1. Importantly, complex organisms embody hierarchies of control systems, so that most of their actions are attempts to regulate multiple goals simultaneously at multiple levels (e.g., the same act is simultaneously attempting to place left foot in front of right, pursue a prey, feed the family, etc.).
2. This account is related to the notion of Gibsonian affordances, but it is much broader in including not only direct opportunities for the self ’s concrete actions but also situations that are relevant to the organism in many more indirect ways. In addition, we should also acknowledge that all organisms are hardwired to attend to some things as naturally salient (e.g., for humans, loud noises) because of potential relevance to biological “goals” and “values” (so-called “bottom-up” processes of attention).
3. In none of these studies did chimpanzees understand and predict that, when a dominant was not just ignorant but had a false belief, she would reliably go to the place where she (falsely) thought the food was located. They treated ignorance and false belief as the same (see also Kaminski et al., 2008; Krachun et al., 2009, 2010; chapter 3 discusses this distinction further).
1. Contemporary human foragers are not good models for the early humans we are imagining here, as they have gone through both steps of our evolutionary story and so live in cultures with social norms, institutions, and languages. Moreover, contemporary foragers have tools and weapons that make individual foraging (then sharing at the end) feasible, whereas the early humans we are imagining here had more primitive weapons and so needed to work together.
2. Of course, contemporary human societies are also full of selfishness and noncooperation, not to mention cruelty and war. Much of this is generated by conflicts between people from different groups (however this is defined) and concerns competition for private property and the accumulation of wealth that began only in the last 10,000 years or so, after the advent of agriculture, that is, after humans had spent many millennia as small-group collaborative foragers.
3. Davidson is actually concerned with a special kind of perspective, namely, belief: a cognitive representation of the world that the subject knows might be in error. His claim is that a necessary condition for the notion of error is a social situation in which I and another person simultaneously focus on the same object or event simultaneously yet differently, what we have called perspective. But the notion of error introduces an additional consideration because it privileges one of the perspectives as accurate (and the other as in error), and this requires some notion of an “objective” perspective. This notion of objectivity—and so the notion of belief—will not be available to humans until the next step in our story when agent-neutral perspectives are possible (see chapter 4).
4. The possibility of lying meant that recipients had to practice “epistemic vigilance” (Sperber et al., 2010). And so the notion of true propositions also arose from the comprehension side of the interaction, as comprehenders attempted to distinguish truthful from deceptive communicative acts.
5. For purposes of simplicity, the terminology here—referential acts underlain by communicative intentions—is slightly different from that of Tomasello (2008). What is here called the communicative intention comprises what was there called the social intention in the context of the Gricean communicative intention.
6. Some researchers think that this characterization of children’s early communication via pointing is too cognitively rich (see, e.g., Gomez, 2007; Southgate et al., 2007) and that infants are actually doing something simpler.
7. Said another way, it is one thing to throw an object at another person (which, coincidently, many apes do), but it is quite another to throw something to someone in anticipation of her task of catching (Darwall, 2006)—which is what the communicator does, metaphorically, in human cooperative communication.
8. Some researchers have claimed that some great ape intention-movements are actually functioning iconically, for example, when one gorilla ritualistically pushes another in a direction in a sexual or play context (Tanner and Byrne, 1996). But these are most likely garden-variety ritualized behaviors that appear to humans to be iconic because they derive from attempts to actually move the body of the other in the desired direction—they are not functioning iconically for the apes themselves.
9. Some contemporary cultures have more than one (e.g., pointing with the index finger and pinky extended simultaneously for a certain subclass of situations), but the presumption is that those are derived from the original primordial index finger pointing, with which all children begin.
10. We have until this point discussed only “propositional contents” in the sense of fact-like situations that are expressed in cooperative communication. By the term proposition we mean a communicative act expressed as a fully articulated act of conventional linguistic communication.
1. Children also find it difficult for some time to comprehend situations in which objective reality is unaffected by the fact that we humans may describe it from different, even conflicting, perspectives, for example, situations in which there is an undisturbed objective reality despite the fact that this entity is simultaneously a dog an animal and a pet (see Moll and Tomasello, in press).
2. This is not unlike the way that some motivated linguistic forms, such as metaphors, become opaque (“dead”) across historical time as new learners are ignorant of the original motivation.
3. A number of unusual situations in the contemporary world have illustrated the process, at least in broad outline. Most spectacular is the case of Nicaraguan Sign Language. A number of young deaf individuals each had their own kind of pidgin signing, or home sign, with very little grammatical structuring, that they used with their hearing families. But soon after they were brought together into a community—within three “generations”—their various idiosyncratic home signs turned into a system of conventionalized signs used in numerous constructions with all kinds of grammatical organization (Senghas et al., 2004). A very similar process was observed in the birth of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (Sandler et al., 2005), and indeed, somewhat similar processes have been at least indirectly observed in many cases in which spoken pidgin languages have turned into creoles and full languages (Lefebvre, 2006). What seems to happen is that pidgin communication (or home sign) works well among family members, coworkers, and others with very strong common ground, typically in highly restricted and recurrent situations such as mealtime or a work task. But especially as a wider community of communicators and communicative situations must be accommodated, this process breaks down, and new grammatical means must be found to help recipients to reconstruct the events and participants (and their roles) in the intended referential situation. Communicator and recipient then work together further until there is comprehension, and successful grammatical solutions are repeated and imitated and so conventionalized in the community.
4. Participants and events in situations may be linguistically indicated at many different levels of specificity, depending on the common ground between communicator and recipient (Gundel et al., 1993). Pronouns are used to indicate entities already well established in common ground, whereas nouns with relative clauses are used for new entities that the recipient may identify using our common ground (e.g., “the man we saw yesterday”). In addition, many languages have determiners such as the and a, which specifically indicate whether something is or is not in our common ground in the current communicative interaction. Events are typically grounded in the current communicative interaction by specifying when they occurred or will occur relative to, ultimately, now (i.e., via tense). This way of specifying referents thus leads to the kind of hierarchical tree structures diagramed in traditional linguistic analyses, as the different linguistic items of a noun phrase or a verbal complex, each with its own function, are used together, collaboratively as it were, toward the overall goal of indicating a particular participant or event in the referential situation.
5. Sandler et al. (2005) provide a very interesting description of how successive generations of the newly created Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language conventionalized speaker motive and attitude, mostly by conventionalizing slightly exaggerated facial expressions. Thus, across generations signers came to use conventionalized facial expressions to signal such things as “the illocutionary force of an utterance, such as assertions vs. questions” (p. 31)—as in mature sign languages. In addition, communicators in later but not earlier generations came to symbolize conventionally their various modal and epistemic attitudes, such things as necessity, possibility, uncertainty, or surprise.