The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics: A Hoot in the Light (original) (raw)
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Review: Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation
Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2018
Diane Keeling, Nathan Stormer, and Jason Kalin reviewers: In Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, Hawhee extends and synthesizes many of her signature concerns into a novel reading of rhetorical history from Aristotle to Erasmus. She models her pan-historiographic method, which she has previously elaborated on (Hawhee & Olsen), to study how sensation organizes rhetoric not only as a bodily art, but also as a theory of feeling with much to say about nonrational forms of interaction. Delicately, with inspiring ease, she traces the way in which animals, indeed animality, subtend rhetorical theories of perception and affect from Aristotle forward.
Animal communication in linguistic & cognitive perspective
2022
Detailed comparative studies have revealed many surface similarities between linguistic communication and the communication of non-humans. How should we interpret these discoveries in linguistic and cognitive perspective? We review the literature with a specific focus on analogy (similar features and function but not shared ancestry) and homology (shared ancestry). We conclude that combinatorial features of animal communication are analogous but not homologous to natural language. Homologies are found instead in cognitive capacities of attention manipulation, which are enriched in humans, making possible many distinctive forms of communication, including language use. We hence present a new, graded taxonomy of means of attention manipulation, including a new class we call ‘Ladyginian’, which is related to but slightly broader than the more familiar class of ‘Gricean’ interaction. Only in the latter do actors have the goal to reveal specifically informative intentions. Great ape inte...
The question of whether nonhuman animals participate in intentional communication has become central in the comparative research on animal communication: How can intentional communication be determined; what framework or which criteria should be applied in order to do so? Current research has focused on the signaller displaying intentional behaviour (Townsend et al. 2016) mostly by applying the features of the concept of intentional signals (Call & Tomasello 2007; Liebal et al. 2014). However, a drawback of these methodologies is that they introduce false positives: for instance, the criteria applied fail to exclude instances in which the recipient merely takes into account external evidence to decide how to react after signal production. Here, we will show that current empirical evidence may pick out a signaller’s informative and communicative intention, and a recipient’s ability to understand the signal’s meaning linked to the signaller’s intentions, only if researchers adopt a Neo-gricean definition of intentional communication that views communication as fundamentally inferential. However, we will argue that adopting such an approach happens mainly for reasons of methodological access to intentional communication in animals and does not exclude calling out to non-inferential accounts of communication such as the one developed by Millikan (2005). Based on Millikan’s insight that signallers and recipients always constitute together a communicative interaction, we illustrate here with two examples of animal communication in apes (Cartmill & Byrne 2007) and corvids, (Pika & Bugnyar 2011) and two systematic approaches (Hobaiter & Byrne 2014; Rossano 2013) how the Neo-gricean framework can be enriched by focusing on the notion of flexible interaction between signallers and recipients to analyze animal communication.
Ostensive intentional communication in nonhuman animals
2018
By interacting with each other communicatively humans constantly engage in so-called intentional communication. Intentional communication means to engage in meaningful communication, i.e. communicating meaningful messages to others by communicating goals, information etc. with the help of signals that carry meaning themselves. Humans engage in such intentional communication openly, that is we do not simply use language to transmit a message, but we also address each other directly by employing eye-contact and other so-called ostensive signals to emphasize our motivation to communicate something to a specific audience. Human communicators are not just naturally good at displaying these back-and-forth interactions, but they are also very efficient in doing so. One reason for this efficiency is our conventionalized communication system: human language. Using a word with a fixed meaning in a sentence to deliver a certain message then is easing the workload of signalers and recipients grasping each other’s intentions directly or indirectly, and makes communication indeed more efficient. Given this, intentional communication appears at least at first glance to be uniquely human. But is it uniquely human indeed? What about the communicative interactions of nonhuman animals? They clearly do not have a conventional language system. But can they influence each other’s mental state in a communicative situation and do they intend to do so? If yes, by what means? In this dissertation, I aim to provide a framework, that is a set of criteria derived from theoretical and empirical research on human and nonhuman communication, which is aimed at picking out a sophisticated, human-like intentional communication: a kind of intentional communication that is cognitively related human communication, and in particular to ostension. The criteria will be based, first on the central idea of flexibility to be perceivable within a communicative interaction, both in recipients and signalers. Secondly, ostensive signals, it will be argued, function even in human communication as attention-getters and -directors, and do not require higher level cognition.
Exorcising Grice's ghost: an empirical approach to studying intentional communication in animals
Language's intentional nature has been highlighted as a crucial feature distinguishing it from other communication systems. Specifically, language is often thought to depend on highly structured intentional action and mutual mindreading by a communicator and recipient. Whilst similar abilities in animals can shed light on the evolution of intentionality, they remain challenging to detect unambiguously. We revisit animal intentional communication and suggest that progress in identifying analogous capacities has been complicated by (i) the assumption that intentional (that is, voluntary) production of communicative acts requires mental-state attribution, and (ii) variation in approaches investigating communication across sensory modalities. To move forward, we argue that a framework fusing research across modalities and species is required. We structure intentional communication into a series of requirements, each of which can be operationalised, investigated empirically, and must be met for purposive, intentionally communicative acts to be demonstrated. Our unified approach helps elucidate the distribution of animal intentional communication and subsequently serves to clarify what is meant by attributions of intentional communication in animals and humans.
Can You Hear Me (Yet)?-Rhetorical Horses, Trans-species Communication, and Interpersonal Attunement
The Relational Horse: How Frameworks of Communication, Care, Politics and Power Reveal and Conceal Equine Selves, 2022
Despite ongoing interdisciplinary calls to level the playing field toward a more symmetrical view of human-nonhuman animal relationships, frameworks and formats that serve to border human and animal lifeworlds into separate categories of experience and study continue to stymie such efforts. This interdisciplinary essay focuses on several aspects of language and communication concerning horse-human interactions. These include the limits and possibilities of the theory and methods through which scholars frame and describe such communication, and the means by which horses attempt to communicate rhetorically with humans. I review recent applied ethology studies concerning equine communicative abilities, and relationships. Then, using models and theory from the fields of communication studies and psychology, I consider the implications of these findings for interspecies power dynamics, specifically in instances where humans do not allow for the types of communication and levels of interpersonal attunement of which horses are capable. Pulling from interdisciplinary theory and method, this case study introduces a model for “trans-species communication” that provides a means for studying and speaking about human-equine relationships.
2019
Why explain the communicative behaviours of animals by invoking the information/meaning ‘transmitted’ by signals? Why not explain communication in purely causal/functional terms? This thesis addresses active controversy regarding the nature and role of concepts of information, content and meaning in the scientific explanation of animal communication. I defend the methodology of explaining animal communication by invoking the ‘meaning’ of signals, and responds to worries raised by sceptics of this methodology in the scientific and philosophical literature. This involves: showing what facts about communication a non-informational methodology leaves unexplained; constructing a well-defined theory of content (or ‘natural meaning’) for most animal signals; and getting clearer on what cognitive capacities, if any, attributing natural meaning to signals implies for senders and receivers. Second, it weighs into comparative debates on human-nonhuman continuity, arguing that there are, in fact, different notions of meaning applicable to human communication that have different consequences for how continuous key aspects of human communication are with other species.