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4A common intentional framework for ape and human communicationCurrent Anthropology 56 (1): 71-72. 2015.
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53The evolution of syntactic structure (review)Biology and Philosophy 32 (4): 599-613. 2017.Two new books—Creating Language: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing by Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater, and Why Only Us: Language and Evolution by Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky—present a good opportunity to assess the state of the debate about whether or not language was made possible by language-specific adaptations for syntax. Berwick and Chomsky argue yes: language was made possible by a single change to the computation Merge. Christiansen and Chater argue no: our …Read more
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125Exorcising Grice’s ghost: an empirical approach to studying intentional communication in animalsBiological Reviews 3. 2016.Language’s intentional nature has been highlighted as a crucial feature distinguishing it from other communication systems. Specifically, language is often thought to depend on highly structured intentional action and mutual mindreading by a communicator and recipient. Whilst similar abilities in animals can shed light on the evolution of intentionality, they remain challenging to detect unambiguously. We revisit animal intentional communication and suggest that progress in identifying analogous…Read more
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119Imitation and conventional communicationBiology and Philosophy 28 (3): 481-500. 2013.To the extent that language is conventional, non-verbal individuals, including human infants, must participate in conventions in order to learn to use even simple utterances of words. This raises the question of which varieties of learning could make this possible. In this paper I defend Tomasello’s (The cultural origins of human cognition. Harvard UP, Cambridge, 1999, Origins of human communication. MIT, Cambridge, 2008) claim that knowledge of linguistic conventions could be learned through im…Read more
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2Convergent Minds: Ostension, Inference, and Grice’s Third ClauseInterface Focus 7 (3). 2017.A prevailing view is that while human communication has an ‘ostensive-inferential’ or ‘Gricean’ intentional structure, animal communication does not. This would make the psychological states that support human and animal forms of communication fundamentally different. Against this view, I argue that there are grounds to expect ostensive communication in non-human clades. This is because it is sufficient for ostensive communication that one intentionally address one’s utterance to one’s intended …Read more
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87Three-year-olds understand communicative intentions without language, gestures, or gazeInteraction Studies 14 (1): 62-80. 2013.The communicative interactions of very young children almost always involve language, gesture and directed gaze. In this study, ninety-six children were asked to determine the location of a hidden toy by understanding a communicative act that contained none of these familiar means. A light-and-sound mechanism placed behind the hiding place and illuminated by a centrally placed switch was used to indicate the location of the toy. After a communicative training session, an experimenter pressed the…Read more
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50Reconsidering the Role of Manual Imitation in Language EvolutionTopoi 37 (2): 319-328. 2018.In this paper, we distinguish between a number of different phenomena that have been called imitation, and identify one form—a high fidelity mechanism for social learning—considered to be crucial for the development of language. Subsequently, we consider a common claim in the language evolution literature, which is that prior to the emergence of vocal language our ancestors communicated using a sophisticated gestural protolanguage, the learning of some parts of which required manual imitation. D…Read more
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60Meaning and Ostension in Great Ape Gestural CommunicationAnimal Cognition 19 (1): 223-231. 2016.It is sometimes argued that while human gestures are produced ostensively and intentionally, great ape gestures are produced only intentionally. If true, this would make the psychological mechanisms underlying the different species’ communication fundamentally different, and ascriptions of meaning to chimpanzee gestures would be inappropriate. While the existence of different underlying mechanisms cannot be ruled out, in fact claims about difference are driven less by empirical data than by cont…Read more
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49Ontogenetic constraints on Grice's theory of communicationIn Danielle Matthews (ed.), Pragmatic Development in First Language Acquisition, . pp. 87-104. 2014.Paul Grice’s account of the nature of intentional communication has often been supposed to be cognitively too complex to work as an account of the communicative interactions of pre-verbal children. This chapter is a (fairly uncritical) review of a number of responses to this challenge that others have developed. I discuss work on Relevance Theory (by Sperber and Wilson), Pedagogy Theory (by Gergely and Csibra), and Expressive Communication (by Green and Bar-On). I also discuss my own response to…Read more
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999Evidence and interpretation in great ape gestural communication.Humana Mente 6 (24): 27-51. 2013.Tomasello and colleagues have offered various arguments to explain why apes find the comprehension of pointing difficult. They have argued that: (i) apes fail to understand communicative intentions; (ii) they fail to understand informative, cooperative communication, and (iii) they fail to track the common ground that pointing comprehension requires. In the course of a review of the literature on apes' production and comprehension of pointing, I reject (i) and (ii), and offer a qualified defence…Read more
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31Us and them: The science of animal minds: Thomas Suddendorf: The gap: The science of what separates us from other animals. New York: Basic Books, 2013, 368pp, $29.99 HB (review)Metascience 23 (3): 551-554. 2014.Thomas Suddendorf’s The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals takes as its subject the question of what separates human cognition from the cognition of animals. In addition to providing a lengthy synthesis of the current state of knowledge of the differences between human and animal minds, it also contains an introduction to the history of thinking about “the gap” between us and them, and—more implicitly—an introduction to the methods of experimental science. It does not defen…Read more
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85Imitation reconsideredPhilosophical Psychology 28 (6): 856-880. 2015.In the past 20 years or so, the psychological research on imitation has flourished. However, our working definition of imitation has not adequately adapted in order to reflect this research. The closest that we've come to a revamped conception of imitation comes from the work of Michael Tomasello. Despite its numerous virtues, Tomasello's definition is in need of at least two significant amendments, if it is to reflect the current state of knowledge. Accordingly, it is our goal in this paper to …Read more
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529Orang-utans played a communication game in two studies testing their ability to produce and comprehend requestive pointing. While the ‘communicator’ could see but not obtain hidden food, the ‘donor’ could release the food to the communicator, but could not see its location for herself. They could coordinate successfully if the communicator pointed to the food, and if the donor comprehended his communicative goal and responded pro-socially. In Study 1, one orang-utan pointed regularly and accurat…Read more
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893Pragmatic Interpretation and Signaler-Receiver Asymmetries in Animal CommunicationIn Kristin Andrews & Jacob Beck (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds, Routledge. pp. 291-300. 2017.Researchers have converged on the idea that a pragmatic understanding of communication can shed important light on the evolution of language. Accordingly, animal communication scientists have been keen to adopt insights from pragmatics research. Some authors couple their appeal to pragmatic aspects of communication with the claim that there are fundamental asymmetries between signalers and receivers in non-human animals. For example, in the case of primate vocal calls, signalers are said to p…Read more
Royal Leamington Spa, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |