Antonio Scarafone

In this paper I will argue that, contrary to what most scholars are inclined to believe, there are important tensions between the later Wittgenstein’s views on language and Michael Tomasello’s usage-based theory of language acquisition. On one hand, Wittgenstein characterises the first steps into the acquisition of a first language as a matter of acquiring practical abilities, which, in an anti-intellectualistic vein, do not require any kind of knowledge. On the other hand, Tomasello employs a Gricean model of communication to describe pre-linguistic children’s communicative interactions, thus taking an intellectualist stance. According to this model, children are supposed to acquire the meanings of words because they are able to infer communicators’ intentions on the basis of the common ground (mutual knowledge) they establish with them. Eliciting this tension is of uttermost importance because: (i) it bears crucial implications for the explanatory relationships between language and thought; (ii) it is central to the heart of Tomasello’s project of explaining linguistic competency as based on communicative abilities. In the conclusion, I will argue that there are ways to ease the main tension if, following Richard Moore, basic communicative acts are conceived of as Minimally Gricean.

Communication is crucial for us as human beings – much of what we know or believe, we learn through hearing or seeing what others say or express, and arguably part of what makes us human is our desire to communicate our thoughts and feelings to others. A core part of our communicative activity concerns linguistic communication, where we use the words and sentences of natural languages to communicate our ideas. But what exactly is going on in linguistic communication and what is the relationship between what we say and what we think? This entry explores these issues.

The fact that speech acts serve to share commitments makes it possible to identify important preconditions for becoming a competent user of speech acts. I employ this assumption to investigate the development of prelinguistic, communicative competence in early childhood. To become competent users of speech acts, children must count as participants in normatively regulated joint activities. This includes being disposed to behave normatively, as well as knowing how to signal acceptance and rejection of candidate commitments which regulate those activities. Contrary to widespread opinions, I argue that by around 18 months of age children have started meeting these preconditions. I outline how they may get there based on studies about teasing and headshaking. To acquire the target competences, I argue, infants need not be able to conceptualize commitments or their contents, let alone reason about intentions and beliefs.

According to a well-established tradition, communicating in a language is, necessarily, a matter of reasoning about psychological states. Recently, it has been argued that for learning a language, and for communicating in the ways they do, infants must be capable of reasoning about their own and others’ intentions and beliefs. The overarching aim of this thesis is to show that the orthodox explanatory strategy gets things back to front. There are at least two good reasons to embark on this enterprise. First, I argue, there is no convincing evidence that infants engage in the required kind of psychological reasoning. Second, I argue, the orthodox strategy leads, in general, to a problematic picture of the psychology of communicators. The alternative I propose is inspired by Bart Geurts’ works. I argue that prelinguistic communication is better thought of in terms of normative practices. In interactions, commitments and entitlements are created, fulfilled, or reneged. Interactants may act in light of the commitments that they share without knowing that this is what they are doing. It is generally possible to learn how to play a game before knowing its rules, and this is how the early stages of language acquisition will look like in the present work. The complexity of the interactions in which they participate is not something that infants understand. It is something that they grow into. Once stable forms of action coordination enabled by the sharing of commitments are achieved, and a rich enough language has thus been acquired, the road to psychological reasoning is paved. Competence in playing the manifold games they play with others makes it possible, for them, to discern and negotiate the whys of others’, as well as of their own, sayings and doings.

Joint attention is typically conceptualized as a robust psychological phenomenon. In philosophy, this apparently innocuous assumption leads to the problem of accounting for the “openness” of joint attention. In psychology, it leads to the problem of justifying alternative operationalizations of joint attention, since there does not seem to be much which is psychologically uniform across different joint attentional engagements. Contrary to the received wisdom, I argue that joint attention is a social relationship which normatively regulates the attentional states of two or more individuals. This social account of joint attention leans on Bart Geurts’ view of communication as commitment sharing. Its promises are: (i) to explain the role of joint attention in wider joint activities, including communicative interactions; (ii) to account for how playing this role requires individuals to deploy different psychological resources on different occasions; and (iii) to identify the rationale behind alternative operationalizations of joint attention.

Paul Grice’s theory of meaning has been widely adopted as a starting point for investigating the evolutionary and developmental emergence of linguistic communication. In this picture, reasoning about complexes of intentions is a prerequisite for communicating effectively at the prelinguistic level, as well as for acquiring a natural language. We argue that this broadly ‘Gricean’ picture rests on an equivocation between theories of communication and theories of cognition, and that it leads to paradoxical or implausible claims about human psychology. We defend an alternative conception of prelinguistic communication, inspired by Bart Geurts and based on the notion of commitment. Adopting a commitment-first approach makes it possible to avoid the pernicious equivocation, and it provides a better systematization of the key empirical findings. We develop our argument with respect to infants’ sensitivity to ‘ostensive signals’; infants’ pointing; and infants’ endorsement of normative attitudes in joint activities. Finally, adopting a commitment-first approach makes it possible to argue that sophisticated forms of psychological reasoning are enabled by the mastery of a rich natural language, rather than being a prerequisite for acquiring one.

In this paper I will argue that, contrary to what most scholars are inclined to believe, there are important tensions between the later Wittgenstein’s views on language and Michael Tomasello’s usage-based theory of language acquisition. On one hand, Wittgenstein characterises the first steps into the acquisition of a first language as a matter of acquiring practical abilities, which, in an anti-intellectualistic vein, do not require any kind of knowledge. On the other hand, Tomasello employs a Gricean model of communication to describe pre-linguistic children’s communicative interactions, thus taking an intellectualist stance. According to this model, children are supposed to acquire the meanings of words because they are able to infer communicators’ intentions on the basis of the common ground (mutual knowledge) they establish with them. Eliciting this tension is of uttermost importance because: (i) it bears crucial implications for the explanatory relationships between language and thought; (ii) it is central to the heart of Tomasello’s project of explaining linguistic competency as based on communicative abilities. In the conclusion, I will argue that there are ways to ease the main tension if, following Richard Moore, basic communicative acts are conceived of as Minimally Gricean.