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1143Gricean Communication and Cognitive DevelopmentPhilosophical Quarterly 67 (267). 2017.On standard readings of Grice, Gricean communication requires (a) possession of a concept of belief, (b) the ability to make complex inferences about others’ goal-directed behaviour, and (c) the ability to entertain fourth order meta-representations. To the extent that these abilities are pre-requisites of Gricean communication they are inconsistent with the view that Gricean communication could play a role in their development. In this paper, I argue that a class of ‘minimally Gricean acts’ sat…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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897Pragmatic 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
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836Gricean Communication, Joint Action, and the Evolution of CooperationTopoi 37 (2): 329-341. 2018.It is sometimes claimed that Gricean communication is necessarily a form of cooperative or ‘joint’ action. A consequence of this Cooperative Communication View is that Gricean communication could not itself contribute to an explanation of the possibility of joint action. I argue that even though Gricean communication is often a form of joint action, it is not necessarily so—since it does not always require intentional action on the part of a hearer. Rejecting the Cooperative Communication View h…Read more
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574Pedagogy and social learning in human development.In Julian Kiverstein (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Social Mind., Routledge. pp. 35-52. 2016.
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568The cultural evolution of mind-modellingSynthese 199 (1-2): 1751-1776. 2020.I argue that uniquely human forms of ‘Theory of Mind’ are a product of cultural evolution. Specifically, propositional attitude psychology is a linguistically constructed folk model of the human mind, invented by our ancestors for a range of tasks and refined over successive generations of users. The construction of these folk models gave humans new tools for thinking and reasoning about mental states—and so imbued us with abilities not shared by non-linguistic species. I also argue that uniquel…Read more
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533Orang-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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245The evolution of skilled imitative learning: a social attention hypothesisIn Ellen Fridland & Carlotta Pavese (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise, Routledge. pp. 394-408. 2020.Humans are uncontroversially better than other species at learning from their peers. A key example of this is imitation, the ability to reproduce both the means and ends of others’ behaviours. Imitation is critical to the acquisition of a number of uniquely human cultural and cognitive traits. However, while authors largely agree on the importance of imitation, they disagree about the origins of imitation in humans. Some argue that imitation is an adaptation, connected to the ‘Mirror Neuron Syst…Read more
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186Gricean communication, language development, and animal mindsPhilosophy Compass 13 (12). 2018.Humans alone acquire language. According to one influen- tial school of thought, we do this because we possess a uniquely human ability to act with and attribute “Gricean” communicative intentions. A challenge for this view is that attributing communicative intent seems to require cognitive abilities that infant language learners lack. After considering a range of responses to this challenge, I argue that infant language development can be explained, because Gricean communication is cognitively …Read more
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168Normative expectations in human and nonhuman animalsPerspectives on Psychological Science. forthcoming.We admire Heyes's attempt to develop a mechanistic account of norm cognition. Nonetheless, her account leaves us unsure of whom Heyes counts as normative agents, and on what grounds. Therefore we ask a series of questions designed to clarify which features of Heyes's account she thinks are necessary and sufficient for norm cognition.
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126Exorcising 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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113Social cognition, Stag Hunts, and the evolution of languageBiology and Philosophy 32 (6): 797-818. 2017.According to the socio-cognitive revolution hypothesis, humans but not other great apes acquire language because only we possess the socio-cognitive abilities required for Gricean communication, which is a pre-requisite of language development. On this view, language emerged only following a socio-cognitive revolution in the hominin lineage that took place after the split of the Pan-Homo clade. In this paper, I argue that the SCR hypothesis is wrong. The driving forces in language evolution were…Read more
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89Three-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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86Imitation 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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81Utterances without ForceGrazer Philosophische Studien 96 (3): 342-358. 2019.In this paper the author attempts to reconcile two claims recently defended by Mitchell Green. The first is that illocutionary force is part of speaker meaning. The second is that illocutionary force is a product of cultural evolution. Consistent with the second claim, the author argues that some utterances – particularly those produced by infants and great apes – are produced with communicative intent, but without illocutionary force. These utterances lack the normative properties constitutive …Read more
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76Social learning and teaching in chimpanzeesBiology and Philosophy 28 (6): 879-901. 2013.There is increasing evidence that some behavioural differences between groups of chimpanzees can be attributed neither to genetic nor to ecological variation. Such differences are likely to be maintained by social learning. While humans teach their offspring, and acquire cultural traits through imitative learning, there is little evidence of such behaviours in chimpanzees. However, by appealing only to incremental changes in motivation, attention and attention-soliciting behaviour, and without e…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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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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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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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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35Two-year-olds but not domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) understand communicative intentions without language, gestures, or gaze.Developmental Science 18 (2): 232-242. 2015.Infants can see someone pointing to one of two buckets and infer that the toy they are seeking is hidden inside. Great apes do not succeed in this task, but, surprisingly, domestic dogs do. However, whether children and dogs understand these communicative acts in the same way is not yet known. To test this possibility, an experimenter did not point, look, or extend any part of her body towards either bucket, but instead lifted and shook one via a centrally pulled rope. She did this either intent…Read more
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32Us 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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27The evolution of imagination and the adaptive value of imaginary worldsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.Characterizing the cultural evolution of imaginary worlds as a hedonic but non-adaptive exaptation from evolved exploratory tendencies, Dubourg and Baumard defend too narrow a conception of the adaptive evolution of imaginary worlds. Imagination and its imaginary worlds are ancient and adaptive, allowing deliberation over actions, consequences, and futures worth aspiring to, often engendering the world we see around us.
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20Great ape enculturation studies: a neglected resource in cognitive development researchBiology and Philosophy 38 (2): 1-24. 2023.Disagreement remains about whether particular human socio-cognitive traits arose primarily as a result of biological adaptations, or because of changing cultural practices. Heyes argues that uniquely human traits, including imitation and theory of mind, are the product of cultural learning. In contrast, Tomasello argues that they are, in key respects, part of a suite of adaptations for ‘shared intentionality’. We consider how such disagreements might be resolved. We show that the kinds of consid…Read more
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18In this introduction to the Synthese SI: The Cultural Evolution of Human Social Cognition, we introduce some basic theoretical terms that will help readers to navigate the volume. Subsequently we describe the papers that make up the volume and draw attention to points of agreement and disagreement between the authors. We also identify a number of outstanding issues for the field of cultural evolution research. The papers in the volume can be divided into three sections: The Cultural Evolution of…Read more
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16Metarepresentation, trust, and “unleashed expression”Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.Heintz & Scott-Phillips's account of human expression leaves a number of central issues unclear – not least, whether the lack of expression in nonhuman species is attributable to their lack of the relevant metarepresentational abilities, an absence of trust, or a consequence of other factors. In place of their view, we propose a gradualistic account of the origins of human expression.
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 |