When someone trains a dog to follow a command, they are actively making the dog respond to signals such as a pointing gesture or a spoken word. As I wrote in my letter, they are establishing a signal–response relationship. This is made easier by dogs’ unusual attentiveness to human signals — a trait far stronger than in other animals.
This question ties in with my previous post, where I discussed the human drive to ‘share thoughts’. The mother in my example is eager to share her experience of eating and seeing the world with her child. But this is only possible because the human infant, like the dog, is naturally interested in the signals of its caregiver, something that a chimpanzee infant is not.
Dogs, after all, are often treated and spoken to like children. However, this ability did not simply ‘evolve’. It appeared because humans took wolves and selectively bred them for desirable traits that wolves do not have — including attentiveness to our signals. In other words, the behaviour of making others respond to signals explains the evolution of this attentiveness, not the other way round.
Theorists rarely think about humans in the same way because they adopt what I call the sociocentric perspective: the belief that human communication evolved within ‘natural’ relationships, rather than through the actions of individuals establishing them. The human–dog relationship is a clear illustration of this error, since it was created by humans; it is not merely a ‘beautiful friendship’ that arose in nature.
The same sociocentric assumption underlies modern theories of meaning. Philosophers such as Paul Grice and, more recently, Thom Scott-Phillips have drawn attention to the discontinuity between human and animal communication, arguing that true communication depends on the expression and recognition of intentions — on the ability to show that one means to mean. In other words, meaning begins when the signaller behaves ostensively.
Scott-Phillips illustrates this with a simple example:
‘Suppose that we are in a bar. It is your turn to buy the drinks, and I would like another. I intend for you to believe this … and I therefore make sure that my empty glass is visible to you.’
He adds that this alone is not enough for meaning to arise — meaning requires, for instance, ‘making eye contact with my friend and simultaneously tilting my wine glass’.
From a psychological perspective, such distinctions are important. We have insider knowledge of them, as it were. Yet this still does not explain anything. It is a ‘just so’ story, that the required attention and cognition evolved. From an objective, biological standpoint, both acts — placing the glass visibly and tilting it ostensively — are variations of the same behaviour: an organism attempting to change another’s behaviour through signals.
And before this, we must explain why the two friends are there together in the first place; why they are already responding to one another’s signals, ostensive or not.
Given what I call prescription — the behaviour of language — the answer, I think, is clear. Ostension is an adaptation to prescription: it evolved to signal that the signaller wants a response. Merely leaving the empty glass visible is not enough; Thom must ensure the signal is seen and recognised. He tilts the glass, makes eye contact, perhaps smiles or raises his eyebrows. Indeed, if his friend ignores the signal, Thom may become upset, withdraw cooperation, or even retaliate; and if he acknowledges it, he may be rewarded. The motivation to recognise communicative intentions thus arises not from mutual friendship or understanding, but from the social regulation of responses: from the fact that signals come with consequences.
We can certainly imagine other signallers competing for the same receiver’s attention — offering incentives or imposing penalties to ‘become friends’. Such dynamics, extending deep into our evolutionary past, would have favoured those who could recognise the intentions of signallers.
Ostensive–inferential communication, then, is not the foundation of language but its refinement — an adaptation built upon the more basic behaviour of making receivers respond. This remains difficult to see so long as we adopt a historicist, sociocentric perspective in which signallers and receivers are imagined as permanently bound together by some invisible cognitive thread.
