We humans do it all the time, and most of the time we do it as a matter of
course, without thinking about it. We talk, we listen, we write, we read-as
you are doing now-or we draw, we mimic, we nod, we point, we shrug, and,
somehow, we manage to make our thoughts known to one another. Of course,
there are times when we view communication as something difficult or even
impossible to achieve. Yet, compared to other living kinds, we are amazingly
good at it. Other species, if they communicate at all, have a narrow repertoire
of signals that they use to convey again and again things like: "This is
my territory," "Danger, run!" or "Ready for sex." To communicate is to attempt
to get someone to share your thoughts-well, at least some of them. But how
can thoughts be shared? Thoughts aren't things out there in the open, to
be sliced like cakes or used collectively like buses. They are strictly private
affairs. Thoughts are born, live, and die inside our brains. They never truly
come out of our heads (although we talk as if they did, but this is just
a metaphor). The only thing that is ever produced by one person for another
person to see or hear is behavior and the traces it leaves behind: movement,
noise, broken twigs, ink spots, etc. These things aren't thoughts, they don't
"contain" thoughts (that is just another metaphor), and yet some of these
behaviors or traces serve to convey thoughts. How is such communication possible?
There is an old story-it dates back at least to the ancient Greek philosopher
Aristotle -and no doubt you have heard it many times. What makes communication
possible, so the story goes, is a common language. A language such as English
is a kind of code in which sounds are associated to meanings and meanings
to sounds. So, if Jill wants to communicate some meaning to Jack, she looks
up in her mental grammar of English the sound associated to that particular
meaning, and produces that sound for Jack to hear. Jack then looks up in
his mental grammar the meaning associated with that particular sound. In
that manner, Jack finds out what Jill had in mind. Of course, all this "looking
up" is automatic and unconscious (except when you can't find your words,
and become painfully aware of searching for them). Thanks to this double
conversion-the encoding of meaning into sound, and the decoding of sound
into meaning-Jill and Jack are now sharing a thought. Well, "sharing" may
still be a metaphor, but at least we know now how to make good sense of it.
Or do we? The old "we communicate thanks to a common language" story is clever
and simple. It would make a great explanation, if only it were true. Actually,
some such story is true of most animal communication. Bees and monkeys have
their own rudimentary codes, and whatever they communicate, they do so through
encoding and decoding. Not so with us humans. True, we have our rich languages
and many minor codes too, but-and this is where the old story breaks down-we
manage to communicate much more than we encode and decode, and not just
occasionally, but all the time. So, our having language is, at best, a mere
part of the true story. Let me illustrate. Imagine you are killing time at
an airport. There is a woman standing nearby and you overhear her say to
her companion, "It's late." You have heard and even uttered these very same
words many times. Do you know what they mean? Of course. But do you know
what the woman meant in uttering these words right now? Think about it. She
might have been talking about a plane and meaning that it would arrive -or
maybe depart-late. She may as well have been talking about a letter she was
expecting, or about spring being late. She need not have been talking about
anything in particular; she might just mean that it's late in the afternoon,
or in the day, or in her life. Moreover, "late" is always relative to some
schedule, or expectation; it might be late for lunch and yet early for supper.
So she must have meant late relative to something, but what? I could go on,
but the point should be clear: Although you know perfectly well what the
words the woman uttered mean, you don't know what she meant. Strangely enough,
her companion does not seem puzzled. He seems to have understood her. And
come to think of it, on the many occasions when you were the person told
"It's late," you knew what the speaker meant. You didn't have to think about
the many meanings that "It's late" might serve to convey. Is this sentence
a special case? Not at all. Any English or French,or Swahili-sentence may
convey different meanings on different occasions, and might have served to
illustrate the same point. Because of such facts, linguists have found it
necessary to distinguish "sentence meaning" from "speaker's meaning." Only
linguists are interested in sentence meaning for its own sake. For the rest
of us, sentence meaning is something we are generally unaware of. It is something
we use unconsciously, as a mean toward our true end, which is to understand
people, and to make ourselves understood. Speaker's meaning the stuff we
care about-always goes beyond sentence meaning: It is less ambiguous (although
it may have ambiguities of its own); it is more precise in some ways, and
often less precise in other ways; it has rich implicit content. Sentence
meaning is but a sketch. We arrive at speaker's meaning by filling in this
sketch. How do we go from sentence meaning to speaker's meaning? How do we
flesh out the sketch? In the past twenty years or so, it has become obvious
that, in order to grasp a speaker's meaning, we make use of inference. Inference
is just the psychologists' term for what we ordinarily call "reasoning."
Like reasoning, it consists in starting from some initial assumptions and
in arriving through a series of steps at some conclusion. Psychologists,
however, are not just being pretentious in using a rarer word. When most
of us talk of reasoning, we think of an occasional, conscious, difficult,
and rather slow mental activity. What modern psychology has shown is that
something like reasoning goes on all the time-unconsciously, painlessly,
and fast. When psychologists talk of inference, they are referring first
and foremost to this ever-present mental activity. Here, then, is how today's
linguists and psychologists understand how one person understands what another
person says. When you are told something, for instance, "It's late," first
you decode the sentence meaning, and then you infer the speaker's meaning.
All this, however, takes place so fast and so easily that it seems immediate
and effortless. How, then, should we revise our understanding of human
communication? The first response is to stay as close as possible to the
old coding-decoding theory. The updated story might go like this: What makes
communication possible is the possession of a common language, as we always
said; however, given human intelligence, you don't need to encode all your
meaning, or to encode it exactly, in order to be understood. You can trust
your audience to infer your full meaning from their knowledge of the situation,
taken together with what you actually said. Why indeed say, "The plane on
which your mother is coming is late, so late that we cannot wait for her
any longer. I told you, we should have stayed at home," when saying, "It's
late!" with the right tone of voice can convey all of this and more. The
role of inference in communication is that of an optional add-on. All that
is really needed for communication is a common language, but inference provides
fast routines and shortcuts that are too effective to do without. Many
psychologists and linguists accept this updated version of the old story.
Others don't. Trying to understand the kind of inference involved in
communication has led some of us to turn the old story upside down. We now
think that human communication is first and foremost a matter of inference
and that language is the add-on. Here is the new story. A million years ago,
let's assume, our ancestors had no language at all. One of our ancestors,
call him Jack, was watching an ancestress -call her Jill-picking berries.
What did Jack understand of what Jill was doing? He might have seen her behavior
as a mere sequence of bodily movements, or he might have seen it as the carrying
out of an intention, perhaps the intention to gather berries for eating.
Understanding the behavior of an intelligent animal as the carrying out of
an intention is, in general, much more insightful and useful than seeing
it as mere movement. But were our ancestors capable of recognizing intentions
in one another's behavior? You have to be doubly intelligent to see the
intelligence in others. You need the ability to represent in your own mind
the mental representations of other creatures. You need, that is, the ability
to entertain representations of representations, what, in our jargon, we
call "meta-representations." Most animals have no meta-representational capacity
whatsoever. In the world as they see it, there are no minds, only bodies.
Chimpanzees and other close relatives of ours seem to have some rudimentary
meta-representational capacity. As for Jack, I bet he did perceive Jill's
intention, and not just her movements. In fact, he was probably gifted enough
to infer from her behavior not just her intention, but also one of her beliefs:
that those berries were edible. If you are able to infer other people's beliefs
from their behavior, you can benefit from their knowledge and discover facts
of which you yourself have no direct experience. Jack might not have known
that these berries were edible, but seeing Jill pick them gave him a good
reason to believe that they were. Even without the use of language or of
communication, it may be possible to discover other people's thoughts and
to make them one's own. Now, Jill was just as smart as Jack. She had noticed
that Jack was watching her, and she knew what he would infer from her behavior.
She may have liked Jack and felt glad that her picking berries would serve
two purposes instead of one: providing her with food, and providing Jack
with information. In fact, it could be that Jill didn't really need the berries,
and that her main purpose in picking them was to let Jack know that they
were 'good to eat. Mind you, it could also be that she hated Jack, and, knowing
that these particular berries were poisonous, she was trying to mislead him!
We are coming closer to true communication with its tricks, but language
is not yet in the picture. There is another big difference between Jill's
attempt at informing or misinforming Jack and ordinary human communication.
Ordinary communication is pursued openly. Here, on the other hand, Jack is
not meant to realize that Jill is trying to alter his thoughts. What if jack
understands that Jill's true intention in picking berries is to make him
believe that they are edible? If he trusts Jill, he will believe her; if
he doesn't, he won't. Now, what if Jill understands that Jack grasps her
real purpose? Well, then, lo and behold, a world of possibilities opens!
If Jack is capable of understanding that her purpose is to inform him, she
might as well be open about it. Jill does not have to actually pick the berries
anymore. All she must do is show Jack that she wants him to know that they
are edible. She may, for that, resort to symbolic means. Jill might, for
instance, stare at the berries and then move her mouth, or she might mimic
eating the berries. Jack would ask himself: Why does she do that? Once he
recognized that she was doing that for his benefit, he wouldn't find it hard
to infer her intention, or, in other words, her meaning. This is true overt
communication, although still without language. All Jill does is give evidence
of her intention, and all Jack does is infer what her intention is from the
evidence she has given him. None of that evidence is linguistic or even codelike.
For creatures capable of communicating in this inferential manner, a language
would be tremendously useful. Words are even better than mimicry for putting
ideas in people's mind. If Jill had been able to utter just eat, or good
Jack could have inferred her intention, her full meaning, from her verbal
behavior as easily as he did from her miming. With a richer language, Jill
would have been able to give evidence of more complex meanings. Actually,
in those days, our ancestors did not speak. However, their capacity for
inferential communication created an environment in which language would
come as a major advantage, and sure enough, a capacity for language evolved
in the human species. The new story, then, is that human communication is
a by-product of human meta-representational capacities. The ability to perform
sophisticated inferences about each other's states of mind evolved in our
ancestors as a means of understanding and predicting each other's behavior.
This, in turn, gave rise to the possibility of acting openly so as to reveal
one's thoughts to others. As a consequence, the conditions were created for
the evolution of language. Language made inferential communication immensely
more effective. It did not change its character. All human communication,
linguistic or nonlinguistic, is essentially inferential. Whether we give
evidence of our thoughts by picking berries, by mimicry, by speaking, or
by writing-as I have just done-we rely first and foremost on our audience's
ability to infer our meaning.
DAN SPERBER is senior research scholar at the Centre National de la Recherche
Sientifique and at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. Together with the British
linguist Deirdre Wilson, he is author of Relevance: Comnunication and
Cognition, in which they develop their groundbreaking and controversial
approach to human communication and Relevance Theory, which has inspired
much novel research since. He is also author of Rethinking Symbolism,
and On Anthropological Knowledge.
Further Reading
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