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Communication is ubiquitous in human social life. There are many possible modes of human communication but language use is plainly of special interest: because it plays a critical role in culture and society; and because languages are important cultural products in their own right, with their own distinctive properties. These properties include in particular grammatical structure. However, we do not presently have any compelling synthesis of our understanding of communication and our understanding of grammar. This problem is important because synthesizing knowledge across neighboring domains can considerably deepen understanding in its own right, and bring new perspectives to bear on old issues. Mature syntheses are major scientific breakthroughs. Here, I argue that contextualist theories of communication, and constructionist approaches to the description of grammars, together provide a cohesive picture. Both bodies of work have proved enormously influential in their respective subfields, but their synthesis provides a unified picture of considerable clarity. Linguistic communication is a coordination problem on the speaker’s informative intentions; and grammars are networks of microconventions (“constructions”) that enable language users to resolve this coordination problem far more easily than they otherwise would. This synthesis in turn provides fresh perspectives on many classical issues in the language sciences. I sketch three examples: literal meaning and “construction modulation”; language learning; and the evolutionary emergence of language in our species.

Any behavior humans can perform, they can be performed in an “ostensive” way, that is, overtly attracting attention and providing evidence of meaning. The communicative principle of relevance is a lawlike generalization about ostensive stimuli and hence about human communication. Here I present the principle as a pair of simple and general empirical statements: one on the audience side and one on the communicator side. I also summarize recent developments: Experimental tests have proved supportive, theoretical analyses have connected the principle to evolutionary and developmental perspectives, and the principle has been used more broadly than before, far beyond the traditional domains of semantics and pragmatics. These developments consolidate the communicative principle of relevance as fundamental to understanding human interaction.

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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 interaction, meeting widely used empirical criteria for intentionality. At the same time, there remain some manifest differences, most obviously the enormous range and scope of human expression. How to account for these similarities and differences in a unified way remains a major challenge. Here 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. We hence describe how 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’, and to have a high degree of perceptual resemblance between form and meaning—are products of its Ladyginian but not Gricean character. We also reinterpret video footage of great ape gesture as Ladyginian but not Gricean, and we 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’.

See here for a presentation of the paper.

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Human expression is open-ended, versatile, and diverse, ranging from ordinary language use to painting, from exaggerated displays of affection to micro-movements that aid coordination. Here we present and defend the claim that this expressive diversity is united by an interrelated suite of cognitive capacities, the evolved functions of which are the expression and recognition of informative intentions. We describe how evolutionary dynamics normally leash communication to narrow domains of statistical mutual benefit, and how expression is unleashed in humans. The relevant cognitive capacities are cognitive adaptations to living in a partner choice social ecology; and they are, correspondingly, part of the ordinarily developing human cognitive phenotype, emerging early and reliably in ontogeny. In other words, we identify distinctive features of our species' social ecology to explain how and why humans, and only humans, evolved the cognitive capacities that, in turn, lead to massive diversity and open-endedness in means and modes of expression. Language use is but one of these modes of expression, albeit one of manifestly high importance. We make cross-species comparisons, describe how the relevant cognitive capacities can evolve in a gradual manner, and survey how unleashed expression facilitates not only language use, but also novel behaviour in many other domains too, focusing on the examples of joint action, teaching, punishment, and art, all of which are ubiquitous in human societies but relatively rare in other species. Much of this diversity derives from graded aspects of human expression, which can be used to satisfy informative intentions in creative and new ways. We aim to help reorient cognitive pragmatics, as a phenomenon that is not a supplement to linguistic communication and on the periphery of language science, but rather the foundation of the many of the most distinctive features of human behaviour, society, and culture.

Here is a conversation about the paper, on the podcast Because Language.

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The last 30 years has seen the emergence of a self-styled ‘evolutionary’ paradigm within psychology (henceforth, EP). EP is often presented and critiqued as a distinctive, contentious paradigm, to be contrasted with other accounts of human psychology. However, little attention has been paid to the sense in which those other accounts are not also evolutionary. We outline the core commitments of canonical EP. These are, from least distinctive to most: mechanism, interactionism, functionalism, adaptationism, and functional specialization. We argue that the minimal requirement for an approach to psychology to qualify as evolutionary in an important sense is functionalism. This is because the notion of functional design in organismal structures presupposes a history of evolution by natural selection. On this criterion, we argue, most, perhaps all of psychology qualifies as evolutionary, either implicitly or explicitly. We review several approaches that are typically contrasted with EP, showing that these are all evolutionary too by our criteria. We suggest that the EP/non-EP dichotomy be retired. However, though all psychology is evolutionary, psychologists do not always need to foreground evolution in their research, just as is true for biologists. At the same time, more space for evolution does not mean any less space for environment, context, culture, meaning or agency.

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..the notion of open society is an attempt to answer the question of how we can most effectively live together in large and modern environments… Here I present an updated model of the panhuman cognitive phenotype (“human nature”) based on the findings of modern evolutionary, cognitive, and anthropological sciences; and I summarize what I believe these findings imply for how to think about collective governance… I shall describe the human mind as a primarily social mind, far more finely tuned to the challenges of living together than we understood even two decades ago; and I shall conclude that we should embrace far more overtly open approaches to governance. Standard liberal demands made in the name of open society do not go far enough.

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According to several interlinked and influential lines of argument, human minds have been shaped by natural selection so as to include biological adaptations with the evolved, naturally selected function to facilitate the transmission of cultural knowledge. This ‘cultural minds’ hypothesis has proved highly influential, and if it is correct it is a major step forward in understanding how and why humans have survived and prospered in a hugely diverse range of ecologies. It can be contrasted with a ‘social minds’ hypothesis, according to which cultural transmission occurs as an outcome, but not the biologically evolved function, of social cognition the domain of which is relatively small-group interaction. Here, I critique the cultural minds hypothesis and I argue that the data favour the social minds perspective. Cultural phenomena can clearly emerge and persist over time without cognitive adaptations for cultural transmission. Overtly intentional communication plays an especially pivotal role.

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A short paper arguing that there is a substantial divide between the cognitive sciences and the social sciences. Addressing this divide is a key problem that should receive greater research attention.

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Non-cognitive gadgets are fancy tools shaped to meet specific, local needs. Cecilia Heyes defines cognitive gadgets as dedicated psychological mechanisms (e.g. cooking and sporting expertise) created through social interactions and culturally, not genetically, inherited by humans. She has boldly proposed that many human cognitive mechanisms (including imitation, numeracy, literacy, language and mindreading) are gadgets. If true, these claims would have far-reaching implications for our scientific understanding of human social cognition. Here we assess Heyes’s cognitive gadget approach as it applies to mindreading. We do not think that the evidence supports Heyes’s thought-provoking thesis that human children are taught to read minds the way they are taught to read words. We highlight a potential circularity lurking behind this analogy, and we explain why we are unpersuaded by Heyes’s anti-mentalistic proposal for handling data inconsistent with the gadget view, which others take to be evidence for mindreading in human infancy. We conclude that while human minds may well be filled with gadgets, mindreading is unlikely to be one of them.

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Art theory has consistently emphasised the importance of situational, cultural, institu- tional and historical factors in viewers’ experience of fine art. However, the link between this heavily context-dependent interpretation and the workings of the mind is often left unexamined. Drawing on relevance theory—a prominent, cogent and productive body of work in cognitive pragmatics—we here argue that fine art achieves its effects by prompting the use of cognitive processes that are more commonly employed in the interpretation of words and other stimuli presented in a communicative context. We describe in particular how institutional factors effectively co-opt these processes for new ends, allowing viewers to achieve cognitive effects that they otherwise would not, and so provide cognitivist backing for an Institutional Theory of Art, such as that put forward by Arthur Danto. More generally, we situate and describe the Western fine art tradition as a phenomenon that is a consequence of both the cognitive processes involved in communication, and of cultural norms, practices and institutions.

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Cultural attraction theory (CAT) is a research agenda the purpose of which is to develop causal explanations of cultural phenomena. CAT is also an evolutionary approach to culture, in the sense that it treats culture as a population of items of different types, with the frequency of tokens of those types changing over time. Now more than 20 years old, CAT has made many positive contributions, theoretical and empirical, to the naturalization of the social sciences. In consequence of this growing impact, CAT has, in recent years, been the subject of critical discussion. Here, we review and respond to these critiques. In so doing, we also provide a clear and concise introduction to CAT. We give clear characterizations of CAT's key theoretical notions, and we outline how these notions are derived from consideration of the natural character of cultural phenomena. This naturalistic quality distinguishes CAT from other evolutionary approaches to culture.

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Pragmatics has historically played a relatively peripheral role in language evolution research. This is a profound mistake. Here I describe how a pragmatic perspective can inform language evolution in the most fundamental way: by making clear what the natural objects of study are, and hence what the aims of the field should be.

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What is meaning? While traditionally the domain of philosophy and linguistics, this question, and others related to it, is critical for cognitive and comparative approaches to communication. This short essay provides a concise and accessible description of how the term meaning can and should be used, how it relates to ‘intentional communication’, and what would constitute good evidence of meaning in animal communication, in the sense that is relevant for comparisons with human language.

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Comparisons with the cognition and communication of other species have long informed discussions of the origins and evolution of human communication and language. This research has often focused on similarities and differences with the linguistic code, but more recently there has been an increased focus on the social-cognitive foundations of linguistic communication. However, exactly what these comparisons tell us is not clear because the theoretical concepts used in the animal communication literature are different from those used in the corresponding literature on human communication, specifically those used in linguistic pragmatics. In this article, I bridge the gap between these two areas and in doing so specify exactly what great ape communication tells us about the origins of human communication and language. I conclude that great ape communication probably does not share the same social-cognitive foundations as linguistic communication but that it probably does involve the use of metacognitive abilities that, once they evolved to a more sophisticated degree, were exapted for use in what is an evolutionarily novel form of communication: human ostensive communication. This in turn laid the foundations for the emergence of linguistic communication. More generally, I highlight the often-neglected importance of pragmatics for the study of language origins.

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Darwin-inspired population thinking suggests approaching culture as a population of items of different types, whose relative frequencies may change over time. Three nested subtypes of populational models can be distinguished: evolutionary, selectional and replicative. Substantial progress has been made in the study of cultural evolution by modelling it within the selectional frame. This progress has involved idealizing away from phenomena that may be critical to an adequate understanding of culture and cultural evolution, particularly the constructive aspect of the mechanisms of cultural transmission. Taking these aspects into account, we describe cultural evolution in terms of cultural attraction, which is populational and evolutionary, but only selectional under certain circumstances. As such, in order to model cultural evolution, we must not simply adjust existing replicative or selectional models but we should rather generalize them, so that, just as replicator-based selection is one form that Darwinian selection can take, selection itself is one of several different forms that attraction can take. We present an elementary formalization of the idea of cultural attraction.

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Niche construction refers to the activities of organisms that bring about changes in their environments, many of which are evolutionarily and ecologically consequential. Advocates of niche construction theory (NCT) believe that standard evolutionary theory fails to recognize the full importance of niche construction, and consequently propose a novel view of evolution, in which niche construction and its legacy over time (ecological inheritance) are described as evolutionary processes, equivalent in importance to natural selection. Here, we subject NCT to critical evaluation, in the form of a collaboration between one prominent advocate of NCT, and a team of skeptics. We discuss whether niche construction is an evolutionary process, whether NCT obscures or clarifies how natural selection leads to organismal adaptation, and whether niche construction and natural selection are of equivalent explanatory importance. We also consider whether the literature that promotes NCT overstates the significance of niche construction, whether it is internally coherent, and whether it accurately portrays standard evolutionary theory. Our disagreements reflect a wider dispute within evolutionary theory over whether the neo-Darwinian synthesis is in need of reformulation, as well as different usages of some key terms (e.g., evolutionary process).

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The study of pragmatics is typically concerned with ostensive communication (especially through language), in which we not only provide evidence for our intended speaker meaning, but also make manifest our intention to do so. This is not, however, the only way in which humans communicate. We also communicate in many non-ostensive ways, and these expressions often interplay with and complement ostensive communication. For example, fear, embarrassment, surprise and other emotions are often expressed with linguistic expressions, which they complement through changes in prosodic cues, facial and bodily muscular configuration, pupil dilatation and skin colouration, among others. However, some basic but important questions about non-ostensive communication, in particular those concerned with evolutionary stability, are unaddressed. Our objective is to address, albeit tentatively, this issue, focusing our discussion on one particular class of non-ostensive communication: emotional expressions. We argue that existing solutions to the problem of stability of emotional communication are problematic and we suggest introducing a new class of mechanisms—mechanisms of emotional vigilance—that, we think, more adequately accounts for the stability of emotional communication.

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“..consideration of language highlights the need for discussion about the nature of communication to develop an account that is sufficiently general to describe a communication system that is heavily context-dependent. Our overall objectives are thus to present a unified, consilient account of communication, and to discuss the implications…”

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To properly understand behavior, we must obtain both ultimate and proximate explanations. Put briefly, ultimate explanations are concerned with why a behavior exists, and proximate explanations are concerned with how it works. These two types of explanation are complementary and the distinction is critical to evolutionary explanation. We are concerned that they have become conflated in some areas of the evolutionary literature on human behavior. This article brings attention to these issues. We focus on three specific areas: the evolution of cooperation, transmitted culture, and epigenetics. We do this to avoid confusion and wasted effort—dangers that are particularly acute in interdisciplinary research. Throughout this article, we suggest ways in which misunderstanding may be avoided in the future.

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Communication is a fundamentally interactive phenomenon. Evolutionary biology recognises this fact in its definition of communication, in which signals are those actions that cause reactions, and where both action and reaction are designed for that reason. Where only one or the other is designed then the behaviours are classed as either cues or coercion. Since mutually dependent behaviours are unlikely to emerge simultaneously, the symmetry inherent in these definitions gives rise to a prediction that communication will only emerge if cues or coercive behaviours do so first. They will then be co-opted for communication. A range of case studies, from animal signalling, evolutionary robotics, comparative psychology, and evolutionary linguistics are used to test this prediction. The first three are found to be supportive. However in the Embodied Communication Game, a recent experimental approach to the emergence of communication between adult humans, communication emerges even when cues or coerced behaviours are not possible. This suggests that humans are exceptional in this regard. It is argued that the reason for this is the degree to which we are able and compelled to read and interpret the behaviour of others in intentional terms.

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Communication is ubiquitous in biology, and agreement on terms essential for scientific progress. Yet there is no agreed definition of biological communication. Definitions couched in terms of adaptation are often used, but there is significant variability in exactly which criteria are invoked. An alternative is to define communication in terms of information transfer. This article reviews the merits of these approaches, and argues that the former is to be preferred, so long as we demand that both the signal and the response be adaptive, rather than just one or the other, as is common. Specific concerns with the definition are addressed, and it is then explained why an account of communication predicated on information transfer is necessarily derivative upon such an approach. Other alternatives and some variants of the adaptationist definition are also briefly discussed.

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Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in the evolution of the human capacity for language. Such a project is necessarily interdisciplinary. However, that interdisciplinarity brings with it a risk: terms with a technical meaning in their own field are used wrongly or too loosely by those from other backgrounds. Unfortunately, this risk has been realized in the case of language evolution, where many of the terms of social evolution theory (reciprocal altruism, honest signaling, etc.) are incorrectly used in a way that suggests that certain key fundamentals have been misunderstood. In particular the distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations is often lost, with the result that several claims made by those interested in language evolution are epistemically incoherent. However, the correct application of social evolution theory provides simple, clear explanations of why language most likely evolved and how the signals used in language—words—remain cheap yet arbitrary.