The Communicative Mind

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Why do humans but not apes acquire language? According to a standard view (Tomasello 2008; Scott-Phillips 2014) humans alone acquire language because we possess biological adaptations for Theory of Mind ('ToM') - the ability to think about others' mental states - that great apes lack. These enable us to act with and attribute the 'Gricean' (Grice 1957) communicative intentions that are necessary for natural language development. Since great apes lack ToM, they can neither attribute communicative intentions nor acquire language. Problematically for the standard view, the ToM needed for Gricean communication seem to develop only with the mastery of certain natural language forms - 'realis complement clause' syntax - around children's fourth birthday. If the mindreading needed for Gricean communication is itself language dependent, then it cannot contribute to an explanation of children's language acquisition. Since new empirical data (Krupenye & Kano, 2017) also shows that the ToM of great apes is similar to that of pre-verbal infants, the standard view leaves the absence of language in great apes unexplained. To dissolve these explanatory puzzles, the Communicative Mind project (FLF1) is developing a new account of the relationship between ToM, language, and communication. Building on the PI's previous work, which shows that infants and apes alike can engage in socio-cognitively undemanding forms of 'minimally Gricean' communication, the project establishes that key socio-cognitive differences between humans and apes are culturally learned, not biologically inherited. They emerge because humans but not apes can use syntactically structured utterances to communicate, and because on the back of this ability generations of language-users have developed linguistic tools for theorising about mental states. Thus, it is not ToM that explains the development of language, but syntax and the cultural evolution of language that explains the development of ToM. Children learn to use these tools in ontogeny, through cultural practices of conversation and storytelling, and thereby acquire new tools for thinking about minds. The initial four years of the Communicative Mind project (FLF1) has sought to develop new accounts of the evolution of language in phylogeny, and of the development of ToM in ontogeny. In the second part of the project (years 4-7, FLF2), we extend this work to consider the extent to which other uniquely human forms of cognition - including the ability to think of ourselves in the past and future ('mental time travel'), among other cognitive traits - are also developmentally dependent upon the cultural evolution of natural languages. These projects will combine to give an account of the origins of the ability to use language, and of the ways in which language has changed human cognition. By showing that uniquely human cognitive traits emerge through communication, we will demonstrate the fundamentally social foundations of human thought. Subsequently we will use our findings to develop educational tools to support children's learning, and to reconsider the appropriateness of existing standards of animal welfare, grounded in a new appreciation of the cognitive continuity between animals and humans.