Christophe will present his work at the University of St Andrews (May 6th), and then at the University of Manchester (May, 20th) on ''ways of satisfying informative intentions''.
Here is the abstract:
This presentation examines various strategies for satisfying informative intentions. It situates 'ostensive communication' as just one of those strategies.
Humans routinely satisfy their informative intentions without relying on ostensive communication. For instance, a shopkeeper positions products within clients' sight. This consists in making specific facts in the environment manifest to the audience. Importantly, such facts can include evidence about intentions. For instance, when someone moves to the right side of the pavement when encountering another person, they may do so early to make manifest their plan to pass on the right.
I present findings supporting the hypothesis that non-human great apes also possess genuine informative intentions, which they satisfy in a similar way. I will argue that great apes' gestures are intended to display evidence about desires—the desire to be groomed, for instance. However, the systematic display of evidence about communicative intentions appears to be uniquely human. Non-human great apes are skilled at satisfying their informative intentions, but they don’t rely on ostensive communication.
The presentation includes an analysis of the adaptive value of ostensive behavior and proposes an account of its evolutionary emergence, arguing that this shift made humans uniquely "language-ready" and enabled the open-ended nature of human communication.