Intentionality and Flexibility in Animal Communication (original) (raw)

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds, 2017

Abstract

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.

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