[CogSci] [Webinar on Nov 21] CogIST Cognitive Webinar Series: Thom Scott-Phillips - Great ape interaction: Ladyginian but not Gricean

[Cog IST]

Dr. Thom Scott-Phillips will be with us at the 16th Cognitive Webinar
series.

Date: November 21st, Tuesday
Time: 18:00 (GMT +3), 16:00 (CET), 10:00 AM (EDT)

In order to join the event, please fill up the application form here:
https://forms.gle/tyvNJAfCbPKC6Qw89

Below you can find the title of the talk and a short description of its
content:

*Great ape interaction: Ladyginian but not Gricean *
Non-human great apes inform one another in ways that can seem very
humanlike. Especially in the gestural domain, their behavior exhibits many
similarities with human communication, meeting widely used empirical
criteria for intentionality. At the same time, there remain some manifest
differences. How to account for these similarities and differences in a
unified way remains a major challenge. This presentation will summarise the
arguments developed in a recent paper with Christophe Heintz. We make a key
distinction between the expression of intentions (Ladyginian) and the
expression of specifically informative intentions (Gricean), and we situate
this distinction within a ‘special case of’ framework for classifying
different modes of attention manipulation. The paper also argues that the
attested tendencies of great ape interaction—for instance, to be dyadic
rather than triadic, to be about the here-and-now rather than
‘displaced’—are products of its Ladyginian but not Gricean character. I
will reinterpret video footage of great ape gesture as Ladyginian but not
Gricean, and distinguish several varieties of meaning that are continuous
with one another. We conclude that the evolutionary origins of linguistic
meaning lie in gradual changes in not communication systems as such, but
rather in social cognition, and specifically in what modes of attention
manipulation are enabled by a species’ cognitive phenotype: first
Ladyginian and in turn Gricean. The second of these shifts rendered humans,
and only humans, ‘language ready’.

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