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Di' quello che hai in mente. Le origini della comunicazione umana
Il linguaggio è la capacità che, più di ogni altra, contribuisce a rendere unici gli esseri umani. Quali sono le sue origini? Quali processi hanno condotto all'evoluzione delle abilità comunicative in un sistema complesso come quello che oggi chiamiamo linguaggio? Che indicazioni può fornirci la prospettiva evoluzionistica sulla natura del linguaggio e della comunicazione? Sullo sfondo di ricerche interdisciplinari provenienti dalle scienze cognitive, dalla linguistica, dall'antropologia e dalla biologia evoluzionistica, il libro intende spiegare le ragioni per cui quella umana è l'unica specie in grado di comunicare attraverso il linguaggio verbale.
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First published November 3, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 22, 2017
In Speaking our Minds , Scott-Philipps attempts to answer several big questions about human communication and language : their - uniqueness, psychological pre-requisits, evolutionary stability, ultimate function, expressive power, forms, history, groundedness and suitability to experimental analysis under an adaptationist glance (see p.154-5 Epilogue for an overview).
Scott-Philips intends to answer all these using mostly Dan Sperber and Deirde Wilson's Relevance Theory . This theory, building on some of Paul Grice's insights, breaks with the Code Model which is still pervasive.
Under the Code Model, communication is understood as coding and decoding a message channelled from a sender to a receiver, where (i) coding sends a signal about (triggered by) a given state of thing, and (ii) decoding links the received signal to a reaction on the receiver side. The prevalence of the Code model accounts for linguistic being obsessed with syntax and negligent of pragmatics (of what counts as meaning for actors facing a given context and a shared intentional content).
Scott-Philips forcefully shows how this double association inherent to the Code Model is too rigid to account for the full indeterminacy of meaning , that is, of speaker meaning by the literal, linguistic meaning. Whatever "chair" means in any given context depends on speaker's intent, which is never satisfactorily understood as replicating the literal meaning. This holds for any conceivable linguistic and communicative convention. Matching evidences, meaning and communicative media (be it gestural or vocal) requires a pragmatic competence, and a recursive capacity of reading other's mind.
Communication should be understood as implying ostension on the speaker's side (the expression of a communicative and informative intent that links whatever bodily, gestural and vocal expression to whatever contextually and psychologically relevant evidences) and inference on the receiver's side (inferring what is speaker's intent).
The ostensive-inferential model is said to precede and gain later expressive power by the Code model (by building conventional codes, including linguistic ones), instead of the other way around. Datas gathered from Michael Tomasello's team at Max Planck Institute are shown to support how apes have no ostensive-inferrential communication outside of a prior associative, coded message, and how, more generally, recursive mind-readings appear as the meta-psychological skill present in human, absent in apes, that ostensive-inferential communication emerged from (together with a motivation for shared or "we-intentionality").
The expression and recognition of a communicative intent is what turns sent signals and given responses into creative, inter-dependent features - which is what makes communication in the first place.
Scott-Philips wants to address longstanding debates in an empirically fit approach without overwhelming the laymen with difficult concepts and phraseology.
Speaking our Minds is, for sure, remarkably well written. If anything, its likely success at reaching non-academics is compromised by its very subject matter, which may not appeal to the Many in the first place. That being said, it ranks nicely as a landmark book (along with Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, 2017, The Enigma of Reason).
Scott-Philips intends to answer all these using mostly Dan Sperber and Deirde Wilson's Relevance Theory . This theory, building on some of Paul Grice's insights, breaks with the Code Model which is still pervasive.
Under the Code Model, communication is understood as coding and decoding a message channelled from a sender to a receiver, where (i) coding sends a signal about (triggered by) a given state of thing, and (ii) decoding links the received signal to a reaction on the receiver side. The prevalence of the Code model accounts for linguistic being obsessed with syntax and negligent of pragmatics (of what counts as meaning for actors facing a given context and a shared intentional content).
Scott-Philips forcefully shows how this double association inherent to the Code Model is too rigid to account for the full indeterminacy of meaning , that is, of speaker meaning by the literal, linguistic meaning. Whatever "chair" means in any given context depends on speaker's intent, which is never satisfactorily understood as replicating the literal meaning. This holds for any conceivable linguistic and communicative convention. Matching evidences, meaning and communicative media (be it gestural or vocal) requires a pragmatic competence, and a recursive capacity of reading other's mind.
Communication should be understood as implying ostension on the speaker's side (the expression of a communicative and informative intent that links whatever bodily, gestural and vocal expression to whatever contextually and psychologically relevant evidences) and inference on the receiver's side (inferring what is speaker's intent).
The ostensive-inferential model is said to precede and gain later expressive power by the Code model (by building conventional codes, including linguistic ones), instead of the other way around. Datas gathered from Michael Tomasello's team at Max Planck Institute are shown to support how apes have no ostensive-inferrential communication outside of a prior associative, coded message, and how, more generally, recursive mind-readings appear as the meta-psychological skill present in human, absent in apes, that ostensive-inferential communication emerged from (together with a motivation for shared or "we-intentionality").
The expression and recognition of a communicative intent is what turns sent signals and given responses into creative, inter-dependent features - which is what makes communication in the first place.
Scott-Philips wants to address longstanding debates in an empirically fit approach without overwhelming the laymen with difficult concepts and phraseology.
Speaking our Minds is, for sure, remarkably well written. If anything, its likely success at reaching non-academics is compromised by its very subject matter, which may not appeal to the Many in the first place. That being said, it ranks nicely as a landmark book (along with Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, 2017, The Enigma of Reason).
February 1, 2025
The guy who wrote this has such a hard on for relevance theory he doesn’t feel the need to discuss any other pragmatic approach. That’s fine I guess.
What’s a little harder to swallow is that the whole books premise is that language is ostensive inferential first, and then conventional for increased expressive power (this is repeated ca 500 times in only 150 pages), but the very idea pragmatic processes boil down to ostension-inference is what is challenged in pragmatics outside Sperber. So it sounds a lot like author wanted to tell an evolutionary story about language, and found the best pragmatic theory to tell it with. Trouble is, there is not much of an evolutionary story to be told either, apart from: ostension first, conventions after. But maybe conventions don't really increase expressive power (radical contextualism). Maybe that's because ostensive-inferential communication is not properly linguistic communication per se (but more like direct perception, something on which people as different as Elugardo, Pelletier, Millikan, Chomsky and Recanati could agree on). Maybe because conventions have nothing whatever to do with language anyhow (Chomsky). Maybe we could give an honorable mention to phenomena relevance theory has been said not to explain (like Levinson's work on GCIs maybe). Nope.
But the truly worst part of the book is everything that’s not about pragmatics. When author goes into development psych and autism research, it makes no sense at all. “People with autism have social knowledge but no motivation to express it. That explains why they believe wrong things (fail false-belief tasks) and communicate spontaneously.” Wouldn't we expect just the very opposite?
Then there’s also a lot of research that author doesn’t talk about because “to the best of [his] knowledge”, it doesn’t exist. Well, I for one don’t really care about what he knows and doesn’t know, but he should get up to speed with primatology work on apes and communicative intentions, because it doesn’t say what he’s saying (viz. apes do correct perceived misunderstandings: https://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/lab...)
I was also rather put off by the condescending tone towards the research in animal communication and ethology throughout (“all those midwits who believe in the code model of communication!”), and the corresponding religious rhetoric about relevance theory.
Got some interesting references on language evolution (got to check that issue from Interaction Studies on protolanguage), and the first 40 pages were ok.
What’s a little harder to swallow is that the whole books premise is that language is ostensive inferential first, and then conventional for increased expressive power (this is repeated ca 500 times in only 150 pages), but the very idea pragmatic processes boil down to ostension-inference is what is challenged in pragmatics outside Sperber. So it sounds a lot like author wanted to tell an evolutionary story about language, and found the best pragmatic theory to tell it with. Trouble is, there is not much of an evolutionary story to be told either, apart from: ostension first, conventions after. But maybe conventions don't really increase expressive power (radical contextualism). Maybe that's because ostensive-inferential communication is not properly linguistic communication per se (but more like direct perception, something on which people as different as Elugardo, Pelletier, Millikan, Chomsky and Recanati could agree on). Maybe because conventions have nothing whatever to do with language anyhow (Chomsky). Maybe we could give an honorable mention to phenomena relevance theory has been said not to explain (like Levinson's work on GCIs maybe). Nope.
But the truly worst part of the book is everything that’s not about pragmatics. When author goes into development psych and autism research, it makes no sense at all. “People with autism have social knowledge but no motivation to express it. That explains why they believe wrong things (fail false-belief tasks) and communicate spontaneously.” Wouldn't we expect just the very opposite?
Then there’s also a lot of research that author doesn’t talk about because “to the best of [his] knowledge”, it doesn’t exist. Well, I for one don’t really care about what he knows and doesn’t know, but he should get up to speed with primatology work on apes and communicative intentions, because it doesn’t say what he’s saying (viz. apes do correct perceived misunderstandings: https://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/lab...)
I was also rather put off by the condescending tone towards the research in animal communication and ethology throughout (“all those midwits who believe in the code model of communication!”), and the corresponding religious rhetoric about relevance theory.
Got some interesting references on language evolution (got to check that issue from Interaction Studies on protolanguage), and the first 40 pages were ok.
Want to read
October 30, 2020As heard on Lexicon Valley:
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June 29, 2017This book does an excellent job arguing that there are good reasons for why language is pervasively context-sensitive, but it does so in a different (and somewhat more compelling) way than usually happens in the radical contextualism debate. Instead of invoking rule-following and the indeterminacy of all representations, it argues for the fundamentality of "ostensive" communication (basically Gricean communicative intentions, which involve not just intentionally bringing about changes in another person's beliefs, but that you and your audience mutually know that that's what you're intending to do) for human language use, over the idea that language is a conventional "code". I think it's a little too enthusiastic about Relevance Theory, but that doesn't get in the way of the book's main argument.
And it's very readable!
And it's very readable!
April 5, 2015
Very intriguing look at how and why humans developed language (and why other intelligent and communicative creatures apparently have not). Fairly technical and a few parts were tough going for me, but it's short and well-organized and written for lay people who are willing to work a bit. I'm not enough of a linguist or an evolutionary biologist to judge the science but it certainly gives one a lot to think about.
January 4, 2016
This book was great if you're interested in human communication, Relevance Theory, the ostensive-inferential model. Okay, you have to be interested in all of those things to really get the most out of it. Although it's not for beginners, he's written it with so much structure and guidance that a more-or-less beginner could pick it up and learn a lot. It helps that I think the author is correct on nearly every point.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews