Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning

Abstract

Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning is a contribution to the growing literature on the puzzle of language evolution. It offers a novel philosophical take on the problem of the emergence of linguistic meaning from animal communication, using insights and recent findings from philosophy of language and mind, ethology, biology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and more. The book’s main goal is threefold: a. to convince the reader that language evolution poses a genuine puzzle with philosophical as well as empirical dimensions; b. to expose limitations of existing solutions to the problem of the emergence of linguistic meaning from animal communication; and c. to develop an alternative, original solution to the problem, which identifies significant pragmatic continuities, side by side with the admittedly considerable syntactic and semantic differences. The book identifies four milestones in the evolution of communication, culminating in the emergence of a (non-Gricean) pragmatically intermediate Protolanguage. All four milestones take advantage of a basic capacity adult humans share with young children and nonhuman animals: the capacity to openly show or disclose to each other our psychological states through expressive behaviors. A pragmatically intermediate Protolanguage emerged once our ancestors learned to intentionally harness this capacity in communicating about the world. The book’s last chapters provide a characterization of this Protolanguage and its evolutionary advantages over existing animal communication systems. Some indirect evidence is offered by appeal to present-day ‘pragmatic fossils’; these are uses of natural language that are themselves pragmatically intermediate.