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Gloria Origgi |
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Dan Sperber |
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Department of |
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CNRS, Paris |
EVOLUTION, COMMUNICATION AND THE PROPER FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE*
(A discussion of Millikan in the light of pragmatics and of the
psychology of mindreading)
(In Peter Carruthers and Andrew Chamberlain (eds.) Evolution and the
Human Mind: Language, Modularity and Social Cognition.
* We thank Peter
Carruthers, Andrew Chamberlain, Ruth Millikan, and Deirdre Wilson for their
most useful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
Language is both a
biological and a cultural phenomenon. Our aim here is to discuss, in an evolutionary
perspective, the articulation of these two aspects of language. For this, we
draw on the general conceptual framework developed by Ruth Millikan (1984)
while at the same time dissociating ourselves from her view of language.
Biological and cultural
evolutionary processes
The phrase "evolution
of language" refers to two related but quite distinct processes: the
biological evolution of a language faculty, and the historical-cultural
evolution of languages. The historical-cultural evolution of languages itself
requires the repetition across populations and over generations of the
individual process of language acquisition. Individuals who have acquired the
language of their community can engage in verbal communication. Through a
myriad of acts of communication, they achieve a variety of effects, intended or
unintended. The aggregation of these effects explains both the biological
evolution of the language faculty, and the historical-cultural evolution of
languages.
The biological evolution of
a language faculty and the historical-cultural evolution of languages are
related in interesting ways. If we assume, with Chomsky, that human languages
require, to be acquired, a language faculty, it follows that the biological
emergence of this faculty is a precondition for the cultural emergence of any
human language. On the other hand, if we think, without Chomsky this time, of
the language faculty as a biological adaptation, then, presumably its function
- at least its proximate function on the successful performance of which other
functions depend - is to make language acquisition possible. A language faculty
is adaptive only in an environment where languages are spoken and where,
therefore, inputs indispensable for language acquisition are found. Adaptations
qua adaptations emerge only in an environment where they are adaptive. So it
seems that the existence of a spoken language is a precondition for that of a
language faculty. But then, the language faculty and a spoken language are each
a precondition for the other. There are various ways to finesse this
bootstrapping problem. We will conclude this paper by proposing a possible way
to resolve it.
Even if the proximate
function of the language faculty is to permit the acquisition of language, what
makes this adaptive is the adaptive value of language use itself. In
fact, most adaptationist explanations of the biological evolution of the
language faculty just take for granted or ignore its obvious proximate
function, that of permitting language acquisition. They explain the emergence
and stabilisation of the language faculty by the adaptive value of language
use, that is, in terms of quite remote functions of the language faculty
itself.
How, then, does language
use contribute to biological fitness? Language use consists in the expression
and communication of thoughts. Expression without communication, as when we
think in words, may be adaptive because of its contribution to cognitive
performance (Bickerton, 1995, chapter 3; Carruthers, 1996, Chomsky 1980:
229-230) . We will not consider this (possibly important) aspect of the
adaptiveness of language use in this discussion. The adaptive value of public
languages is, we assume, mostly due to their use in communication. But what
makes communication itself adaptive? Communication has a great variety of
effects. It allows individuals to benefit from the perceptions and inferences
of others and increases their knowledge well beyond that which they could
acquire on their own. It allows elaborate forms of co-ordinated planning and
action. It can be used for manipulation, deceit, display of wit, seduction,
maintenance of social relationships, all of which have fitness consequences.
Many of the debates on the
biological emergence and evolution of the language faculty revolve solely
around the relative importance of these diverse functions of linguistic
communication (e.g.
A language faculty is an
adaptation because it permits the acquisition of linguistic competence, which
permits verbal communication, which can be used in a great variety of ways,
some with beneficial effects. Identifying those remote effects of the language
faculty that have contributed to the biological fitness of language users
should provide some essential pieces of the overall puzzle. However, this is
unlikely to help much with the specifics and the articulation of the two
evolutionary processes involved: the biological evolution of a language faculty
and the cultural evolution of languages. The proper way of describing this
articulation is the second main issue we want to discuss here.
There have been, in the
past twenty years or so, interesting discussions of the relation between
biological and cultural evolution. On the one hand processes of gene-culture
co-evolution have been hypothesised. It is reasonable to surmise that solving
the bootstrapping problem we mentioned at the outset will involve modelling
such a co-evolutionary process between languages and the language faculty. On
the other hand, various conceptual frameworks for dealing in a unified manner
with both biological and cultural evolution have been proposed (Boyd &
Richerson 1985; Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman 1981; Dawkins 1976, 1982; Dennett
1995; Durham 1991; Lumsden & Wilson 1981; Millikan 1984; Sperber 1996). The
best known is probably Dawkins's. The conditions for undergoing Darwinian
selection, Dawkins argues, can be fulfilled not only by biological replicators
such as genes, but also by artefacts such as computer viruses, or by bits of
culture that get copied again and again and which he calls "memes". If
one accepts this framework, then languages, or at least linguistic devices such
as words or grammatical forms, can be seen as paradigmatic examples of memes. There
are problems, however, with the meme framework: either the Darwinian model of
selection is applied as is to cultural evolution, and this is too rigid, as
many including Dawkins himself have noted. Or else the meme framework must be
loosened, but it is unclear how this should be done, and to what extent the
explanatory power of the approach might survive such loosening (see Sperber
1996, chapter 5).
In this presentation, we
will consider another conceptual framework, more familiar to philosophers than
to evolutionary theorists, that of Ruth Millikan. It is intended from the start
to approach biological and cultural phenomena in the same basic way, and it is,
in this respect at least, both more precise and less rigid than Dawkins's. Moreover,
in her book Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories (1984),
Millikan uses this framework to discuss in detail the case of language. Her
not-at-all-hidden agenda, in so doing, is to debunk a view of verbal
communication defended in particular by Paul Grice (1957, 1989) that has gained
not universal but wide acceptance among philosophers of language and linguists.
According to the Gricean view Millikan attacks, comprehension systematically
involves identifying an intention of the speaker. According to the view
Millikan defends, comprehension typically consists in coming directly to
believe what is being asserted or in coming directly to want to comply with
what is being requested. Here, we will articulate our discussion of the
evolution of language around Millikan's proposals. Specifically, we will
attempt to pry apart her conceptual framework, which we find well worth
exploring further, in particular in reflecting about the case of language, from
her own view of language, with which we quite disagree.
Millikan's
teleofunctional framework
In her 1984 book, Language,
Thought and Other Biological Categories, Ruth Millikan presented a general
account of biological and cultural items in terms of "proper functions"
historically responsible for the reproduction and proliferation of these items.
She proposed a particularly interesting distinction between direct and derived
proper functions. (We will ignore several other conceptual distinctions that
she introduced in this book and made little use of thereafter. Generally, our
goal is not to present a critical exegesis of Millikan work, but to reconcile
aspects of her basic approach with a view of language she opposes.) Millikan's
theory of proper functions is a way of explaining different cases of
reproduction, in particular biological and cultural, within a single framework.
Linguistic devices, purposive behaviours, artefacts, and body organs provide
examples of such cases.
What is a proper function? Quite
standardly, Millikan distinguishes the proper function of an item from its
actual effects, that is, what in fact it succeeds in doing on various
occasions, and from the functions that various users intend it to perform on
various occasions. She then defines, quite originally, not one but two types of
proper function: direct and derived. For an item A to have a direct
proper function F it has to fulfil the following condition:
Direct Proper Function: "A originated as a "reproduction" [...] of some
prior item or items that, due in part to possession of the properties
reproduced, have actually performed F in the past, and A exists
because (causally, historically because) of this or these performances"
(Millikan, 1993 : 12).
An item may typically have
a great many recurring effects: its direct proper function is the one
that is historically responsible for its reproduction. A heart makes
noise, contributes to the body's weight, and pumps blood. Only the latter
effect is its proper function. Even a malfunctioning heart still has the direct
proper function to pump blood, because it has been reproduced through organisms
that, thanks in part to their own heart pumping blood, have had descendants
similarly endowed with blood-pumping hearts. Millikan's notion of direct proper
function is a rendering of the biological notion of function as used in
evolutionary theory, but without any reference to the particular conditions of
biological reproduction and selection. As we will see, it applies equally well
to an item such as a word.
A device having a direct
proper function may perform it by producing items that are adapted to specific
environmental circumstances. For instance the pigment-arranging device of the
chameleon's skin performs its functions of hiding the chameleon by producing
colour patterns matching the background on which the animal is sitting. When
the chameleon is sitting on a matching surface, the function of hiding it from
predators is performed by a particular colour pattern. It is reasonable to say
that this pattern, though it may never have been produced before, has a proper
function. However, this should be described not a direct, but a derived proper
function. For an item A to have a derived proper function F it
has to fulfil the following condition:
Derived Proper Function: "A originated as the product of some prior device that,
given its circumstances, had performance of F as proper function, and
that, under those circumstances, normally causes F to be performed by means
of producing an item like A" (ibid.).
Whereas, by definition, a
direct proper function is performed by a great many items with the same
causally relevant properties, a derived proper function may be performed by
individual items that have each different causally relevant properties. An item
with a derived proper function is one that has been produced by a device (for
instance, the chameleon's pigment-arranging device) that produces different
items in different contexts (for instance different colour patterns depending
on the surface on which the chameleon happens to be sitting). To take another
example, the gosling's imprinting mechanism has the direct proper
function of allowing each and every gosling to fix an image of its mother so as
to follow her. The fixation by gosling George of an image of his mother
Samantha is a product of this imprinting mechanism in the special circumstances
of George's birth. This particular imprinting, unique to George has the derived
proper function of helping George follow Samantha.
Note that the derived
proper function of a given item can be given two descriptions, one general, the
other specific. A general description is without reference to the particulars
of the case. For instance any particular colour pattern on the skin on a
chameleon has the derived function of making it less visible on the surface on
which it is sitting; any imprinting in the brain of a gosling has the derived
function of helping it follow its mother. A specific description refers to the
particulars of the case and may be different for each item. For instance this
pattern has the derived function of making this chameleon less visible
on this surface on which it is sitting; the imprinting in George's brain
has the function of helping him follow Samantha. Under its general description
a derived proper function is one typically shared by many items. Under its
specific description, a derived proper function may be a one time affair: the
particular colour pattern of chameleon sitting on an improbable background may
occur only once in the history of the species, and therefore the derived proper
function of hiding this chameleon on this background may be a function that,
under this description, is performed only once.
Roughly, the distinction
between direct and derived proper functions explains respectively how an item
stabilises due to the function its ancestors have performed, and how a new
particular item, not reproduced from any ancestral model, is nevertheless
generated to perform a proper function - though an indirect one.
Millikan, language and
communication
Culture is comprised of all
items that are reproduced and proliferated through communication in the widest
sense, including unintentional transmission of information (for a more
elaborate characterisation of culture, see Sperber 1996). The direct cultural
function of a cultural item is, unproblematically, the effect that prior items
of the same type have performed in the past and that have caused the item to be
reproduced again and again. For instance, a hammer, even if it is actually used
as a paperweight, has the direct cultural function of helping to drive nails,
because it is the repeated and successful performance of this effect (helping
to drive nails) by hammers that has caused them to be produced again and again.
Linguistic items are cultural
items, and it is sensible to ask what direct proper functions of a cultural
kind they have. In Millikan's terminology, language is a complex of different
devices. A "linguistic device" can be a word, a surface syntactic
form, a tonal inflection, a stress pattern, a system of punctuation and
"any other significant surface elements that a natural spoken or written
language may contain" (Millikan 1984:3). A linguistic device has
proliferated because it has served a describable, stable proper function.
Language use is a
purposeful activity that needs some regularity for its successful performance. More
specifically, there must be a regular pattern of correspondence between a
speaker's purpose in uttering a given language device and the hearer's response
to this utterance. It is this reliability that accounts for the device being
used again and again. Among the effects that may be correlated with a
linguistic device, its direct proper function is what keeps speakers and
hearers using and responding to the linguistic device in a standard way and
therefore stabilises the device. What is often called the "conventional
use" of a linguistic device corresponds to this stabilising direct
proper function. Thus the stabilising direct proper function of a given
word is to contribute its conventional meaning to the meaning of the utterances
in which it is used.
The use of a given
linguistic device on a given occasion, by a speaker with his or her own
purposes, endows this token of the device with a derived proper function. This
derived proper function may be a mere tokening without modification of its
direct proper function (as when a word is used to convey just its conventional
meaning) or it may be different from its direct proper function (as in the case
of an indexical, or of a non-conventional metaphor). For example, at first
blush (and we will propose a different account later), the indexical
"now" has the stabilising direct proper function of referring to the
time of utterance, and this direct function is performed through each token of
"now" performing the derived proper function of referring to a
specific time.
Though Millikan does not
develop this, linguistic devices also have derived proper functions of a
biological kind. A word, say the English word "now", has both public
tokens (one every time it is uttered) and mental tokens. The mental tokens
themselves are at two levels. There is a mental token each time the word
"now" is uttered or comprehended, i.e. a mental representation of the
uttered word. There is also, at a more fundamental level, in all individuals
capable of using the word "now", an entry for "now" in the
mental lexicon which is part of their knowledge of the English language. This
mental lexical entry is a mental version of the public language word. It is a
cultural item, with a cultural direct proper function. At the same time, it is
a device produced by the individual's language faculty or Language Acquisition
Device performing its direct function in the particular environment of an
English speaking community. The direct biological function of acquiring a
language is performed by producing mental devices adapted to the local language
community. Therefore mental "now" in a person's mental lexicon (and
all the mental linguistic devices of English or of any other language) have
biological derived proper functions, just as does George the gosling's
imprinting of his mother Samantha's image. The difference is that the gosling's
imprinting mechanism fulfils its direct biological function by producing a
single item with a derived biological function and no cultural function at all,
whereas the Language Acquisition Device fulfils its function by producing tens
of thousands of items with derived biological functions and direct cultural
functions.
Here then, thanks to the
notion of derived function, is a way of describing linguistic devices as
belonging simultaneously to biological and cultural histories. A linguistic
device in the mind of an individual belongs to biological history in being the
product of a biologically evolved language faculty that performs its function
by producing such devices, adapted to the local linguistic community. The same
linguistic device belongs to a cultural history: it has been reproduced in the
mind of the individual, as in that of all the members of the linguistic
community, because of its past and repeated performance of a specific
linguistic function. The proliferation and stability of linguistic devices can
be explained through a combination of cultural and biological (more specifically
cognitive) factors. This seems to us much more insightful than a strictly
cultural story.
Note that this account
differs from a meme model of linguistic evolution in two respects. In the
meme model, linguistic (and more generally cultural) evolution is homologous to
biological evolution in that it too is essentially driven by a process of
Darwinian selection. Biological and cultural evolution however are not
otherwise articulated (apart from the obvious point that cultural evolution
requires a species with biologically evolved capacities that makes it capable
of culture). In contrast, by using Millikan's distinction between direct and
derived proper functions, we can describe the articulation between biological
and linguistic evolution. Also, whereas the meme model assumes that memes are
replicated, typically by "imitation", there is no postulation, in the
present account, of a copying process. Generally, the word
"reproduction" is ambiguous between a sense of repeated production
and a sense of copying. Items of the same type can be produced again and
again without being copied from one another, for instance by being produced
from the same mould.
As Chomsky pointed out long
ago, members of the same linguistic community do not learn to speak by copying the
sentences they have heard. Most sentences of a language are uttered, if at all,
only once, and, therefore, the overlap between the sets of sentences heard by
two learners of the same language is quite small. If they learned their
language by copying, language learners would end up speaking not just languages
quite different from one another, but also languages quite different from those
humans speak.
In fact, language learners
sift, sort, and analyse linguistic inputs, and use them as evidence for grammar
construction. From quite different inputs sets, they converge on similar
grammars - they "reproduce" more or less the grammar of their
community - thanks to a biologically evolved disposition to treat linguistic
inputs to precisely this effect. A similar point can be made at the level of
the lexicon. The contextual evidence on the basis of which a meaning can be
attributed to a new word tends to be different in every case, and, moreover,
quite often, a word is used with a contextual meaning different from its
"literal meaning". Still, language learners converge on the same
meanings for the same words, not by copying - and what exactly is there to copy
on the semantic side? - but by deriving converging conclusions from quite
different and sometimes divergent pieces of evidence. It may be assumed that
the conclusions language learners derive about word meanings are guided by the
language faculty, which constrains the kind of words that can occur in the
lexicon (count nouns, mass nouns, transitive verbs, intransitive verbs,
prepositions, etc.), and also, possibly, by cognitive constraints on the
structure of concepts. To sum up this point, the stabilisation of linguistic
devices is explained not by some kind of imitation of linguistic behavioural
inputs, but by the constructive processing of these inputs by a biologically
evolved language faculty. Such an account, though not exactly Millikan's own,
fits much better within Millikan's conceptual framework than within the
standard meme framework.
Millikan's motivation, in
developing her theory of proper functions and in applying it to language was,
primarily, to give an original account of meaning and intentionality, and to
defend a certain view of linguistic communication that we do not share. Here is
a stark statement of this view: "Speech is a form of direct perception of
whatever speech is about. Interpreting speech does not require making
any inference or having any beliefs [...] about speaker's intentions"
(Millikan 1984: 62). According to Millikan, it is a sufficient condition for
linguistic communication that the linguistic devices used succeed in performing
their stabilising proper functions. For example, in the case of indicative
sentences "speakers proliferate tokens of the indicative mood mainly
insofar as these tokens produce, at any rate, beliefs in hearers [...] For
this to be true it is not necessary that speakers should explicitly
"intend" that their hearers believe what they say in a sense of
"intend" that would require thinking of these beliefs or even having
concepts of beliefs. [...] A proper function of speakers' acts in speaking
could be to produce true beliefs in hearers even if the speakers had no concept
of mental states and no understanding of the hidden mechanism whereby rewards
result from speaking the truth" (1984 : 58). Similarly, Millikan
argues, the direct proper function of imperatives is to produce compliance. Thus,
an imperative utterance such as "Eat!" performs its proper function
when it causes the hearer to intend to eat and to act accordingly.
Until very recently, all
explanations of the very possibility of communication were based on one version
or another of the idea that a communicator encodes a content into a signal, and
that the audience decodes the signal back into more or less the original
content. After Grice, a second, wholly different mechanism was identified that
also made communication possible: a communicator could communicate a content by
giving evidence of her intention to do so, and the audience could infer this
intention on the basis of this evidence. Of course, the two mechanisms, the
coding-decoding, and the evidence-inference one, can combine in various ways. Today,
most students of linguistic communication take for granted that normal
comprehension involves a combination of decoding and of Gricean inference
processes. By rejecting the Gricean approach (or confining to an occasional and
marginal role), Millikan must, willy-nilly, fall back on some version of the
coding-decoding explanation of verbal communication. There just is not to this
day, in Millikan's work or anywhere else, a third type of explanation of the
very possibility of communication.
In many respects,
Millikan's view of verbal communication is a highly original one. Still, it is,
we claim, a version, however atypical, of the code model of human communication
(this is not, of course, Millikan's terminology). A code can be viewed as a
systematic pairing of stimuli and cognitive responses shared by communicators,
such that the production by a communicator of a stimulus belonging to the code
has, both for communicator and audience, the function of producing the
associated response in the audience. We do not dispute that human languages are
codes in this sense. We do not dispute that the use of a shared code provides a
sufficient explanation for many forms of communication. Indeed, it does explain
how non-human animal communication works. But is what makes human communication
possible the sharing of a common linguistic code? According to the code model,
it is. According to the alternative, inferential model we will elaborate below,
the sharing of a common linguistic code is what makes human communication so
complex and powerful. What makes human communication possible at all, however,
is human virtuosity in attributing intentions to one another.
In its standard form, the
code model assumes that a human language is a pairing of sound and meanings,
and that the meanings encoded by the sounds are, at a sentence level,
propositional contents and attitudes, and at a sub-sentential level,
constituents of these propositional contents and attitudes. Mililkan's takes a
different and original view of the cognitive responses paired with linguistic
stimuli. In a nutshell, the responses she envisages are closer to perception on
one side, to action on the other side, than the more abstract responses
envisaged by standard accounts. Still, her model is a true code model of
communication in that it explains communication by the systematic pairing of
linguistic stimuli and responses. The representational resources of bees and
their code are extremely different from the representational resources and
language of humans, but some of the basic aspects of communication are, in a
Millikanian perspective, the same. In both case, communication typically is a
form of belief and desire transfer: cognition by proxy - or to use Millikan's
phrase "natural teleperception" - made possible by a reliable pairing
of stimuli and responses.
Most current discussions of
the evolution of language give little or no place to pragmatics, and explicitly
or tacitly accept the code model of linguistic communication. Human languages
are seen as, precisely, a rich kind of code that allows for the encoding and
decoding of any communicable thought.
A perfect code is one
without ambiguity: each stimulus-type is paired to only one response-type. Simple
perfect code are common in animal communication. However, the code model does
not require such perfection. Ambiguities do not necessarily compromise the
model, provided that there is some method for automatically resolving them. Thus
tokens of the same bee dance give, at different times of day, different
indications regarding the location of food, but bees readily integrate relevant
information about the position the sun is in their decoding of the dance, and
understand the dance unambiguously. Human languages are obviously not perfect
codes. Typical sentences contain multiple ambiguities. Thus, the one-word sentence
"Eat!" might be interpreted as an order, a request, an encouragement,
or an advice. It could be metaphorical, or ironic, etc.
As Millikan acknowledges,
"understanding a language is never just decoding" (Millikan,
1998a:176). There must be further processes that use the output of decoding and
information about the situation to fix the contextual meaning of the utterance.
For Millikan, except in marginal and untypical cases, these further processes
consist in strict disambiguation, that is, in the selection of one of the
possible decodings of the utterance. All the possible contextual meanings of a
linguistic device (in normal language use) must be conventionally associated
(in the sense of Millikan 1998a) with this device. This actually implies truly
massive ambiguity of nearly all linguistic expressions. As Millikan puts it:
"A
language consists in a tangled jungle of overlapping, criss-crossing
traditional patterns, reproducing themselves whole or in part for a variety of
reasons, and not uncommonly getting in each other's way. Places where these
patterns cross can produce ambiguities. These are sorted out not by
conventions, but by the hearer managing to identify, by one means or another,
the source of the pattern, that is, from which family it was reproduced"
(1998a:176).
Although she does not dwell
on the issue, Millikan's view implies, we insist, massive ambiguity. The idea
closest to that of massive ambiguity is probably that of massive polysemy
currently explored, for instance, in the work of Pustejovsky (1996). However,
the idea of polysemy is that of many senses being generated in context and
according to grammar-like rules, rather than that of many conventional senses
each belonging to a distinct reproductively established family. (Polysemy would
deserve an elaborate discussion from an evolutionary point of view, but we
cannot pursue it here.) The task of the hearer of, say, the utterance
"Eat!" is, on the polysemy account, to generate a contextually
appropriate meaning for the lexical item "eat", whereas, according to
Millikan, the hearer's task is to recognise to which one of the many
family that proliferate phonetically indistinguishable but semantically
different tokens of "eat" this particular token belongs (and the same
problem has to be resolved with the imperative mood: to which of the many
syntactically indistinguishable but semantically different tokens of the
imperative does a particular token belong).
Massive ambiguity vs.
Grice's "Modified Occam's Razor"
Massive ambiguity and
associated disambiguation processes (or, for that matter, massive polysemy and
associated sense-generation processes) are not the only way to try and
accommodate the fact that the same linguistic expression can convey many
different meanings. In fact, Millikan's approach was developed as an
alternative to Paul Grice's. Grice's influential approach is guided by a
methodological principle he called Modified Occam's Razor: "Don't multiply
senses beyond necessity." From a Gricean point of view, linguistic
meanings provide indications, and not necessarily full encodings, of speakers'
meanings, and the same words used with the same linguistic meaning can
quite ordinarily serve to convey different speaker's meanings. Comprehension is
not a process of just decoding and disambiguating, but also of inference that
goes beyond disambiguation.
In all modern pragmatic
approaches inspired by Grice - and in particular in Relevance Theory (Sperber
& Wilson [1986] 1995), the approach we favour and will adopt in the rest of
this chapter -, three ideas go together: the goal of semantic parsimony
expressed in Modified Occam's Razor, the distinction between sentence meaning
and speaker's meaning, and the claim that to understand an utterance is to
discover the speaker's meaning (using sentence meaning merely as a means
towards that end). Millikan, rejecting the view that understanding an utterance
is understanding what the speaker meant in uttering it, has in effect, to give
up of the goal of semantic parsimony.
It might seem that, in
accounting for the richness of communicated meanings, there is a balanced
choice between two possible approaches. According to a first approach, which
was, for Grice, at the time when wrote on the issue, exemplified by Ordinary
Language philosophers, meanings communicated are, with marginal exceptions,
meanings linguistically encoded. For instance, if the English word
"and" can be understood sometimes as the corresponding logical
connective, sometimes as and then, and sometimes as and therefore,
there must be at least these three meanings in the mental lexical entry that
English speakers have for "and". Reacting against Ordinary Language
Philosophy, Grice pioneered another approach aimed at explaining richness of
communicated meaning not at the linguistic-semantic level in terms of
disambiguation, but at the pragmatic level in terms of inference. Thus, Grice
argued, "and" semantically has just the logical-connective meaning,
and all other interpretations are pragmatic speaker's meanings derived
inferentially in context.
In fact, it is questionable
whether the disambiguation and inferential derivation approaches really provide
two alternative accounts of the richness of communicated meanings, more or less
on par with each other. Grice's ideas have given rise to a whole field of
research, pragmatics, pursued more and more within the framework of cognitive
psychology. On the other hand, the disambiguation approach to the richness of
communicated meanings consists in little more than theoretical hand-waving. To
quote again Millikan, hearers resolve ambiguities "by one means or
another." True, but then, the more massive the ambiguity implied by the
theory, the less plausible that human minds can deal with it. Any theory that
implies massive ambiguity faces a problem of psychological plausibility, and is
betting on the outcome of future scientific development. Present studies of
disambiguation in psycholinguistics (which tend to show that all the senses of
a lexical item are unconsciously activated), and in pragmatics (which point the
Gricean way) do not support the view that the richness of communicated meanings
is based on massive ambiguity. This argument is, incidentally, similar to the
sensible argument levelled by Millikan against Grice: that his account the
recovery of speaker's meaning involves psychologically implausible complex
reasoning.
Of course, it is often a
wholly open empirical question whether a given interpretation of a given
lexical item or of some other linguistic device is linguistically encoded or
contextually inferred. On the other hand, there is a clear and ready answer to
the empirical question whether the meanings that, in general, a word or a
linguistic device may serve to convey form a small finite set. The answer, we
would argue (and will shortly illustrate) is a resounding no. If indefinitely
many new meanings can be communicated by means of the same linguistic device
used in a normal way, then the very notion of disambiguation (or, in Millikan's
terms, of identifying from which family a linguistic token was reproduced) is
of limited use in explaining the contextual aspects of comprehension. Meanings
are not just disambiguated, they are in part disambiguated, in part constructed
in context.
Let us illustrate. Julia
puts a piece of cheesecake in front of Henry and says: "Eat!" In so
doing, she intends him to find it desirable to eat the cheesecake there and
then. Linked to the use of the imperative mood, Julia's utterance may have the
character of a permission if it is manifest to the interlocutors that Henry
would want to eat the cheesecake but might fear that it would be impolite to do
so without having been invited; it may be an encouragement if it is manifest to
the interlocutors that Henry's desire to eat the cheesecake is weak; or it may
be an order, an enticement, or some less easily definable form of request,
wish, advice etc. Millikan would assume that every distinct force that the
imperative serves standardly to convey must be one of the conventional meanings
of the imperative, and that the hearer somehow (and without attending to the
speaker's beliefs and intentions) infers which of these meanings is being
reproduced in the situation. Relevance theory assumes on the other hand that
the imperative encodes merely desirability (whether to the speaker or to the
hearer), and that its use in a given utterance and context allows the hearer to
infer what specific form of desirability is meant by speaker.
Say Julia intends that
Henry should recognise that she is encouraging him to eat the piece of cheesecake.
She intends that his recognition of her intention to encourage him should
indeed encourage him. If, as result of Julia's utterance, Henry understands
that she is encouraging him to eat the cheesecake, then comprehension has been
successful. This is so whether or not Henry complies: Julia's communicative
intention is fulfilled by Henry's comprehension, that is, by his recognition of
her meaning. Of course the goal that she was pursuing through
communication, her "perlocutionary" intention, to use
"Eat!" can also
serve to convey an ironical or a metaphorical speaker's meaning. Imagine for
instance that, to highlight the thickness of a stout beer Henry has ordered,
Julia tells him "Eat!" instead of "Drink!" An ambiguity-based
analysis might consist in having "eat" be ambiguous between (among
many other senses) ingesting solid food and ingesting thick drinks, and having
the hearer somehow disambiguate. But this would be a case of multiplying senses
beyond necessity. A Gricean approach would consist in assuming that only the
standard linguistic sense of "eat" is involved here. According to
Grice's own analysis of metaphor, Henry, encountering a linguistic meaning
incompatible with what he can presume of Julia's communicative intention,
searches for a meaning related to, but different from the literal one, a
meaning she could have intended and expected to convey by means of her
utterance (namely, drink a drink so thick that it resembles regular food). Henry
then infers that this must indeed have been Julia's meaning. According to
relevance theory, the same example would be explained by assuming that Henry
accesses, in his mental lexicon, the standard entry for "eat", and
uses the information thus activated as a starting point for constructing a
contextually relevant meaning that he then attributes to Julia. Millikan can
treat such metaphors - which are neither dead, nor out of the ordinary, neither
clearly conventional nor particularly creative - either as ambiguities, or else
as Gricean exceptions to the normal flow of verbal communication. If such
metaphors are cases of ambiguity, then every word has a great many stably
attached metaphorical senses. If these are Gricean cases, then communication is
much more Gricean than Millikan would have it.
In any case, a Millikanian
speaker-hearer has in his or her memory many more senses for each lexical item
(or for other linguistic devices such as the imperative mood) than does a
Gricean or a relevance-guided speaker-hearer. Is this extra weight in memorised
lexical information compensated by a lighter inferential task in comprehending
utterances? Gricean inferential patterns involve using higher-order
metarepresentations of the speaker's beliefs and intentions as premises and are
notoriously cumbersome. Relevance theory departs from Grice precisely in
assuming and describing a much lighter inference pattern where only the
conclusion, but not the premises, need be about the speaker's intention. Since
Millikan gives no indication of the inferential pattern involved in the kind of
massive disambiguation she is hypothesising, there is no reason to assume that
it would be lighter than relevance-based, or even than standard Gricean
inference. In fact, the only plausible accounts of context sensitive
disambiguation are to be found in Grice-inspired pragmatics and involve
standard forms of pragmatic inference.
Moreover, even massive
disambiguation may not be sufficient for the task at hand. If Henry had simply
decoded Julia's utterance and disambiguated it (by whatever means) as, say, a
literal request to eat, he would still not know what and how much was to be
eaten, nor when. He might just eat a crumb, and thereby fulfil Julia's request
literally interpreted. Even if Henry, somehow, disambiguated "Eat!"
in this case as containing a reference to a direct object, and if, somehow, he
inferred that the referent was the piece of cheesecake, this would not suffice.
Should Henry take home the cheesecake, put it in his freezer, and eat it a
month later, he would have acted in such a way as to render true the decoded,
disambiguated, and referentially specified meaning of Julia's utterance, but,
of course, he would have neither understood her nor complied with her
intention. In all these respects, it is hard to see how Henry could understand
Julia's utterance without paying attention to what Julia means by the
utterance. Millikan asserts that comprehension is just a belief or desire
transfer, but she does not begin to address decisive empirical issues in the
study of comprehension that have been highlighted in modern pragmatics.
Let us qualify the last
statement. In fact, Millikan does provide a highly Gricean pragmatic account of
the word "this" (used as a whole noun phrase and without gestural
demonstration as in: "this is how to live!"). She writes:
"..."this"
often holds a place for improvisation. [...] the speaker has the hearer's
capacities, viewpoint, and dispositions in mind as he utters "this"
and utters it purposing that the hearer supply a certain referent for it, that
is, that he translate it into an inner term having a certain referent. This
referent is to be something proximate, or a sign or reminder of which is
proximate, but beyond that the hearer is often pretty much on his own. He picks
up his cues from the rest of the sentence and from his knowledge of what he and
the speaker both know of that it would be reasonable for the speaker to expect
him to think of first. When all goes well, speaker and hearer thus achieve a
co-ordination, but not a co-ordination that results from the speaker's and the
hearer's speech-producing and understanding abilities having been standardized
to fit one another" (1984: 167).
Clearly, Millikan equates
standardisation and full-fledged determinate meaning, and all the rest is mere
"improvisation". We would argue, on the one hand, that there is some
modicum of standardisation involved in the use of "this", that makes
it a word of English rather than of Italian, and a word different from
"that". "This" does not encode, but is indicative of, the
speaker's meaning in a standardised way. The indication is weak, it leaves a
lot to be inferred, but it does indicate to an English hearer that what is to
be inferred is an easily accessible referent. We would argue, on the other
hand, that even when the words used do have a full-fledged meaning, their use
still leaves room for what Millikan calls "improvisation" and which
is just the inferential part of communication. So, for instance, the word
"square" has a definite meaning, but when a speaker says "this
field is square," she does not commit herself to the field actually having
exactly four right angles and four equal sides. What she does is give an
effective indication from which the hearer can infer her meaning, which, depending
on the context, may involve a greater or lesser degree of approximation to
squareness.
Comprehension as
recognition of speaker's meaning
Comprehension, as
understood in modern pragmatics, crucially involves the recognition by the
hearer of a specific intention of the speaker, the "speaker's
meaning." The fact that the hearer is seeking to reconstruct the speaker's
meaning is what focuses, constrains and indeed makes possible inferential
comprehension (and, to begin with, inferential disambiguation, the necessity of
which Millikan well recognises). We won't here give more positive arguments for
the view that comprehension is recognition of speaker's meaning. The whole of
modern pragmatics is predicated on this assumption, and its findings are
arguments in favour of it. Of course, this does not make the assumption right,
but those who deny it, are, in effect, implying that pragmatics as currently
pursued is a discipline without an object, somewhat like the study of humours
in ancient medicine. Surely, the burden is on them to show how pragmatics
fails, and what is a better alternative to explain comprehension.
We will however address the
view expressed by Millikan, that there is some serious implausibility in the
very idea that comprehension is about speaker's meaning. Millikan does not deny
the existence of speaker's meanings, but she sees their communication through
linguistic means not as the normal form of linguistic communication, but as a
departure from this normal form. "The truth in Grice's model," she
says, "is that we have the ability to interrupt and prevent the automatic
running on of our talking and our doing-and-believing-what-we-are-told
equipment." We do this when we have discovered "evidence that the
conditions for normally effective talking and for correct
believing-on-the-basis-of-what-we-hear are not met" (Millikan 1984:69). In
ordinary communication, she claims, going the Gricean way would be incredibly
inefficient. However, for all we know, disambiguation that would not involve
attending to the intentions of the speaker - if possible at all, which we doubt
- might be even more dramatically inefficient.
Still, we do share
Millikan's worry that comprehension as described by most Griceans is indeed
implausibly cumbersome. There are two aspects to this. On the one hand the
process of comprehension as described by Grice involves, in many cases, fairly
sophisticated reasoning about the speaker's mental states. As we already
mentioned and will discuss again below, this is not the case in relevance
theory, where the speaker's meaning is normally inferred without using as
premises assumptions about the speaker's mental states.
On the other hand the very
notion of speaker's meaning can be seen as implausibly complex. In Grice's
original account (1957) a speaker's meaning involved a moderately complex
two-level intention: roughly the intention to achieve a certain effect on the
audience by means of the audience's recognition of this intention. In order to
accommodate some objections, from, in particular, Strawson (1964) and Schiffer
(1972), Grice with some reservations, and others more resolutely embraced the
idea that communicative intentions involve many, or even infinitely many
levels, or are infinitely nested. Millikan objected at length, and rightly,
against the psychological implausibility or irrelevance of communicative
intentions so understood. However, a Gricean-inspired approach to communication
need not be committed to these complexities. Relevance theory's account of a
communicative intention takes the objections into account but, just like
Grice's original account, involves only two levels. According to this
particular approach, a speaker has two intentions. She has the informative
intention to make it manifest to the hearer that a certain state of affairs is
actual or is desirable, and she has the communicative intention to achieve this
informative intention by making it mutually manifest to the hearer and herself
that she has this informative intention (For a detailed defence of this account
and arguments that it is sufficient and genuinely involves only two levels, see
Sperber & Wilson 1995, 1996).
It might still be felt that
there is some implausibility in attributing to speaker-hearers, and in
particular children, the ability to represent, as a matter of course,
second-order metarepresentational intentions. However, to represent a
second-order metarepresentational intention does not mean representing each and
every time its internal structure. We standardly attribute to speakers of
English the knowledge that John killed Bill entails John caused Bill
to die without assuming that they mentally represent the latter each and
every time they understand the former. Still, this attribution of knowledge is
psychologically relevant: we assume that an English speaker who believed that
Bill was alive, or that John had not caused anyone to die, would not be
inclined to believe that John had killed Bill. Similarly, Henry can merely
represent that Julia means that he should eat the piece of cheesecake now,
without expanding the meaning of "means", except when needed.
Imagine the following
scenario: Julia puts a piece of cheesecake in front of Henry and another one in
front of Paul. Henry exclaims "this looks delicious!" and Paul sneers
"cheesecake again!". Henry looks at Paul and hears Julia say
"Eat!" Henry knows that Julia intends both of them to eat, but he -
rightly as it happens - takes her meaning to be that Paul should. Without any
difficulty, Henry thus dissociates Julia's informative intention to cause both
of them to find eating the cheesecake desirable (already manifested by her
putting the pieces of cake in front of them) from her communicative intention
to make it manifest to Paul that she intends him to find eating the cheesecake
desirable (manifested by her saying "Eat!"). Let us stress the
relevant particulars of this case. Henry is not looking at Julia and therefore
has no behavioural cues to the fact that Julia is addressing Paul. The
utterance would be perfectly interpretable if understood as addressed to Henry,
or to both Henry and Paul. Yet it is quite natural for Henry to infer that the
utterance is addressed to Paul only, and that the unexpressed subject of
"Eat!" is Paul. His inference is guided, we would argue, by
considerations of relevance. Given the circumstances, Julia's utterance best
achieves the expected level of relevance if understood as addressed to Paul. We
take this example to illustrate the fact that hearers are capable, as a normal
part of the process of comprehension, of inferentially discriminating different
levels of intentions in the speaker. We have no evidence regarding the age at
which a child would be likely to perform such inferences and to interpret Julia
the way Henry does, but there is nothing implausible in assuming that this
would occur quite early in the development of verbal abilities (more about this
below).
Fitting (post-)Gricean
pragmatics into Millikan's conceptual framework
Assume that verbal
comprehension is recognition of speaker's meaning. Assume that 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 put forward by Millikan? What would then be the direct and derived
proper functions of linguistic devices? Before giving a general answer, let us
take three examples, that of "now", of "eat", and of the
imperative.
It is a misleading
oversimplification to say that the indexical "now" refers to the
time of utterance. Even ignoring various complications, and in particular the
use of "now" in free indirect speech, the time indicated by
"now" can be any time span, long or short. For instance,
"now" in "I feel great now" could refer to the very minute
of utterance, to a period of few days, or to a period of many years. "Now"
does not encode any one of these time spans, nor is it ambiguous among them. Rather,
it is indeterminate. The speaker's meaning, however, though it may be vague, is
generally determinate. Therefore, in order to understand the speaker's meaning,
the hearer must discover which time span is intended. So, we suggest, the
direct proper function of "now" is to give evidence of the fact that
the speaker's meaning includes a reference to a certain time span within which
the utterance occurs. This direct function is performed through each token of
"now" performing the derived proper function of indicating a specific
time span.
Unlike the adverb
"now", the import of which must be contextually specified for
it to contribute to the meaning of any utterance in which it occurs, the verb
"eat" has a full-fledged meaning. On occasions, it is used to convey
just this meaning. For instance, in "Henry ate a piece of
cheesecake," the meaning of "ate" seems to be just that of
"eat" (plus some specification of the past tense). However, quite
often, "eat" is used to indicate a meaning that may be more specific,
less specific, or more specific in certain respects and less specific in other
respects than the lexical meaning of "eat". For instance, a person
declining an invitation to join a dinner party by saying "I have
eaten" is indicating not just that she has eaten, but also that she has
eaten a quantity such that she has no desire to eat any more (having eaten just
a peanut would make her utterance literally true, but would nevertheless make
her a liar). In this case, the meaning conveyed by means of "eat" is
more specific than the lexically encoded meaning of "eat" (this
example is discussed in greater detail in Wilson & Sperber forthcoming). In
the example of Julia saying metaphorically "Eat!" to Henry who has
ordered a thick stout, the lexicalised meaning of "eat" has to be made
less specific (by ignoring the restriction to "food" in the sense
where "food" is opposed to "drink") in order to understand
Julia's meaning. Imagine now that Henry were asked if he would like to join a
dinner party and answered: "I have had three stouts. As far as I am
concerned, I have eaten." In this case, Henry's meaning conveyed by means
of the word "eat" would be less specific than the lexical meaning of
"eat" in being extended to the ingestion of thick drinks. At the same
time, it would more specific than the lexical meaning of "eat" in
that it would indicate that he has ingested a quantity such that he had no
desire to eat anymore. Thus the direct proper function of "eat" is to
give evidence of the fact that the speaker's meaning includes a concept best
evoked by "eat", a concept which may, but need not be, the very
concept lexically encoded by "eat". This direct function is performed
through each token of "eat" performing the derived proper function of
evoking, in the context, a specific concept which is part of the speaker's
meaning on that occasion.
The imperative mood, we
argued, does not encode any particular illocutionary force such as request or
advice, nor is it ambiguous among all the particular forces it may serve to
convey. (That is, speakers and hearers don't have a mental list of possible
forces among which they must choose each time the imperative mood is tokened.) The
imperative mood merely indicates desirability. Indicating that the action or
the state of affairs described in the imperative mood is desirable typically
falls short of yielding, by itself, a relevant enough interpretation. On the
other hand, given expectations of relevance and contextual information,
desirability may be understood as desirability for the speaker (as in the case
of a request), or for the hearer (as in the case of an advice), or for both (as
in the case of a wish). When desirability is understood as being for the
speaker, the use of the imperative may further be understood as indicating
expectations of compliance (as in the case of an order), or preference for
compliance (as in the case of an entreaty), and so on. So, we suggest, the
direct proper function of the imperative mood is to give evidence of the fact
that the speaker is presenting the action or the state of affairs described as
desirable in some way. This direct function is performed through each token of
the imperative mood giving evidence that, together with contextual information,
indicates which specific form of desirability is intended by the speaker.
The description of these
three examples, "now", "eat", and the imperative mood, can
be generalised to all meaning-carrying linguistic devices (see Carston 1998,
Sperber & Wilson 1998, Wilson & Sperber forthcoming, for a thorough
discussion from a pragmatic point of view). A linguistic device does not have
as its direct 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 derived proper
function of indicating a contextually relevant meaning.
We follow Millikan in
considering that the direct proper function of a linguistic device is what
keeps speakers and hearers using and responding to the linguistic device in a
reliable way, thus stabilising the device in a community. Our disagreement with
Millikan has to do with the level of processing at which linguistic devices
elicit the reliable response to be identified as their direct proper function. For
Millikan, this reliable response is to be found at the level of belief or
desire formation, or even at the behavioural level in the case of compliance. In
particular, the function of a word is to contribute its "conventional
meaning" to the overall meaning of an utterance which will then be
accepted as a belief or a desire (depending on the mood) by the hearer. The
function of the imperative is to cause desire and compliance, and so on. The
problem, we argued, is that the same linguistic stimulus may elicit a great
many different responses at the belief or desire level. In other words, at that
level, responses are not reliably paired to stimuli. To invoke massive
ambiguity and say that indistinguishable phonological or syntactic forms are,
in fact, tokens of many different linguistic devices, is a way to shift the
problem, not to resolve it. It amounts to saying that the reliability of
linguistic stimuli is contingent on the ability of the hearer to identify the
type to which the token belongs. As long as there is no account of how this can
be reliably achieved, the very existence of reliable responses to linguistic
devices at the level of belief or desire formation is in doubt, and so is the
claim that the direct proper function of these devices is to be found at this
level.
What is the alternative?
Linguistic devices produce highly reliable responses, not at the level of the
cognitive outputs of comprehension such as belief or desire formation, and even
less at the level of behavioural outputs such as compliance, but at an
intermediate level in the process of comprehension. Linguistic comprehension
involves, at an intermediate and largely unconscious level, the decoding of
linguistic stimuli that are then used as evidence by the hearer, together with
the context, to arrive inferentially at the speaker's meaning. The same
unambiguous linguistic item, decoded in the same way each and every time, can
serve as evidence for quite different meanings in different contexts. (We do
not, of course, deny the existence of true linguistic ambiguity, but there is
much less of it than the code model of linguistic communication ends up
implying, and moreover, the same inferential processes that explain other
aspects of inferential comprehension explain disambiguation.) Linguistic
devices have proliferated and stabilised because they cause these highly
reliable cognitive responses at this intermediate level. Linguistic
devices provide speakers and hearers with informationally rich, highly
structured, and reliably decoded evidence of speaker's meaning. Note that this
proper function of linguistic devices is not one speakers and hearers are aware
of, let alone something they choose.
There could, in principle,
be an intelligent species that communicated the way Millikan believes humans
do: with speakers using utterances directly to cause belief or desire transfer,
and hearers merely decoding and disambiguating these utterances and
automatically turning the resulting interpretation into a desire or belief of
their own. The language of such a species should present many fewer ambiguities
than actual human languages, and only ambiguities that can be easily resolved
either on the basis of the linguistic context (the "co-text"), or by
applying simple rules to pick out the pertinent piece of information from the
environment (as, for instance, in replacing the first person pronoun with a
reference to the actual speaker).
The reaction of a hearer to
a speaker in such a species, using a language à la Millikan, would look very
much like that of a person hypnotised to the hypnotist, where belief and desire
transfers do actually occur. This raises, of course, the problem of explaining
how hearers could escape being systematically deceived and manipulated by
speakers. Communication is a form of co-operation. Co-operation is vulnerable
to free-riding, which, in the case of communication, takes the form of manipulation
and deception. In the study of any communicating species, explaining how come
the benefits of communication are not offset by the cost of deception is a
major problem (Dawkins & Krebs 1978, Krebs & Dawkins 1984, Hauser
1996).
In the case of human
communication, explaining how the costs of possible deception are contained
crucially involves the fact that comprehension and acceptance are two distinct
steps in the overall process. It may be (at least in some socio-cultural
contexts) that people believe most of the things they are told, but this is not
because they are hypnotised or gullible. It is rather that they mostly interact
with relatives and friends with whom they cooperate and from whom sincerity can
be expected in ordinary conditions. People are typically distrustful of
information provided by strangers, or by competitors, or even by relatives and
friends in situations of conflict. Communicated information is sifted, rather
than automatically accepted as Millikan argues. Another part of the explanation
of the viability human communication is the fact that comprehension is, pace
Millikan, a form of mindreading and links easily with attending to the
speaker's benevolence and competence (for a more thorough discussion of the
metarepresentational mechanisms involved in sifting communicated information,
see Sperber forthcoming).
So, yes, assuming that the
problems raised by ambiguity and deception were somehow avoided or solved,
there could be a species that communicated in the way Millikan believes humans
do. On the other hand, there is nothing in Millikan's teleofunctional framework
that implies that communication can only evolve in the way she claims it did. There
could be a species that communicated in the way Grice or relevance theory says
humans do, and, in fact, we believe that humans are such a species. At this
point we have reached one of our goals: to pry apart Millikan's overall
framework from her view of language, and fit this framework together with a
view she opposes and according to which linguistic comprehension is a form of
mindreading. In the next two sections we explore some of the evolutionary
implications of this view of language.
Linguistic communication
and mindreading
In the past twenty years,
the study of the capacity to attribute mental states such as beliefs or
intentions to others has become a major focus of cognitive science under names
such as Theory of Mind or Mindreading (e.g. Carruthers & Smith 1996). There
is a growing body of evidence and arguments tending to establish that a
mindreading ability is an essential ingredient of human cognition, and
moreover, is a domain-specific evolved adaptation (rather than an application
of some general intelligence, or cultural competence). What are the
relationships between mindreading and the language faculty? Millikan argues
that linguistic communication is independent of mindreading, whereas Grice and
post-Griceans assume that linguistic communication involves a form of
mindreading where, by speaking, the speaker helps the hearer read her mind. These
two views of comprehension as a cognitive process fit differently with
developmental and evolutionary considerations.
At the developmental level,
Millikan assumes that linguistic abilities develop before mindreading, and sees
this as further evidence against a Gricean view of linguistic communication. At
first blush, the evidence might seem to be in her favour. Whereas language
comprehension starts developing in the second year of life, it is only around
the age of four that children pass the much-studied "false-belief
task" (in which they are asked to predict where a character will look for
an object that she falsely believes to be in one location when, in fact, it has
been moved to another). Success at the false-belief task is often treated as
the criterion establishing mindreading abilities. Indeed, success at the task
is a clear demonstration of mindreading abilities. Failure, however, is by no
means a demonstration of total lack of such abilities. Mindreading is not an
all-or-none affair. It develops in stages from infancy (Baron-Cohen 1995,
Gergely & al. 1995). People with autism, a condition now understood as
involving a deficit in mindreading abilities, lack the ability to a greater or
lesser degree (Frith 1989, Happé 1994).
The attribution of a
meaning to a speaker, and the prediction that a person with a false belief will
act on this belief, though both involving mindreading, are two very different
performances. The formal resources involved in the two cases are not the same. In
the case of speaker's meaning, what is needed is the ability to represent an
intention of someone else about a representation of one's own - a second-order
metarepresentation of a quite specific form. (From a modularist point of view,
it is quite conceivable that children might develop the ability to represent
speaker's meaning before being able to deploy other types of second-order
metarepresentations.) In the case of false beliefs, a first-order
metarepresentation of a belief of someone else is sufficient, but what is
needed is the ability to evaluate the truth-value of the metarepresented belief
and to predict behaviour on the basis of false belief. We are not aware of any
argument to the effect that the ability needed to pass the false-belief task is
a precondition for the ability needed to attribute speaker's meaning. There is
nothing inconsistent or paradoxical therefore in the idea of an individual
capable of attributing speaker's meaning and incapable of attributing false
beliefs (and conversely).
There are, on the other
hand, functional reasons to expect the ability to attribute false beliefs to
develop after the ability to communicate verbally. The attribution of false
beliefs to others plays an obvious role in the ability to filter false
information communicated either by mistaken or by deceitful speakers. It plays
an obvious role also in the ability to deceive others by communicating false
information. These abilities are asymmetrically dependent on the ability to
communicate. Suppose, moreover that, as we have argued, comprehension consists
in the attribution of a meaning to the speaker. Then there are reasons to
expect attribution of false beliefs to develop after attribution of speaker's
meaning.
The fact that success at
the false-belief task occurs three years or so after the beginnings of verbal
comprehension is no evidence against the view that comprehension is a form of
mindreading. Are there, though, positive arguments or evidence to the effect
that, say, two-year-olds (who fail the false-belief task) do attribute meaning
to speakers? We would be tempted to say that we all know that they do. As
speakers, we take for granted that when we say something we mean something, and
that people - including very young children - who understand what we say understand
what we mean (understand us, in an ordinary sense of the expression). But
of course, this may be a piece of mistaken naïve psychology. A scientifically
more compelling argument is this: young children do disambiguate, identify
referents, and understand implicatures. As we argued before, the only actual
explanations of such achievements (as opposed to hand-waving in the direction
of unspecified explanations) draw on (post-)Gricean pragmatics and presuppose
the capacity on the part of the comprehender to attend to speaker's meaning. Further
positive evidence of an experimental kind is provided by Paul Bloom's work
which shows that the acquisition of lexical meanings - which is involved in
very early language acquisition - requires attention to speaker's intentions
(Bloom 1997).
At an evolutionary level,
the biological evolution of language is, for Millikan, quite independent from
that of mindreading. From a Gricean viewpoint, the evolution of language should
be linked to that of mindreading, since utterances are encodings of speaker's
thoughts, and are typically recognised as such by the audience (Pinker 1994). Linguistic
communication enhances mindreading abilities (and even, some might argue - e.g.
Dennett 1991 -, makes true mindreading possible in the first place), and also
exploits these abilities in complex cases where Gricean inferences must
supplement linguistic decoding. It is reasonable therefore, from a Gricean
point of view, to assume a co-evolution of language and mindreading, without
committing oneself any further.
From a relevance theory
point of view, it is also reasonable to assume a co-evolution of language and
mindreading, but there are reasons to commit oneself to a more precise
articulation of the two. In standard Gricean approaches, inference is seen as
needed in discovering the implicit part of the speaker's meaning, while the
explicit part is seen as decoded (and disambiguation is not much discussed). Accordingly,
there could have been an initial stage in the evolution of language where
utterances were wholly explicit and decoded, with Gricean inferences about
implicit content evolving only at a later stage. In other terms, Gricean
communication could result from a partial change of function of what might have
been, at an earlier stage, a strict code. According to relevance theory, on the
other hand, human verbal communication is never a matter of mere decoding. In
fact, in its basic structure, inferential communication does not even depend on
linguistic stimuli: other behavioural stimuli, e.g. improvised mimes, may
provide adequate evidence of a communicator's intention. Linguistic utterances,
however, provide immensely superior evidence for inferential communication. They
can be as richly and subtly structured as the communicator wishes, and they are
reliably decoded by the audience at an intermediate level in the process of
comprehension. The function of linguistic utterances, then, is - and has always
been - to provide this highly precise and informative evidence of the
communicator's intention. This implies that language as we know it developed as
an adaptation in a species already involved in inferential communication, and
therefore already capable of some serious degree of mindreading. In other
terms, from a relevance theory point of view, the existence of mindreading in
our ancestors was a precondition for the emergence and evolution of language.
The bootstrapping
problem and its solution
Most evolved
domain-specific cognitive abilities have a specific domain of information (a
"proper domain" - see Sperber 1996, Ch. 6) available in the
environment well before the ability develops, and they can be seen as
adaptations to that aspect of the environment. For instance, different
individuals have distinctive faces; an evolved face recognition ability is an
adaptation to the prior presence of these faces in the environment and an
exploitation of their informational value. A mutant endowed with a face
recognition ability could benefit from it, even if he or she were the only
individual so endowed. Some cognitive abilities, however, have a specific
domain of information that is initially empty and that gets filled only by the
behaviour of individuals who already have and use the ability in question. For
instance, an ability to enter into reciprocal exchanges is an adaptation to the
opportunities offered by other individuals who are also endowed with this
ability. A unique mutant endowed with a reciprocal exchange ability could not
benefit from it until other individuals became also so endowed. Thus the
emergence in evolution of abilities that need to be shared by several
individuals in order to be adaptive raises a specific bootstrapping problem.
Innate codes found in
non-human animals are cases in point. What would be the use of an innate code
in a single individual, as long as other members of its species, lacking such a
code, could neither decode its signals, nor send it signals of their own? To
point out that any actual code is likely to result from several mutations and
to have evolved in small steps spreads the problem but does not resolve it. There
are, however, at least three ways to tackle this puzzle. The first is to assume
that an innate code spread in a population as a neutral trait, initially
without benefit but also without significant cost, so as not to be selected
out. The trait then became advantageous and was selected for (Sober
1984), when enough individuals sharing it could use it in their interactions
and benefit from it. Such a development can occur rapidly, say among the offspring
of the initial mutant individual endowed with the trait. Another plausible
speculation is that the trait was initially selected for thanks to some other
beneficial effect, and that its function as a code emerged as a new function
added or substituted to some previous one. A third, more controversial
speculation is that the signals of the code emerged first as
"cultural" items, transmitted through learning and not through genes;
it then became advantageous to possess them innately, sparing the cost of
learning (this strictly Darwinian but Lamarkian-looking possibility is known as
a Baldwin effect).
Human languages, however,
are not innate codes. The human language faculty is not an ability to produce
and interpret signals, it is an ability to acquire culturally transmitted
languages. Thus the bootstrapping problem raised by the emergence of the human
language faculty is not as easily speculated away as that raised by that of the
innate code of most animal communication. Even if a Language Acquisition Device,
starting as a neutral trait, became shared by a number of individuals, this
would not be advantageous to them, since there would still be no language to
acquire. The argument applies not just to the initial emergence of a
rudimentary language faculty, but also to any later biological development of
this faculty. The emergence of an ability to acquire a different, presumably
richer language, is not advantageous in the absence of such a language to be
acquired.
This bootstrapping problem
is at its worst if one accepts the code model of verbal communication. Coded
communication works at its best when the interlocutors share exactly the same
code. Differences in code typically lead to communication failures. Now, a
modification in the language faculty of one individual, if it had any effect at
all on the structure of its internalised language, would introduce a mismatch
between her linguistic code and that of other people, and would have a
detrimental effect on her ability to communicate. An individual endowed with a
language faculty different from that of others, even if it were "more
advanced" in some sense, would stand to suffer rather than to benefit from
it.
If, on the other hand, we
adopt the inferential model of communication, the puzzle becomes much more
tractable. Inferential communication is a matter of reconstructing the
communicator's informative intention on the basis of the evidence she provides
by her utterance. Successful communication does not depend, then, 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 a meanings as points in semantic space. Then according to the code model,
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 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.
Acquiring and using a
non-standard version of the common code need not involve any cost, it may even
be advantageous. In particular, a language faculty that leads to the
internalisation of a grammar that attributes more structure to utterances than
they superficially realise (that project onto them "unexpressed
constituents" for instance) may facilitate inferential comprehension
(Sperber 1990).
Imagine a stage in
linguistic evolution where the languages available consisted in simple
sound-concept pairs, without any higher structure at all. "Drink" in
such a primitive language encoded the concept drink and nothing else,
"water" encoded the concept water and nothing else, and so on.
With such a limited code, the decoding by a hearer of a concept encoded by a
speaker falls quite short of achieving communication between them. An addressee
associating for instance the concept water with the utterance
"water" is not thereby being informed of anything. Even a
concatenation of expressions in such a language such as "drink water"
does not have as its decoded interpretation what we all understand from the
homonymous English expression. It does not denote the action of drinking water.
Rather two concepts, drink and water, are activated without being
linked either syntactically or semantically. The mental activation of one or
several concepts without syntactic linkage does not describe a state of affair,
whether actual or imagined. It does not express a belief or a desire.
If, however, the people
using such a rudimentary code were capable of inferential communication, then
the activation in their mind, through decoding, of a single concept might
easily have provided all the necessary evidence needed to reconstruct a
full-fledged, propositional speaker's meaning (see Stainton 1994 for a related
point). Imagine two individuals of this ancestral species walking in the
desert. One points to the horizon and utters "water". The other
correctly infers that the speaker means here is some water. They reach
the edge of the water, but one of them collapses, exhausted, and mutters
"water". The other correctly infers that the speaker means give me
some water. To the best of our knowledge, there is no evidence that the
signals of animal communication ever permit such an open range of quite diverse
interpretive elaborations.
Imagine now a mutant whose
language faculty is such that she expects elementary expressions of the code
she is to acquire to be either arguments or one- or two-place predicates. She
classifies "drink" as two-place predicate, "water" as an
argument, and so on. When she hears her collapsing companion mutter
"water," what gets activated in her mind as a result of decoding is
not just the mere concept water, but also a place-holder for a predicate
of which water would be an argument. Her decoding, then, goes beyond
what had been encoded by the speaker, who, not being a mutant, had spoken the
more rudimentary language common in the community. This mismatch, however, far
from being detrimental, is beneficial to the mutant: her inferential processes
are immediately geared towards the search for a contextually relevant predicate
of which water would be an argument.
When she talks, our mutant
encodes by means of signals homonymous with those of the community not just
individual concepts, but predicate-argument structures. When she utters
"water," her utterance also encodes an unexpressed place-holder for a
predicate; when she utters "drink," her utterance also encodes two
unexpressed place-holders for two arguments; when she utters "drink
water," her utterance encodes the complex concept of drinking water
and an unexpressed place-holder for another argument of drink, and so
on. These underlying linguistic structures are harmlessly missed by her non-mutant
interlocutors, but are useful to other mutants, pointing more directly to the
intended interpretation. In the language of these mutants, new symbols, for
instance pronouns for unspecified arguments, may then stabilise. This
illustrate how in an inferential communication system, a more powerful language
faculty, which causes individuals to internalise a linguistic code richer than
that of their community, may give them an advantage and may therefore evolve
(whereas in a strict encoding-decoding system, a departure from the common code
may be harmful or harmless, but not advantageous).
This line of reasoning
applies to the very emergence of a language faculty: being disposed to treat an
uncoded piece of communicative behaviour as a "linguistic" sign may
have facilitated the inferential discovery of the communicator's intention, and
led to the stabilisation of this stimulus type as a signal.
Conclusion
Millikan's conceptual
framework allows one effectively to articulate various issues raised by the
biological and cultural evolution of language. At the same time, her own view
of language makes it more difficult to deal with these issues. In particular,
it leaves one with an extra problem of massive ambiguity, and it makes the
bootstrapping problem, if anything, less tractable. Fortunately, Millikan's
conceptual framework can be dissociated from her view of language. It can be
applied to Gricean or relevance-theoretic approaches to language, with, we hope
to have shown, some interesting results.
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