by HCF, that is, that what is essential to our language faculty is a recursive UG, that is, a cognitive module with highly abstract computing capacities.
Also, according to many authors, it seems counterintuitive to see language as an adaptation for other purposes than communication: communication is the central function of language in all species, thus an evolutionary approach to language should take into account this basic feature.
Other criticisms, like Jackendoff (2010) point to the “syntactocentric” architecture put forward by Chomsky and his colleagues. According to Jackendoff, a parallel architecture in which phonology, semantics and syntax are more autonomous, is much more evolutionarily plausible than what Chomsky describes. According to Jackendoff (2002) semantics and phonology should be able to interact and generate combinatorial structures without the intervention of the syntactic module. His parallel model allows for an autonomous set of combinatorial rules for semantics and phonology that do not need syntactic mediation. In terms of evolution, this is, for Jackendoff, a more plausible hypothesis: a combinatorial system to associate representations and phonemes (roughly, a proto-language) seems prima facie a more plausible adaptive evolution than the abrupt emergence of a sophisticated syntactic competence.
Jackendoff’s criticism is in line with other approaches that stress the centrality of the connection between symbols and phonemes as the most salient aspect of language. Yet, Jackendorff’s position sticks to the generative framework, although he puts forward a quite different version.
Other criticisms are much more radical because they reject the very hypothesis of a universal grammar as the underlying core of linguistic competence. Michael Tomasello for example, argues that language is a cultural product whose evolution is made possible by the kind of symbolic communication that humans are able of (Tomasello 2003). He puts forward an alternative model of language, a use-based linguistics, according to which we do not need any innate specific language module in order to develop a linguistic ability. According to Tomasello, the new findings in cognitive science of much more specialized learning mechanisms than general induction help to account for the acquisition of language as a cultural tool used for intentional communication while explaining the variety and cultural richness of the different languages. There are at least two major sets of cognitive abilities that are involved in language learning: a first set that comprises a variety of skills of intention-reading (such as for example shared attention, theory of mind, and pointing) and a second one which comprises various skills of pattern finding, or categorization, such as the ability to form categories of similar items, or the ability to mapping structures or else to perform statistical analyses on various perceptual and behavioral sequences.
Against Chomsky, Tomasello’s use-based linguistics is concentrated on the idea that use creates rules, and that grammar is derivative on language use. The central tenet of linguistic ability is our capacity to communicate symbolically, conventionally and intersubjectively, a capacity that is not shared with other species.
On the same line, without though endorsing this special theory of language, Terence Deacon and Michael Arbib have argued that the only specie-specific cognitive feature that we need in order to develop a language is a “symbolic” ability, that is, the ability to use arbitrary signs to convey meanings and conventionalize these uses.
To sum up: the central tenet of the debate is to establish whether the key-feature of a language faculty is the universal grammar with its recursive properties, as Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch affirm, or a symbolic competence, that is, the exquisitely human capacity to associate arbitrary signs to referents and intentionally point to the signs to “mean” something, as Tomasello and many others suggest. What is peculiar is that, in both cases, the competences posited to account of the origin of language aren’t in themselves adaptations for communication purposes, but for ensuring the enhanced cognitive performances of human species, such as: planning, theory of mind, social cognition, consciousness, complex spatial and temporal representation etc. The origin of language remain thus a partial mystery: a lucky combination of the evolution of a super-complex modular cognition and of biological characteristics, such as the vocal tract, the larynx and the auditory system that optimized mutual comprehension in our ancestors. Both hypotheses favor an interpretation of language evolution as a continuum from previously adapted functions and organs instead of a sharp saltational hypothesis that would posit the separation between humans and non-humans in the unique presence of language in our species. That is why the most recent advancements on the evolution of language16 recommend a “multi-component” comparative approach in order to isolate potential precursor of language within different components: social/communicative, vocal/phonological, referential/conceptual, structural/combinatorial, etc.17
5Why do we talk? Grooming, gossip and the origins of verbal communication
What is so special of human communication? We are prodigious communicators and communicate on an endless array of topics and subjects: about ourselves, our feelings, our desires and expectations; about others, their emotions, their moral qualities. We communicate about the present, the past and the future of our actions and other people’s actions. We talk about gossip, what other should or should not do, what we are told about how things are, about rituals, traditions. We tell truths and lies in order to get attention from others, or sometimes just bullshits,18 for example, to “sex up” a story and make us feeling more important. The range of topics on which we communicate is a peculiarity of our species. Animals can have sophisticated systems of communication, such as vocalizations in birds, or alarm calls in various monkeys (Lemasson et al. 2011), but the intentions that trigger the communicative signals among animals are very limited: directions, alarm, courtship, and few others. Humans can communicate about everything: about existing and non-existing states of affairs, about what they wish and what they won’t. The fact that they can communicate about non existing states of affairs is a major difference with animal communication. The intentions they have to communicate is somehow difficult to specify: they seem to be a talkative species that invests a lot of energy in communication for the sake of it, even without any second end.
The excess of communication so typical of our talkative species has generated hypotheses on the possible adaptive function of communicating so much. For example, the psychologist and anthropologist Robin Dunbar, advanced the hypothesis in 1997 that talk among humans could be an instrument of social cohesion and social order.19 Dunbar reported data on the fact that most conversations among humans around the world are centered on gossip and not on communicating each other vital factual information. This enormous waste of energies in gossiping about others must have an adaptive function that is different from that of acquiring information. According to Dunbar, talk and gossip have the function of keeping track of and strengthening social relations as the intense activity of grooming among certain primates is devoted to. But why humans evolved such a sui generis and elaborated instrument of keeping track of social relations? It depends on the size of ancestral human groups. What distinguishes humans from other social primates such as apes, is that human groups can reach a much larger size than apes’ groups. Evidence shows that ancestral human groups counted more than 150 individuals. In these conditions, keeping track of social relationships through grooming is impossible. Hence, language and “small talk” to monitor who does what to whom etc, etc.
This hypothesis faces some objections. First of all, it is unclear why humans should have evolved such a sophisticated communication system and not another one just in order to keep track of social relations: the representational power of language seems to fit the idea that language’s communicative purpose is primary that of conveying true information, that is, information whose semantic content has potential relevant consequences for the survival of the group. If language were just an instrument for keeping track of social relations, it won’t need such a powerful representational capacity.
Also, the hypothesis doesn’t say anything on the special shape of our language organ: the parallel with gossip, although conceptually interesting, doesn’t say anything about possible precursors of the language faculty, given that, comparatively, gossip and grooming don’t share any functional or morphological similarities.
6Intentions and the non-natural origins of linguistic communication
What Dunbar’s hypothesis lacks is a reasonable explanation of the emergence of language within the special communicative species we are. As I said before, our intentions for communicate are multifarious, and in order to understand what we mean, our interlocutors not only need to understand the sign we used but also the intention we had to convey a particular meaning with that sign. While speculating on the origins of language from a musical protolanguage, Darwin said that language may have evolved when “some unusually wise ape-like animal should have thought of imitating the growl of a beast of prey, so as to indicate to his fellow monkeys the nature of the expected danger; but this would have been a step in the formation of language”.20 What Darwin is alluding to en passant is exactly the very special form of meaning that humans are able to convey through symbols. What the unusually smart ape-like humanoid did is to use “symbolically” the growl of a beast in order to indicate the danger: nothing correlates naturally the imitation of a growl to a kind of danger: in order to understand, its fellow monkeys should have attributed it the intention to convey some meaning to them, a meaning that was possible to infer from the context and the special correlation in that context between the growl and the danger. That is exactly what modern pragmatics, following the philosopher Paul Grice, calls non-natural meaning.21 In a famous article published in 1957, Grice contrasts the natural meaning that some signs possess – like when smoke means fire or red spots mean measles – with non-natural meaning. In order to get the (non-natural) meaning expressed by an utterance we must reconstruct the communicative intention the utterer had by using that expression. He provides the following definition of speaker’s meaning, that is, the non-natural meaning the speakers intended to convey by her/ his utterance:
| (1) | By uttering X a speaker U meansnn to an intended audience A if and only if: | |
| a. | She/he intends A to have a certain belief p | |
| b. | She/he intends that A recognizes her/his intention as part of the reason why she/ he comes up believing p | |
Thus, the speaker’s meaning is much more complex than the linguistic meaning encoded in “U”. It heavily depends on speaker’s intentions of higher order, that is, the intention of making one’s communicative intention explicit and recognizable by the audience.
In a later text,22 Grice presents a sort of “evolutionary myth”, to illustrate how meaningnn could have emerged from natural meaning. The central element for this transition is the creature’s capacity for intentional communication, that is, for using signs intentionally to point to some of her/his intentions, thus provoking some thoughts in her/ his interlocutors. This rich, intentional capacity is the most distinctive trait of human communication.
7How did verbal communication evolve? A post-Gricean picture
How did language evolve? Is language necessary to think in the way we think now or is the way we think a necessary condition for the emergence of language? The Gricean picture seems to imply that a powerful “Macchiavellian intelligence”,23 that is, a capacity to have complex, higher order thoughts and the intention to manipulate others’ thoughts. That is, the intentional origins of verbal communication presuppose a complex mind with rich metarepresentational24 capacities and a sophisticated social cognition.
Some authors are against this view because it imposes too much complexity to an ancestral human pre-linguistic mind and thus reintroduces the same problem of the evolution of language at another level: if we need such a sophisticated metarepresentational mind to evolve a language, how did it evolve and for what purpose? Is it an exceptional feature of the human mind, or do exist precursors of intentional communication in the animal kingdom? Primatologists are divided on this point: some think that a rudimentary intentional communication and some mentalizing capacities are present in primates,25 while others think that the kind of mentalizing capacities needed for intentional communication are only human.26
Anyway, more generally, what is the point of explaining the evolution of language by positing an even more complex and difficult to test mental capacity, that is, the capacity for intentional communication?
The reason why this is a necessary step in order to understand the origins of verbal communication is that no purely coded linguistic communication could have evolved and provided its bearers with fitness advantages in absence of any psychological metarepresentational capacity.
This doesn’t mean that we should frame this debate in the classical terms of: Which came first? Language or metarepresentational capacities? Many approaches account for a co-evolution of language and intentional communication that explains the sophisticated communicative means so special of our species.
In a 2000 paper, Origgi and Sperber have argued that an evolutionary explanation of linguistic meaning as the intended effect that a certain arbitrary sign had the ‘proper function’27 to convey, is compatible with an enriched view of verbal communication. A semantic competence among our ancestors may have conventionalized the use of some linguistic forms as “signs” to convey a certain state. For example, according to the philosopher Ruth Millikan, the proper function of the indicative is to convey information, while the proper function of the imperative is to convey order and command. But even the stabilization of these basic proper functions needed the presence of some rudimentary intentional communication. According to Origgi and Sperber (2000), the intentional capacities needed are, though, much less complex than those presupposed by a full-fledged Gricean communication. Our proto-humans must have been able only to use a certain sign ostensively to point not to an aspect of the world but to one of their internal mental states, and then let the audience reconstruct their states by inferring it from the context and from the proper function of the linguistic sign used. Using Sperber & Wilson (1986/1995) Relevance Theory, Origgi and Sperber show how simple inferences on the relevance of the message (the presupposition that the message is relevant is conveyed by the ostensive use of the linguistic sign) make people infer the mental state to which the speaker wanted the audience to pay attention to. Verbal comprehension is recognition of speaker’s meaning. But what a linguistic utterance does is not to encode speaker’s meaning, but to provide rich evidence from which the audience can infer speaker’s meaning. Could languages playing such a role be described within the general conceptual framework of the evolution of linguistic conventions? A linguistic device does not have as its proper function to make its encoded meaning part of the meaning of the utterances in which it occurs. It has, rather, as its direct proper function to indicate a component of the speaker’s meaning that is best evoked by activating the encoded meaning of the linguistic device. It performs this direct function through each token of the device performing the proper function of indicating a contextually relevant meaning, that is, its implicit meaning.
The human language faculty is not an ability to produce and interpret signals: rather, it is an ability to acquire culturally transmitted languages. A psychological capacity of making inferences about the ostensive communicative behaviour of other species together with a culturally transmitted system of encoded meanings is sufficient to explain how the very special form of verbal communication of our species may have emerged. Successful communication does not depend on the communicator and addressee having exactly the same representation of the utterance, but on having the utterance, however represented, seen as evidence for the same intended conclusion. Different decodings may provide evidence for one and the same inferential interpretation. Here, a metaphor may help. Think of meanings as points in semantic space. Then, according to the code model of language, any device encodes such a point (or several such points when it is ambiguous). According to the inferential model, on the other hand, a linguistic device encodes a pointer in the semantic space (or several such pointers when ambiguous) that makes accessible, with ordered saliencies, a series of points. According to the code model, a mismatch between the codes of interlocutors must result in the selection of different points, i.e. different meanings, by the communicator and audience. Not so according to the inferential model: differently situated pointers may point to the same meaning. The inferential model is thus compatible with a much greater degree of slack between the codes of interlocutors.
The inferential model of communication makes the evolution of verbal communication appear less mysterious. Humans are the only species that is able to make a lot of inferences about other people’s intentions and thoughts. They are also capable of applying their inferential abilities to communicate through cultural sophisticated products, such as language or other cultural tools. The mixture of being a cultural species and having special meta-psychological capacities, creates a context in which the co-evolution of linguistic abilities and intentional abilities is possible. Our language is both a biological and a cultural phenomenon. In order to understand its origins we should pay attention to the relevant biological ingredients as well as to the cultural ones.
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