The psychological foundations of great ape communication

Richard Moore (University of Warwick)

April 28 @16:00 (CET) — Sala 06, Edificio de Humanidades UNED

Abstract

According to a widely accepted view (SV), while humans are Gricean (or ‘ostensive-inferential’) communicators, great apes could not be. Some criticise this view because (among other reasons) it struggles to account for some similarities in the communication of humans and great apes – including, the possibility that the non-human great apes ‘ostensively’ address their gestures.

Two recent accounts defend the SV. They concede that great ape communication is in some respects ostensive, but argue that it still differs fundamentally from human communication. Scott-Phillips and Heintz (2024) argue that great-apes understand a form of non-Gricean ‘Ladyginian’ intentions. These differ from Gricean intentions in that they are dyadic, rather than triadic; do not support spatiotemporally distant communication; and do not involve the production and comprehension of ‘informative intentions’ (often thought to be a necessary feature of Gricean communication) (ibid.). Sperber and Wilson (in press) defend a different approach. They argue that great ape gestures are characterised by ‘basic ostension’, while human communication involves ‘mentalistic ostension’. While the latter is grounded in communicative intentions, great ape communication does not turn on attributions of communicative goals. Basic ostension consists only of presentations of, and responses to, behaviour.

I argue that both the Ladyginian and basic ostension views fail to explain communicative behaviours already identified in the great ape repertoire. Problematic examples include cases of voluntary, triadic, and informative communication in wild chimpanzees; and cases in which the successful comprehension of dyadic gestures seems to turn on the attribution of communicative goals. I reject both views. I argue that while humans and great apes alike are plausibly Gricean communicators, the natural repertoire of great apes is substantially dependent upon the presence of easily interpreted bodily states that limits the flexibility of their gestural communication. Following Rubio-Fernandez, Berke, and Jara Ettinger (2024), I argue that human and great ape communication recruit different kinds of pragmatic process that are only partially overlapping. Both humans and great apes track a network of embodied social microprocesses that help them to disambiguate the communicative goals of others. Humans are better at tracking these microprocesses, on account of our superior memory and social attention. Additionally, a second set of pragmatic processes recruit culturally-evolved and uniquely human forms of ToM, and are consequently available only to humans.

Bio

Richard Moore is Associate Professor of Philosophy and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Warwick. His research investigates similarities and differences in the cognitive, communicative and cooperative abilities of humans, great apes, and other species; and the evolution of human language and cognition.