Humans have a strong need to communicate.
I illustrated this in my previous post by comparing mother–infant communication in humans and chimpanzees. Human infants are surrounded by a flurry of signals directed at them — gestures, words, and tones from mothers and other elders — something unseen in other primates, where communication, if any, flows from infant to mother.
As I mentioned, the nature of this behaviour is often misunderstood. Tecumseh Fitch describes it as a ‘drive to share thoughts’, a puzzling difference between us and other species. Puzzling, I think, because if the thoughts are valuable, an animal should not be giving them away — and if they are not, there would be no reason to listen.
Indeed, sharing thoughts, in itself, is useless in nature. When a chimpanzee calls to warn others of a snake, the purpose is not to share the thought of a snake, but to make others react — to move, to flee, to behave in a way that benefits both caller and receivers. Without such a behavioural effect, the call could not have evolved.
Human communication, however, does not stop at the world. We do not only care about reactions to snakes, but also about responses to signals themselves — to words, signs, and symbols. This is why people can be moved to act upon symbolic dangers such as ‘CORONAVIRUS’. Whether or not the ‘snake’ is real, the signal itself has power because the signaller can enforce a response to it.
In this sense, human communication is prescriptive rather than descriptive. It does not arise from the world; it acts upon it.
Picture again the mother and child from my previous post. The mother brings the spoon close, opens her own mouth exaggeratedly — ‘Aaah!’ — perhaps plays the game of the aeroplane landing between the lips. The child turns away, and the mother repeats the gesture, this time more firmly. Her intention is not to share a thought but to make the child respond — to make her signals effective.
The same happens in seemingly descriptive situations, such as when the mother points to an object and says its name to the child. She still wants the child to respond — to follow her gaze, to smile, to look back at her — to acknowledge the signal and complete the exchange.
Seen this way, the human ‘drive to share thoughts’ becomes a lot less puzzling. We produce signals whose main function is not to convey information but to create engagement — to draw receivers into a relation where their responses benefit us somehow. This is the true meaning of communication — from the Latin com-munis, meaning ‘shared duty’.
Nonhuman animals do not engage in this kind of duty. They produce signals because receivers are already disposed to respond in ways that are beneficial to them — as in the case of chimpanzees, where it pays to avoid a snake or feed one’s offspring.
Humans, by contrast, provide further incentives to receivers. The child is not necessarily hungry, but benefits more from a happy mother than from a frustrated one. This makes the child, as a receiver, more attentive to signals, allowing the signaller to expand the repertoire of signals and meanings. This is particularly evident in interspecies ‘communication’, such as when apes are captured and taught ‘language’ by researchers. Their interest in our signals does not reveal a natural urge to share meaning, but a dependence that mirrors that of a child on a parent.
The fact that researchers such as Tecumseh Fitch describe a spontaneous ‘drive to share thoughts’ only shows how morality influences thinking about this matter. As he notes, ‘even prelinguistic human infants, before they can speak, point and comment, while apes trained for years to communicate do not.’ This reflects a mythical, sociocentric perspective — one that ignores the conditions in which the behaviour arises. In this view, nonhuman signalling is already a kind of ‘sharing thoughts’, and language evolved — somehow — because our ancestors became increasingly curious about what their offspring were thinking.
