Is a naturalistic theory of communication possible?

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Cognitive Systems Research 11 (2010) 165–180 www.elsevier.com/locate/cogsys

Is a naturalistic theory of communication possible? Action editor: Vasant Honavar Gabriella Airenti Center for Cognitive Science and Department of Psychology, University of Torino, Italy Received 13 July 2007; received in revised form 2 March 2008; accepted 22 March 2009 Available online 18 May 2009

Abstract This article presents a theoretical discussion of the relationship between language and communication. I discuss Chomsky’s position on this topic. Chomsky claims that if it is possible to construct a scientific theory of the language faculty, there is no possibility to construct a scientific theory of communication because in communication human intentionality is involved. This position is contrasted by philosophers of language considering that communication is to be studied as a form of rational action. I maintain that both these positions are not supported by the evidence coming from developmental research. Taking a cognitive point of view I contend that a communicative faculty can be defined that develops since infancy to adulthood, which has features independent of language and action. Different steps in the development of the communicative ability are linked to a parallel development of the theory of mind. I then argue in favor of a distinction between collective action and communication considering that while collective action is common to human and nonhuman primates, communication is typically human. Ó 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Communication; Collective action; Sharedness; Theory of mind

1. Introduction In this article I present a theoretical discussion of the relationship between language and communication. I argue in favor of a human species-specific communicative faculty to which particular cognitive structures are devoted. Chomsky in all his theoretical work has stressed the fact that language is a human faculty and that linguistics has to be conceived as part of psychology. Nevertheless for this author only some features of language can be studied in a scientific way. As it is well known, Chomsky has proposed a sharp distinction between those features of language, which can be part of a scientific theory, and the communicative use of language, which is considered as part of the more general human ability to perform intentional action. The philosophers of language working

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on pragmatics agree that communication is a form of intentional action but they maintain that the study of the structure of language cannot be separated by the study of its use (see for instance Searle, 1972). The definition of communication as a form of rational action is crucial to support both arguments. I propose an analysis of the evidence provided by recent research in developmental psychology to argue against this definition. In the following I present Chomsky’s position on the relationship between language and communication. Then I discuss the basic tenets of the classical theories of communication formulated within the philosophy of language. In particular I discuss the form of intersubjectivity that these theories presuppose. I present an alternative point of view where the evidence produced in developmental and comparative psychology is used to support a distinction between collective action and communication. Finally, I clarify my point of view through the discussion of Tomasello’s recent work that argues in favor of a distinction between intentionality and shared intentionality.

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2. Language and communication: Chomsky’s point of view In ‘‘New Horizons in the study of language and mind” Chomsky (2000) presents in a more extended and radical way a point of view he had already expressed in various precedent studies (see for instance, Chomsky, 1995). For Chomsky the language faculty is part of human psychology and then linguistics is to be internalist. This means that a naturalistic, i.e. scientific theory of language can be constructed in terms of what Chomsky calls the I-language. Language in this acceptation is constituted by the rules of syntax, or more precisely those mental operations, which are at the basis of all possible grammars.1 It is this initial state common to the species that constitutes the object of Chomskyan theory. Chomsky clearly explains why in his view no other aspect of language can be treated in a naturalistic way. As regards semantics, Chomsky has in many occasions expressed his skepticism about the possibility to construct a good theory of meaning (see for instance, Chomsky, 1988). In Chomsky (2000) he explicitly declares the death of semantics as an autonomous discipline. He considers that the part of semantics that is not compromised with intentionality has good reasons to be included in syntax. Conversely, it can be shown that all the aspects dealing with reference are dependent on intentionality, thus entering the sphere of pragmatic variability (Bilgrami, 2002). Therefore, Chomsky defines pragmatics as the place where all intentional aspects of language are treated. For these aspects of language, according to Chomsky, a naturalistic i.e. scientific theory cannot be formulated. The studies accomplished in this discipline are attempts to deal with the various aspects of human action. ‘‘Such approaches are to be judged on their merits, as efforts to make some sense out of questions that fall beyond naturalistic enquiry” (p. 38).2 A fundamental point for Chomsky’s assumption

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In his review of this book Searle (2002) criticizes Chomsky for the abandonment of rules, initiating a debate in which Chomsky argues that his present use of principles and parameters does not constitute a change in the general project (Chomsky and Searle, 2002). 2 These statements are interpreted by Stone and Davies (2002) as a way to grant a room for philosophical enquiry of a non-naturalist kind. After the previous quotation they comment: ‘‘Indeed so. Judged on their merits, not in accordance with the requirements of science” (p. 288). Actually, Chomsky has a polemical position towards all the efforts to give philosophy a different status with respect to scientific research. According to Chomsky a number of philosophers think that what allows philosophy of mind to go beyond normal science is the study of the access to consciousness. Chomsky contends that this philosophical claim is not only theoretically unjustified but also in contrast with traditional philosophy. In fact, argues Chomsky, philosophers like Hume, for instance, explicitly shared the same goals with natural science. Therefore, philosophy of mind is included by Chomsky in the rather vague domain of the innumerable attempts to describe or represent human nature together with art and literature.

concerns the use of everyday language to express scientific theories. Chomsky argues that in no scientific discipline everyday terminology is admitted in the formulation of theories. In physics, for instance, theories never mention those elements that in our folk physics constitute the material world and its laws. However, Chomsky himself remarks that in all the disciplines folk knowledge is the starting point for further elaboration, and as far as progress is made the theories depart from common-sense understanding to become more and more abstract. It can be added that this process toward a more and more abstract conceptualization for the so-called hard sciences lasted centuries. The classical mechanics certainly is more intuitively comprehensible than present particle physics. In a much more limited span of time we can say that this same process has been followed by Chomskyan theory of syntax itself. Actually the first presentations of generative grammar were rather similar to what any person who has attended school recognizes as a grammar. The present theory of initial state, which is supposed to single out the basic features from which all grammars of natural languages can be derived, does not correspond to any intuition of folk psychology. According to Chomsky the language faculty can be studied in the way that is usually adopted to construct scientific theories. And this is the aim that is pursued by the theory of generative grammar. This work is founded on a ‘‘body of doctrine” constituted by the evidence provided by empirical research (what we know about the structure of different languages, experiments in psycholinguistics, etc.). Chomsky’s point of view on the relationship between language and communication and on the role of pragmatics derives from this epistemology: pragmatics can only deal with performance. The linguistic faculty can and must be defined in a way which is completely independent from the communicative use that in some situations – but not all – one can do of language. The fundamental character of the communicative use of language is to be submitted to intentionality, which is a general feature of human nature. This is the reason why the study of pragmatics cannot be undertaken in a naturalistic, i.e. scientific way. As Chomsky emphasizes, it is impossible to do the science of everything. ‘‘The study of communication in the actual world of experience is the study of the interpreter, but this is not a topic of empirical enquiry, for the usual reasons: there is no such topic as the study of everything” (p. 69). Let us focus now on a first question implied by this argument. As we have seen, Chomsky has defined a faculty of mind presiding over language, which is completely independent from communication. However, once one has defined the language faculty, the problem remains of the relations this faculty has with the other faculties of the mind. As regards semantics, certainly Chomsky thoroughly criticizes linguistic semantics, which attempts to achieve

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the hard, not to say desperate, goal to build a general theory of reference, i.e. of the relations that words and concepts bear to objects, properties and states of affairs in the external world (Bilgrami, 2002). Nonetheless, even if Chomsky does not treat this topic in a systematic way, he mentions the possibility that faculties of mind correlated with the semantic aspect of language be a constitutive part of human biological endowment. Chomsky proposes a sort of extension of the ‘‘poverty of the stimulus” argument to show this. ‘‘The study of meaning has to face the fact that extremely limited exposure in highly ambiguous circumstances suffices for children to come to understand the meanings of words and other expressions with remarkable delicacy, far beyond anything that the most comprehensive dictionaries and grammars begin to convey, with refinements and intricacy that are barely beginning to be understood. For such reasons, empirical inquiry has sought to discover semantic properties that are innate and universal.‘‘(Chomsky, 2000, p. 185). Moreover, contrary to Putnam (1988), he argues that there are grounds to consider the innateness of concepts as a reasonable hypothesis (even when we take concepts like carburetor or bureaucrat). One could draw the conclusion that some aspects of semantics, which are not possibly included into syntax, would therefore deserve a scientific analysis. Actually, the effort made by developmental psychologists to construct a body of doctrine on concept formation, and therefore to found a ‘‘natural semantics” has already given interesting results. In particular, as mentioned by Chomsky himself, we can include researches on neonates and young children trying to establish human endowment as regards the concepts of time, space, number, etc. However, these aspects of mental activity do not fall within the scope of linguistics. If we follow the internalist standpoint advocated by Chomsky, the aim to be pursued in this field of research is to construct a theory of the conceptual faculty. If we grant this point we have also to recognize that what Chomsky calls the language faculty is constrained very early in the development by another faculty presiding over the formation of concepts. The language faculty thus produces language constrained by the conceptual faculty. The study of some specific linguistic expressions may in turn give us empirical material to understand how are constructed the concepts that humans are able to formulate. Presuppositions are an example of this kind (Airenti & Colombetti, 1992). Let us focus on pragmatics. For Chomsky, as we have seen, given that pragmatics is the discipline to which all intentional features of language are attributed, it cannot be studied in a naturalistic way. But how is pragmatics defined? As Levinson (1983) has already remarked, many different definitions of pragmatics have been proposed. The prevailing point of view considers pragmatics as the use of language in context. This means that in the very definition of pragmatics is included its being part of commu-

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nicative performance. However if our aim is to look for those basic faculties of the mind, which are involved in linguistic expression, we must recognize that even prelinguistic infants have a capacity to interact with others in a significant way. We can then formulate the hypothesis that human beings have a communicative faculty that develops before and independently of language. Therefore, communication can be seen as a faculty of the mind and its relationship with the language faculty would be to constrain it. It would follow from this line of reasoning that if Chomsky is right about the language faculty, then an internalist theory of language should assume that the language faculty is constrained at least by two others faculties the conceptual faculty and the communication faculty. This is completely compatible with Chomsky’s point of view according to which an actual language can be the result of different mental faculties, one of which is the language faculty (Chomsky, 1975). In the following I shall try to support this argument with respect to the relationship between language and communication. To introduce this topic it is useful to mention the most recent point of view expressed by Chomsky in collaboration with two comparative psychologists. Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002) examine the different hypotheses that have been formulated on the evolution of the faculty of language. To this aim they propose a distinction between a faculty of language-narrow sense (FLN) and a faculty of language-broad sense (FLB). The first is syntax and has as main feature recursion, while the second includes the first combined with other two systems, the sensory-motor and the conceptual–intentional. The FLN is the computational system that generates internal representations and maps them into the sensory-motor interface by the phonological system and into the conceptual–intentional interface by the semantic system. As regards the evolution of the language faculty, the authors argue that two opposite hypotheses have been proposed each counting on a number of supporters: (a) FLB is strictly homologous to animal communication and (b) FLB is a derived, uniquely human adaptation for language. According to the authors none of them is sufficiently corroborated by the available comparative data. Their own hypothesis then is that ‘‘most, if not all” FLB is based on mechanisms shared with nonhuman animals. The mechanism of recursion could be a recent evolution (about 6 millions years) specific to our species. The authors have more recently tried to confirm the hypothesis that recursion is typical of our species showing that monkeys are unable to master a grammar incorporating hierarchical structure (Fitch & Hauser, 2004). Other researchers instead have tried to disconfirm this hypothesis showing that starlings can be trained to reliably discriminate between two different patterns of organization of the sounds they produce (Gentner, Fenn, Margoliash, & Nusbaum, 2006). The discussion is still open, as both attempts have been criticized because of the excessive simplicity of the grammars used to test the

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animals.3 The point I intend to discuss here regards the other half of the original hypothesis: namely the fact that ‘‘most if not all” FLB should be based on mechanisms shared with nonhuman animals. I maintain that human communication is based on specific mechanisms. This has two consequences: (i) humans are distinct from nonhuman primates not only because of a different access to language but also with respect to communication and (ii) it is possible to formulate a theory of human communication which is not a theory of everything. 3. Collective action and communication In daily life we are familiar with a communicative use of language. From this it does not follow that language and communication are necessarily dependent on each other. Chomsky (1975) has argued that language is the expression of thought. Language can be used appropriately without any goal of inducing an auditory, that can also be absent, to hold a given belief or to do a given action. Communication for Chomsky is only one function of language and not an essential one. To better understand this relationship we can analyze two kinds of situations where language and communication can be found disjoined, pathology and development. A number of cases of pathology analyzed in the literature show the possibility of mastering grammar when normal cognitive or communicative capacities are lacking. This has been used as evidence in favor of the autonomy of grammar from other cognitive structures (Blank, Gessner, & Esposito, 1979; Bellugi, Marks, Bihrle, & Sabo, 1988; Udwin & Yule, 1991; Yamada, 1990). Smith, Tsimpli, and Ouhalla (1993) made an experimental study with Christopher, a polyglot savant. Christopher was institutionalized, because unable to look after himself and in several tests he presented great deficits in nonverbal IQ. Nevertheless, he was able to translate into English from sixteen languages. The experiment consisted in teaching him two more languages, the Berber and the Epun, an invented language designed to violate the principles of universal grammar. The main result of the experiment was that Christopher, while being successful with Berber, did not succeed to acquire Epun. In clinical literature we find also cases where the communicative ability is preserved while the grammar is never

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From a semiotical point of view, Thibault (2005), criticizes the work by Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch for the split they postulate between biological factors and environment, which leads these authors to see recursion in language as an internal computational process. Thibault, relying on the systemic functional linguistic by Halliday (1994), argues against this account of recursion, maintaining that the emergence of a ranked scale of lexicogrammatical units in the early language of children and in Kanzi, a bonobo trained to use a lexigram board to interact with humans by S. Savage-Rumbaugh (Savage-Rumbaugh, Murphy, Sevcik, Brakke, & Williams, 1993), depends on the increasing complexity and semiotic reach of agents’ interactions with their ecosocial environment.

completely acquired. The case of Genie (Curtiss, 1977), for instance, can be read from two different points of view. It shows that grammar can be acquired only in a very reduced way if the acquisition has been impeded for a long time (Genie was exposed to language only when she was thirteen). But it also shows that a grammatical impairment does not affect communicative capacities. Goodwin, Harness Goodwin, and Olsher (2002) have studied the case of an aged man diagnosed with severe nonfluent aphasia after a stroke. This person who could use only three words (yes, no, and), an extremely limited number of sounds and the movements of the left hand and arm, was still able to exploit prosody and participate in dialogues with other people. In this case we have a certain level of communicative capacity persisting even when language has virtually disappeared. A second set of data comes from developmental studies. Infants are involved in interactions for at least one year before the first rudiments of language appear. It seems then sensible to inquiry on the communicative nature of first interactions. Moreover, nonverbal communication persists also after the acquisition of language and it accompanies language all along the adult life. Thus it is reasonable to pose the question: does a communicative faculty exist that develops independently of language? And in case of affirmative answer to this question, how is this capacity structured and which are its relations with other cognitive capacities? Any attempt to give an answer to these questions previously requires defining communication. The term communication is sometimes used to mean a simple transmission of information from a system to another one. For instance, Bateson (1979) maintained that the entire universe is a mind where at any level there is transmission of information: according to our interests we focalize on a level or another. But even if we would accept that linguistic communication is the human species-specific form of a wider communicative capacity, this would leave open the debate on the relationship that the transmission of information in the animal world, at all levels of complexity, from bees to chimpanzees, has with human communication. Moreover, it is clear that development has to be taken into account. In humans there are important – not only quantitative but also qualitative – differences between the ability to interact of a neonate and adult communication. In recent years several authors have discussed the relationship between language and communication from an evolutionary standpoint. Bickerton (1995) argues that it is a mistake to conceive language simply as a means of communication. The evolution of syntax has been the catastrophic event that has made humans different from all other species. It is language that underlies human thought and has provided humans with the means to go beyond the exigencies of the moment creating a level of secondary representation. Animals and human infants (and adult pidgin speakers) have a form of expression inferior to language, a protolanguage. Many features distinguish protolanguage

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from language. In particular, protolanguage is restricted as it is not based on the mechanism of recursion and can be interpreted only using contextual information. Hattiangadi (1987) criticizes Chomsky’s theory, defined as essentialistic because it postulates a structural property common to all languages. He supports an evolutionary point of view and argues that language is a system of communication, which has evolved in the ability of abstract understanding. Thus, also for this author language is at the origin of human reflexivity. The evolutionary point of view has given origin to different theories but what these theories have in common is to distinguish language considered as the basis of human abstract thinking from some form of protolanguage, which is a previous rudimentary form of expression. The path I will follow will be instead to see the relationship between language and communication from an ontogenetic point of view. I will argue that what we see in infants is not a protolanguage but a specifically human predisposition to communication that emerges very early in life and is distinct from language. In linguistic pragmatics, the problem of defining the principles of communication is not in the agenda because the supposed aim of pragmatics is to describe linguistic performances.4 The philosophers of language have faced the problem of defining communication. Their object is to identify mental states, which make that a linguistic exchange can be defined as communicative. This can be viewed as an internalist standpoint even if, as we shall see, cognition is not defined in psychological terms. I refer here to two sets of theories, Gricean theories and speech act theory. Discussing the variant forms of these theories goes beyond the scope of this article. The interesting point here is that these theories do have differences but have a basic tenet in common, i.e. the definition of communication as a form of intentional action. For Chomsky, this means that a naturalistic theory of communication is not possible because it should include all human activity and it is not possible to make a theory of everything. For philosophers of language, on the contrary, this means that communication inherits all the features of intentional action. The consequence is that, as human behavior is rational behavior also communication is submitted to the rules of rationality. Particularly clarifying is the position taken by Kasher (1991a, 1991b) who has explicitly proposed to use the concept of speech act in order to construct a theory of pragmatic competence compatible with Chomskyan position. Kasher agrees with Chomsky that language is not intrinsically communicative. However, Kasher contends that also

pragmatics is independent of communication. He claims that a pragmatic competence does exist which is constituted of the rules governing speech acts. According to this author if these rules can be formulated without mentioning a possible recipient, they actually are independent of communication.5 For Kasher this is really the case: it is possible to define a question as a way to introduce a problem without necessarily mentioning in the definition a recipient to whom the question is addressed. These rules constitute what Kasher (1991a), in analogy with the core-grammar proposed by Chomsky, calls the core-pragmatics. The problem with core-pragmatics is that it includes only a very limited part of pragmatics. Only some speech acts are included.6 Moreover, some fundamental aspects of pragmatics like conversational implicatures, politeness rules, nonliteral uses of language are excluded. In fact, also on this point Kasher is in complete consonance with Chomsky. ‘‘It turns out that one of the most important areas of pragmatics is not purely linguistic, in an interesting sense. Some of the most impressive insights into the operation of language use are found not to capture an essential property of language use per se, but rather reflect an intrinsic property of intentional activity in general.” (Kasher, 1991b, p.578) So an internalist pragmatics can be defined only if pragmatics is restricted in such a way to severe all links with communication. The most interesting phenomena characterizing communication are not intrinsically linguistic and by this fact can only be part of general intentional activity. On this view communicative interaction becomes a mere form of action. Let us analyze more in detail how the link between communication and action has been constructed. We can retrace it in the development of the notion of speech act (Austin, 1946). Austin, analyzing the institutional use of language, has discovered its social value. Some social acts are performed through acts of uttering specific words or sentences in the appropriate conditions. Afterwards, Austin himself and his successors have extended this point of view and have shown that the use of language is always an attempt to change the world through some specific communicative modalities corresponding to different illocutionary intentions (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969). Communication is defined in this perspective as a form of action, which uses language. Grice shares this perspective too. Grice (1975, 1978), to explain the cooperation principle that in his view is at the basis of human communication, explicitly mentions a situation where two persons are acting together. To com-

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4 The exception is Gazdar (1979), where however the intent to build a formal theory is at the price to reduce pragmatics to presuppositions and implicatures. For Sperber and Wilson (1981) Gazdar’s work can be seen as the application of the techniques developed within the field of formal semantics to a small set of pragmatic phenomena, explicit but of no much interest.

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Kasher (1991b) submits all different aspects of pragmatics to the test of modularity, using the criteria proposed by Fodor (1983) and in particular the principle of informative encapsulation and the principle of domain specificity. His goal is to show that this part of pragmatics is an independent module of mind. 6 Promises, for instance, are excluded – due to the fact that in their constitutive rules some beliefs of the speaker on the recipient are comprised – and declarations because these are acts which need to be comprehended institutional and not merely linguistic knowledge.

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municate, in his example, is the same case of two persons mending a car. There is a common goal to which the participants cooperate, both doing the part they have been assigned in the most adequate way. This is true even if their ultimate goals can be completely divergent. For instance, one of them can look forward the car being mended only to flee with it. Another example that is normally used is that of musicians playing together. Two musicians playing in a duet both make their part in a common project. However, since Austin’s first formulation an important shift occurred. If in the first definition of speech act it was question of an institution giving strength to words and transforming them in social actions, in the successive formulations intentions regarding collective actions have entered the mind of human beings. What for Austin was a social fact has become a cognitive process. This concept has been expressed in different ways. For Grice the principle of cooperation is the basis for the interpretation of utterances. Kasher (1976, 1982) suggests that the principle of cooperation should be replaced by a general principle of rationality. Searle defines social behavior, of which conversation is an instance, as dependent on a mental state that he calls collective intentionality. When two persons do something together, like to push a car or speak, collective intentions take the place of individual intentions that normally cause action. In this case each actor performs her action as part of a shared action (Searle, 1990). Collective intentionality causes cooperation. According to this point of view people cooperate even in situations of conflict or competition. Two persons who insult each other at a party realize a form of higher-level cooperation, in the same way that two players in competition cooperate in participating to a match. Therefore, for Searle the use of language is part of human action, which has two dimensions, an individual and a collective one. For these two dimensions the mind provides for two different primitive mental states, intentions and collective intentions. It must be noted that for Searle also collective intentions being mental states are part of the content of individual minds. Other authors have proposed different formalizations of collective intentions (Tuomela & Miller, 1988; Bratman, 1992). In spite of the differences, the positions of these philosophers have in common the focus put on the concept of engagement to make one’s part in an activity shared with others.7 Within psychology on a similar position we find the work of Clark (1996). In his view linguistic communication is only one of the components of the interactions in which humans are commonly engaged. According to circumstances, this component may acquire more or less weight. Then for this author communicative acts are a kind of joint acts. To take Clark’s

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Tuomela (1993) emphasizes the fact that the notion of cooperative disposition has to be taken distinct from a psychological state of altruism. In fact a joint action can be seen as cooperative even if it is performed under coercion. Then we still have cooperation also when the engagement in a joint action is determined only by the fear of a sanction.

example, the client and the cashier of a supermarket at the moment of payment are engaged in a joint action that involves, among other acts, also the performance of some linguistic exchanges. Often, like in the case cited above of musicians playing together, as noted by Clark himself, the result is the product of long sessions of coordination. But, according to him, even if it were possible to imagine a case where no difference is perceived between a musician playing her part alone or in duet, one execution would be the product of an individual action while the other would be the product of a joint action. Every participant to a joint action intends to do her part to attain a common goal and holds the belief that the other too does her part and shares the same intentions and beliefs. The great majority of examples proposed by Searle and by Clark involves situations in which rules exist beyond the intentions of the specific individual participants: what people do on a football field, in court or at the cash-desk of a supermarket is not decided every time but follows already established rules. This is why we can speak of high-level cooperation also when the participants are in competition like in a match of football, or defend opposite interests as it happens in court. It is the institution that makes the behavior appear as cooperative. The fact that in social situations the actions of the participants look connected from an outside look is not a demonstration of the existence of a specific mental state causing interaction. The uncontroversial truth that communication is a kind of social action does not imply that the cognitive processes underlying communication can be derived from the ones underlying rational action. In fact, the traditional argument is twofold: (i) communication is a kind of rational interaction and (ii) in terms of mental states the relevant distinction is between individual action and collective action. I shall try to show that communication is not a form of rational action and that cooperating in an activity with another person and communicating with someone imply different cognitive processes. Joint action demands coordination and is the result of an agreement either undertaken by the individuals participating to it, or crystallized in structures previously stipulated. Communication, on the contrary, is an action intrinsically dual. It is possible to act alone, it is possible to speak alone, but it is impossible to communicate alone. 4. Action, communication and the development of the theory of mind Theories of communicative development in children usually utilize a number of concepts formulated by philosophers of language. In particular, the concept of speech act has arisen interest because some authors have considered that it can help to explain the transition from preverbal to verbal communication (Bates, Camaioni, & Volterra, 1975; Bruner, 1975, 1983). Children would learn communicative features of speech acts already in the preverbal phase and later these communicative features would be

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transferred to the correspondent verbal form. The typical example is the act of request, considered as a protoimperative. In the interactions with adults children acquire the conditions for the act of request already when requests are performed by pointing. In this case we would have speech acts without speech. This position has been criticized for different reasons within the field of developmental psychology. Dore (1978) considers that the linguistic component is essential in the definition of a speech act and does not accept the equation between nonverbal communicative acts and proper illocutionary acts. Other authors have shown that different speech acts require different representational capacities (Astington, 1988; Camaioni, 1993). It has been argued that speech act theory cannot be the basis of a plausible account of developmental data (Papafragou, 2000; Ninio & Snow, 1996; Snow, Alexander Pan, ImbensBaily, & Herman, 1996; Airenti, 2005). In fact, when we study the development of young children’s abilities in interactions we find the same problems that have arisen in the analysis of adults’ communication. If we take a cognitive point of view the analysis of communicative intentions is always required. We have then to rely on Gricean theory of communication and a fundamental question relevant to the definition of the nature of communication is the development of the theory of mind. Actually, Grice does not use the term ‘communication’ but defines what he calls nonnatural meaning. Gricean theory of nonnatural meaning maintains that communication requires two intentions, the intention to achieve an effect on a recipient and the intention that the previous intention is recognized (Grice, 1957). The goal of this definition is to make a clear distinction between human communication and all situations involving a nonintentional transfer of information. Starting from Strawson (1964), other authors have integrated and elaborated this definition to rule out cases of noncommunicative transfer of information that the original definition does not eliminate. In fact, it can be shown that no definition including a finite number of nested intentions is acceptable. For any nth-order intention there is always the possibility that the intention n + 1 is not verified making the interactive situation not fully overt (Airenti, Bara, & Colombetti, 1993a). Schiffer (1972) has proposed to solve the problem introducing the concept of mutual knowledge or belief. This concept allows to modify the original Grice’s formulation postulating as a condition for the speaker’s meaning that the recognition by the recipient of the intention of the speaker to produce an effect on the recipient by the recognition of the intention itself be mutual knowledge between the speaker and the recipient. The analysis of the speaker’s meaning, as defined by Schiffer, involves then a regress ad infinitum in the intentions that a communicative intention be recognized.8

In any case according to Grice and his followers communication implies inferences about the others’ mental states, hence a theory of mind. Here the developmental data become very interesting. In fact, we know that children acquire progressively the ability to represent their owns and others’ mental states. Different authors have different points of view on the development of the theory of mind in children, but almost everybody agrees that a complete development of the theory of mind is not verified before four years when children are successful in the false belief task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). So we are in a situation where to explain adult communication it has been necessary to postulate higher-level mental states, i.e. a completely developed theory of mind, while we know that young children have not yet developed it. This means that in humans communication should not develop before four years.9 As regards the comparative aspects, the consequence is that we can think of the possibility of communication in animals only if we can demonstrate that they have a theory of mind. Actually another possibility has been proposed. The theory of Grice is compatible with the point of view on the theory of mind formulated by Leslie (1987). For Leslie the theory of mind is a module, which matures at around 18/24 months allowing the child both to communicate and to make pretend play. But what is the content of this module? For Leslie, this module is the innate metarepresentative basis, which constitutes the essential character of the theory of mind. The child can count on this capacity before having completely developed the problem solving ability (Scholl & Leslie, 1999). Therefore, in this perspective a two-year-old has a metarepresentative notion of belief but this notion is hidden due to performance limitations. This is supposed to explain why children under four are not able to face successfully false belief tasks. In a more recent version of the theory the authors postulate that successful reasoning with metarepresentation needs an inhibitory selection process blocking the true-belief default. This mechanism develops ‘‘slowly through the pre-school period and well beyond” (Leslie, Friedman, & German, 2004). The fact that the metarepresentative capacity necessarily develops around two years can be criticized both with respect to pretend play and with respect to communication. As far as pretend play is concerned, it has been shown that it can be explained parsimoniously without the need of metarepresentations (Jarrold, Carruthers, Smith, & Boucher, 1994). In relation with communication the argument of the supporters of a precocious development of the capacity of metarepresentation is the following. From the fact that communication requires higher-level representations and young children are able to produce forms of ostensive communication10 like the acts of pointing and of showing, it can

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8

This solution has been seen as problematic by Grice (1969) himself both for formal and psychological reasons.

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A similar point of view is presented in Risjord (1996). The ostensive character of communication has been proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986). 10

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be deduced, that children must be able to construct higherlevel representations (Leslie & Happe´, 1989). However, Grice’s definition of communication, is a theoretical construct, which has to be supported by empirical evidence, and cannot be used as evidence itself for the actual development of children’s mind. If the theory of Grice seems inadequate to give account of children communication, we should think of a different theory satisfying our requirements. The major point is to overcome the definition of communication in terms of the minimal requisites making an interaction successful from the communicative point of view. Instead, communication is to be seen as a human faculty which develops and which proceeds through some recognizable successive stages. We can make the hypothesis that communication is not an all or none phenomenon but instead that there are simple forms of communication and complex ones. This hypothesis derives both from a theoretical presupposition and from an empirical observation. The theoretical question is that communicating is a human cognitive ability. Therefore it is relevant to study how it appears and how it develops. The empirical observation is that even if a child indicating a ball and an adult making a subtle irony seem to do rather different things, yet both cases are instances of communication. The aim of the approach I am proposing here is to find out if continuity can be identified in the different forms of communication since infancy to adulthood, and how it reveals itself (Airenti, 1998, 2001). Moreover, it is interesting in this perspective to understand if the gesture of the child indicating the ball has something in common with the interactions that other primates have with their conspecifics and with their human caretakers. This hypothesis is connected also with a hypothesis on the theory of mind. We will agree with those approaches maintaining that the child’s representative capacity appears following successive stages of which metarepresentation is the last step (Perner, 1991). The representative capacity is considered as the development of the first forms of intersubjectivity that we find in newborns (Trevarthen, 1979; Bra˚ten, 1998). We can then hold that to different representative abilities correspond different communicative abilities. I shall now pursue this point of view. I shall start analyzing what characterizes adult communicative interactions. Then, going backward, I shall investigate what a young child can do with simpler representative modalities. What makes us infer that adult communication needs a theory of mind able to deal with metarepresentations? There are a certain number of features of adult communication, which seem to require the concept of metarepresentation. Adults are able to use forms of complex communication like irony and deceit. These two forms of communication involve explicit inferences about others’ beliefs, in the case of deceit in order to manipulate them according to one’s goals, in the case of irony in order to exploit them for conversational aims. An element in favor of this point of view is that developmental literature shows

that young children are unable to understand these two communicative forms (as regards deceit see for instance Leekman, 1992; Peskin, 1992; Sodian, 1991; as regards irony see Lucariello & Mindolovich, 1995; Winner, 1988). Another fundamental feature of communication is the ability to handle with failure. In the case of failure of a communicative act, an adult searches for its cause in order to perform a repair. In the simplest case, i.e. the other does not react to a communicative act of mine, the cause can be attributed to facts of so different level as ‘‘there was too noise and she did not hear” or ‘‘I embarrassed her and she cannot answer”(Airenti, Bara, & Colombetti, 1993b). So failure repair demands a complex procedure in several steps: the failure has to be detected, a possible cause singled out and an adequate strategy of repair planned and executed. Etnometodologists have thoroughly analyzed repair, showing that in adult conversation the repair strategies are rather elaborated (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977). Also in the case of failure the developmental evidence is that young children are unable to deal with it. The youngest children are completely unable to react while later they use very poor strategies, like simple repetition or louder repetition (Golinkoff, 1983). When it is the child who does not understand what she has been told, her request of clarification is again very simple (Snow, Alexander Pan, Imbens-Baily, Herman, 1996). Finally, adults do not only express communicative intentions, but also manifest them with appropriate conversational modalities. In particular, they use those modalities that every culture provides for preserving conversationalists’ face (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Scholars working on conversation have described in an accurate way the different modalities that are normally practiced to this aim (the use of indirect forms of speaking, the preference for self-repair, various ways to avoid non preferred responses, etc.). These conversational abilities are not natural for young children. They do not use them. This is why we find children’s communication clumsy in the best of cases and rude in the worst. No child spontaneously acquires the knowledge that the direct communication of a will or of a refusal is in general unacceptable with respect to the rules of conversation. This is the part of pragmatics, which is matter of explicit teaching (Foster, 1990). There are data on this point coming from different cultures and languages, like American, Turkish and Japanese (AksuKocß & Slobin, 1985; Clancy, 1985; Gleason & Weintraub, 1976; Greif & Gleason, 1980). These aspects of pragmatics become part of the common knowledge about communication rules only in a later phase of development. To be able to apply correctly the rules devoted to preserve face the child must be able to deal with metarepresentations, i.e. be able to represent herself and others as subjects having mental states. Gordon and Ervin-Tripp (1984) have shown as a four-year-old switched from imperative to polite (then indirect) forms depending on being certain or uncertain about the fact that the response would be an affirmative one.

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The aspects of communication that I have just mentioned, due to their complexity, develop in children in several years (Airenti, 2004). I do not discuss them here. For my present aim it is sufficient to recognize that these abilities require metarepresentations and that develop in humans not before four years. Instead, it is useful to discuss the comparative issue. Is it possible to find these abilities in nonhuman primates? This question has been extensively studied with respect to deceit. Starting with the famous experiment carried out by Menzel (1974), different authors have collected a certain number of cases in which chimpanzees apparently showed the ability to perform and discover deceits (Whiten & Byrne, 1988). If we compare this ability showed by chimpanzees with analogous behaviors performed by children, we can say that the behavior of chimpanzees has a resemblance with the behavior of 3-year-olds who happen to be in similar situations.11 A young child who has made something wrong will normally try to hide the traces of her action to prevent punishment. Experimental studies have shown that a distinction has to be posed between the capacity to construct anti-planning in sabotage, tasks which has been shown in 3-year-olds, and real deception which requires the manipulation of beliefs and develops later (Sodian, 1991; Leekman, 1992). We can deduce that at an early stage a certain form of deceit, based on problem solving capacities is present both in chimpanzees and in children. In chimpanzees then, like in children under 4 years of age, we do not find deceit in the form of belief manipulation, but as a form of complex interpersonal action. This is consistent with the comparative work presented by Premack (1988). The conclusion of this study is that chimpanzees and 3-yearolds are normally successful in the same nonverbal cognitive tests. Instead, chimpanzees are unable to pass the tests in which 4-year-olds are successful. These data lead to the conclusion that the ability shown by chimpanzees to perform some forms of deceit is not a demonstration that they have a concept of representation, that is the capacity of metarepresentation. If we consider that the theory of mind is the capacity to represent oneself and the others through different modalities which have different developments, the ability to represent the others as actors is a component of it, the one corresponding to what Wellman (1990) has called the psychology of desire. This means the ability to establish a link between goals, desires and the actions that these goals and desires obtain and therefore to expect courses of actions. It means also the ability to make attempts to prevent undesirable effects that others’ actions could bring about. Finally this means the ability to expect that the actor have positive emotions in the case of a successful action and negative ones in case of failure. As

11 Younger children will have even more primitive behaviors. A nineteenmonth-old child to escape from her mother and do something which is prohibited can try to have the mother seated in a far place in order to be able to flee. A similar behavior can be found in a dog (Dennett, 1978).

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regards the representative power required, Perner (1991) shows that metarepresentation is not necessary. The capacity to manipulate two models of reality is sufficient to represent temporal change and then the effects of actions. From these experimental data and their interpretation we can draw an interesting conclusion. The capacity of action, also of interpersonal action, which children around three years and chimpanzees have in common, does not shed light on the specific features that characterize human communication. A model of the other as an actor with concordant or discordant goals with respect to one’s own does not seem to be a model of the other sufficient to explain adult communication. We can now proceed backward to analyze what happens in simpler forms of communication, i.e. those forms of communication realized in the preverbal phase. Our aim is to find out those cognitive capacities that make them possible. Neonates start to interact with others at birth. At which stage of the development are we entitled to speak of communication? As we have seen, a possibility is to define as communication only the final stage, when all the abilities characterizing adult communication have been acquired. Also some developmental psychologists assume this position (Shatz, 1983). In this case we should admit that for a long period children interact both in nonverbal and verbal way but that these interactions cannot be considered as communicative. In fact, developmental research has discovered that very early children participate in a process of mutual attunement with others. This has led some authors to postulate a basic predisposition of humans to interact with conspecifics founded on a number of specific capacities, including the so-called precursors of the theory of mind (Trevarthen, 1979; Trevarthen & Hubley, 1978). Children begin in their first months to construct with their caregivers shared contexts. I argue that these shared contexts make the simple gestures and sounds that a neonate may produce communicative. Let us analyze the data in favor of this hypothesis. Newborns and adults perform routines that are repeated several times. In these routines an important role is played by imitation, where the initiative is taken in turn by both partners. Meltzoff and his collaborators in almost thirty years of experiments have studied the development of imitation from facial imitation of neonates in their first hours to differed imitation already possible at 9 month to the imitation of unsuccessful acts by 15/18month-olds (Meltzoff, 1999). Vocal imitation of vowel sounds has been proved in infants since 12 weeks of age (Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1996). These studies show that imitation is the simplest tool available to newborns to start a relationship with others. Imitation allows infants to develop the capacity to acknowledge the others’ similarity, and in this sense it can be seen as a fundamental element in the development of the theory of mind (Meltzoff & Gopnik, 1993). The interesting point here is that the capacity of imitation is exploited both by the caretaker and the child to build typical exchanges. It is then reasonable to think that the discovery of the others’ similarity and the possibility to interact

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with them are two related phenomena. If imitation is not a mere reflex we have to explain it by an innate attitude to share experience.12 Actually if we analyze episodes of imitation in their context we can interpret them as a relatively pure way to exhibit interaction. The researches have shown that if imitation persists in the neonate, at the same time, during the first months the initial facial imitation declines while vocal imitation increases. Children take into the interaction their abilities as soon as they become available (Kugiumutzakis, 1999). In a later phase when action capacity is developed the possibility of imitation grows so to include external objects. At the basis of imitation in the child there is not only the capacity to perceive a human face as something different from anything else (Fantz, 1961), but also that of producing expressions of emotion and eliciting emotions in turn (Trevarthen, 1993). With respect to the auditory aspects of imitation, it is now well known that the child has already acquired in the mother’s womb the ability to recognize and prefer the prosody of a language and of familiar voices (De Casper & Fifer, 1980; De Casper & Spence, 1986). Another crucial aspect underlying interactions is the capacity to share attention. A 2-month-old is already able to follow the change of focus of attention of an adult (Scaife & Bruner, 1975). The capacity to share attention passes through different stages, which have been thoroughly studied (Butterworth, 1991). When children develop motor abilities, the act of calling the adult’s attention to objects to share the excitement of discovery seems to be the natural development of sharing looks and sounds, which we have seen in the newborn.13 The child then in a very precocious phase interacts with adults exhibiting a significant natural endowment. Crucially, all these elements organize in the turn-taking frame that constitutes interactions. The spectrographic analysis of exchanges between neonates and adults shows that they follow regular rhythms. The newborns participate to the interactions coordinating their rhythm with the adult’s one. This analysis has been performed on the interactions of a 6-week-old baby with her

12 In the literature there are studies which claim that the importance of precocious imitation has been overestimated. It has been argued that the number of gestures actually imitated has to be reduced (Anisfeld, 1996) and that it cannot be excluded the possibility that they are simple reflexes (Heyes, 2001). However, Meltzoff and other authors have made a great number of experiments in order to exclude the hypothesis of reflex (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977, 1994). Moreover, studies made in different laboratories have documented a range of acts that can be imitated (Meltzoff, 2005). Anyway, the most convincing fact on this matter is that children in their first months change the objects of imitation, but the phenomenon of imitation persists (Kugiumutzakis, 1999). 13 Some authors, in particular Baron-Cohen (1991), claim that to attract attention to an object not in order to have it but simply to show it requires the capacity to represent the others as endowed of mental states. Therefore, shared attention would be the main step in the acquisition of the theory of mind. Butterworth (1991) on the contrary argues that ecological factors can explain this phenomenon in a more parsimonious way.

mother and on the interactions of a premature born 8week-old baby with her father (Malloch, Sharp, Campbell, Campbell, & Trevarthen, 1997; Trevarthen, Kokkinaki, & Fiamenghi, 1999). The scholars working on conversation have based their descriptive analysis of dialogue on the concept of turn (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). In fact, if the dynamic of turns is one of the elements of conversation, the fact of including not only words but also gestures, sounds, smiles in the alternation of turns constitutes the basis for communication. Respecting the alternation of turns means foreseeing the other, it is a way to make one’s gesture a gesture addressed to the other. The fact that infants actively participate to imitative exchanges of sounds or gestures with the adults shows that they have a predisposition: – to draw the other’s attention on their acts, i.e. to share one’s experiences with others – to use to this aim the modality to include one’s gestures in the context of alternation The fact that the behavior of the child is not due to chance is shown by a certain number of facts: (a) all pairs construct and repeat their games (Newson, 1979); (b) dyadic patterns can be different following the affective state of the infant. Stern, Jaffe, Beebe, and Bennett (1975) have shown that in 3/4-month-old infants who are in a state of particular affective excitement the pattern of alternation is replaced by the one of simultaneity, exactly as it happens in adult communication; (c) in experimental situations it has been possible to demonstrate that, facing the mother who suddenly interrupts a normal interaction, 6/12-weekold infants try to reestablish the interaction (Tronick, Als, & Adamson, 1979; Murray & Trevarthen, 1985). This in turn means that the child acknowledges: – what an interaction is and – what counts as an interruption. I argue that these features establish a constitutive background for communication. Any action performed within this format (including smiles, sounds, etc.) counts as a communicative act (Airenti, 2005). To summarize, we can say that infants participate to the interactions with adults exhibiting a basic endowment that predisposes them to communication. This endowment allows them to join into what for an adult is the normal rhythm of alternation that characterizes communicative exchanges. What the infant and the adult perform takes meaning as part of the exchange. Both partners recognize exchanges. We can then formulate the hypothesis that those are, from a cognitive point of view, the bases for communication. In Airenti et al. (1993a) we have presented a model of adult communication, whose elements are a basic communicative intention and behavior games. According to this model, understanding a communicative intention is to

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establish the link between the communicative act and a game of which it can be part. We define a game as a shared pattern of linguistic or not linguistic acts performed by actor and partner within a frame of alternation. For instance, it is the game taxi-driver/client which allows the taxi-driver in Berlin to interpret ‘‘Wittemberg Platz” as a request to be driven at that address with the implicit engagement to pay what it is indicated by the taximeter. Similarly, the utterance ‘‘For tomorrow sun is forecast” is interpreted as a proposal of a bicycle ride in a situation where two friends in sunny days normally make a bicycle ride together. This basic schema seems to be present already in very young children. Already in first interactions the gestures of the infant and the actions of the adult become part of games that make them significant from the communicative point of view. In theoretical terms the hypothesis proposed is that sharedness underlying communication is not acquired through the use of higher and higher-level intentions but has to be considered as a primitive of communication. The appeal to higher-level beliefs may be determined by the failure of sharedness or by the intention to pursue specific communicative aims, as for instance to make a deceit.14 With respect to development this perspective means that if for an adult sharedness is the default value that can always be negated demanding higher-level inferences, for the young child it is the only available possibility. For the infant there are no different standpoints, but a unique reality. The infant lives in a world where an action is always shared with others. Therefore, infants already have at their disposal the basic elements to construct communicative interactions. However, there are a certain number of limitations: – the contents are very poor (facial expressions, simple gestures, sounds at the start) – the model of the other is very simple: the other is similar to me – this results in a very limited possibility to repair errors. Let us come back to the comparative point of view. What can be said about animal communication? If we are ready to consider as communicative the first rudimentary interactions involving infants, if we feel justified to use the concept of communication even in the absence of metarepresentations, may we apply this concept also to

14 With respect to adult communication, Clark and Marshall (1981) noted that the position according to which to achieve shared knowledge an infinite number of conditions has to be satisfied is psychologically implausible. Perner (1988) suggested that normal communication be based on the transparence of intentions and beliefs. This enables young children to communicate. The development of higher-order mental states on the contrary would be necessary to understand errors and non literal uses of language.

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other primates and possibly to other animals? A certain number of researches have sought in primates those capacities that seem to be at the basis of precocious child communication. It must be pointed out that the interest is focused on primates not because of the absence of these capacities in other animals. It is well known, for instance that vocal imitation is present in many birds (Baker & Cunningham, 1985) and in dolphins (Reiss & McCowan, 1993). However, these potentialities are inserted in a frame of capacities very different from the human ones. Therefore, they do not provide useful elements for the question we are discussing.15 For primates, there is little evidence of the presence of imitative behavior. In monkeys this kind of behavior is not present in the wild and has never been successfully induced in experimental situations. In chimpanzees imitation is not present in a natural form (Galef, 1988). Bard and Russell (1999) have reproduced the same experimental procedures used with human neonates with some infant chimpanzees to see if innate facial imitation exists. The results give no certain answer. In a very small sample some neonates have imitated the proposed facial gestures, but only one, tested for the first time when 7-day-old has repeated all the three proposed gestures. This evidence is not sufficient to support the position that facial imitation is an innate endowment in chimpanzees. Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner (1993) argued that in enculturated chimpanzees the enhancement of imitative learning abilities could be shown. One study to compare imitative learning in a situation of joint attention with an experimenter in 18-month-old children and chimpanzees has been carried out by Carpenter, Tomasello, and Savage-Rumbaugh (1995). Chimpanzees were in turn parted in two groups: mother-reared chimpanzees and chimpanzees reared in a human-like cultural environment. The results of this experiment show that the difference between children and the two groups of chimpanzees is the greater length of glances to the experimenter by the children and the greater use made by children of declarative gestures. On the contrary the encultured chimpanzees were situated between the children and mother-reared chimpanzees with respect to the attention they gave to an object in compliance with the request of the experimenter. The problem of attention is posed also by Gomez (Gomez, Sarria`, & Tamarit 1993). This author maintains that his studies on gorillas show the capacity of these animals to discriminate between attentive and nonattentive subjects even in the absence of a concept of attention. Every time the gorilla made a request to the experimenter, before performing it, made sure that a visual contact had been established, looking for the experimenter’s attention. This behavior is interpreted in terms of the ability of the

15

This leaves open the question now at the center of debate if, at least for the most evolved animals like dolphins and whales, it would be possible to conceive forms of social transmission (Rendell & Whitehead, 2001).

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gorilla to identify some body attitudes as manifestations of attentions. At the same time this does not imply the recognition of attention as a mental state. To this point the behavior of the gorilla is not different from the behavior of a young child. The difference between the gorilla and the child is that while the child uses this capacity also to show something, the gorilla uses it only to induce the other to do something. Why, then the author asks, if big apes have the ability to understand attention, do they use it only to attain immediate goals? What makes the difference between primates and children, is the answer, are motives. Big apes interact with the only aim to pursue their plans and possibly hinder actions that can prevent them. They do not have the attitude to share, which is typical of human beings. Studies on animals seem to show that what is specific of human infant is the fact to be directed to interaction independently from the necessity of immediate action. Interaction is not only one of the means used to make effective particularly complex action plans. Human interaction is an end in itself and all the abilities developed by the child are submitted to this capacity. Therefore communication cannot be reduced to rational action. In fact apes perform rational, goal-oriented actions without being able to establish real communicative interactions. Humans are, on the contrary, able to do both. Thus, the most basic element of the theory of mind seems to be the tendency to share that makes gestures and sounds meaningful both for oneself and another one. It is in this context that it becomes clear that imitation in birds and the imitation games between infants and adults have nothing in common. To conclude, we could say that some cognitive functions as imitation and shared attention are necessary conditions for the development of communication, but they are not sufficient. To assume the function they have in development they must be employed by an attitude toward sharedness, which is shown only by human infants (Premack & James Premack, 1994). No animal shows this ability naturally neither in the wild, nor when reared in strong contact with humans. In some experimental situations some results have been obtained, but these results are significantly due to big effort and isolated. Human beings communicate in the sophisticated and complex way we know because they develop the capacity to represent others’ mental states. This capacity has its roots in the attitude to share that infants have since their birth. The ability to plan actions, even interpersonal actions, is not the characterizing feature of human communication and it is precisely what we find in other primates and, in simpler forms, also in other mammals. If we come back to the article by Hauser et al., we can agree that actually some of FLB is shared with nonhuman animals but not all. Moreover, two remarks have to be added. First, not all animals have all the relevant abilities; these are scattered in a way that does not necessarily respect evolution (imitation is present in birds and not in chimpanzees). Second, what even the nearest primates lack

is the capacity to submit all the possessed abilities to the communicative aim. 5. Communication: the body of doctrine If, instead of relying on classical theories of communication, we focus on developmental and comparative studies we can see that a body of doctrine on communication actually exists. This can open the path to a naturalistic theory of communication. The study of communication in infants shows that most definitions of communication that we find within the field of pragmatics are not satisfactory because they do not allow seeing communication as a basic human faculty. In particular, the definition of communication as a specific kind of interpersonal action, deriving its basic features from rational action, is not adequate. Researches in developmental psychology show that in human infants the attitude toward action and the attitude toward interaction are two distinct capacities. Human beings start to interact with others at birth and the newborns utilize all their abilities to interact. They develop very precociously the capacity to recognize situations as social situations, i.e. situations where the behaviors of the participants are interdependent. The first step toward communication is then the ability of the infant to construct with others behavior games, i.e. frames of interactions the syntactic element of which is constituted by turn-taking and where, in a first phase the contents are very simple elements: facial expressions, simple gestures and sounds. Imitation probably is the simplest way to construct an interaction even in the absence of content. The ability to share attention in its different phases is the tool allowing the inclusion of external objects in the interaction, to go beyond, in Trevarthen’s words (1977), interaction without object. These first forms of interaction can be considered the degree 0 of communication. Actually, in the developed forms of communication this basic structure does not change. The pragmatic meaning of utterances can be understood only by relying it to a behavior game. In different phases of development humans use the representative capacities available to them and this determines different degrees of communicative capacity. At the beginning the infant conceives a world where everything is shared. Communication in its simplest form is possible. What are not possible are repair, deceit, and the use of politeness strategies. This requires understanding that different points of view are possible and thus higher-level representations. We can then draw the following conclusions: – Contrary to what the classical theories we have presented give for granted, in humans the distinction between communication and non communication is not in the form ‘all or none’. There are different degrees of communication. There are simple forms of communication and elaborated ones. Human beings acquire this capacity in several years due to the progressive develop-

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ment of different cognitive abilities. Planning rational action is one of these abilities, but it is not the first and it is not the only one. – In communication there are two basic components. One component is behavioral and is connected with the aim of the communicative act. The other component is conversational and is the modality used to achieve the desired aims. The behavior component is basic as it is basic the principle of exchange which is built in turntaking. The other conversational features are very important in social intercourse, but are not what defines communication. This leads to a general distinction between two levels of pragmatics: a deep pragmatics corresponding to an innate communicative competence, and a superficial pragmatics, depending on culture and acquired by learning. We can therefore answer the question we have posed at the beginning: a naturalistic theory of communication is possible if we define it as the study, on developmental and comparative basis, of the human cognitive processes involved in deep pragmatics. 6. Discussion The importance of sharedness has been recently stressed by M. Tomasello in his comparative work. In fact his present theory is a revision of the previous work on intentionality. Following the elaboration of the theory is useful to clarify the discussion on the links between action and interaction we are pursuing here. According to Tomasello (1999) there is just one feature, a biological adaptation that makes human beings different from nonhuman primates. It is the capacity that humans have to understand conspecifics as intentional beings. So it is the capacity of understanding intentionality that allows humans to understand action and communication. This capacity develops in children by about nine months of age. Nonhuman primates are intentional themselves in the sense that they can plan actions and infer what it is going to happen based on past experience. Human beings have something more in that they can attempt to affect intentional and mental states, not just behavior. Human beings then develop at a precocious age the possibility to learn by imitation in two fundamental domains: actions directed toward objects and the use of communicative symbols. Imitation here is seen in a restrictive way: the reproduction of a new behavior of an adult both in its form and its function. In this sense the first forms of imitations are excluded as no new behaviors are acquired (Tomasello et al., 1993). The results of research of recent years have lead Tomasello to revise his theory. What makes the difference between humans and primates is not the fact that humans understand actions as intentional. Actually, several studies have shown that nonhuman primates have a comprehension of intentional action that previously had been undetected (Tomasello, Call, & Hare, 2003). In particular, it has been shown that in exper-

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imental situations chimpanzees understand attempted actions and accidental actions, i.e. actions that do not have the attended result (Call, Hare, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2004). Moreover, chimpanzees know that others’ actions are influenced by perception. For instance, in a situation of competition for food a subordinate individual tried to appropriate the food which he alone could see and ignored the food which was visible also to the dominant individual (Hare, Call, Agnetta, & Tomasello, 2000; Hare, Call, & Tomasello, 2001). But still a difference remains with humans, which has to be explained. Tomasello and his collaborators argue that if the comprehension of intentional action is not a sufficient condition to explain human difference the hypothesis has to be made that humans are not simply endowed with intentionality, but with shared intentionality (Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behene, & Moll, 2005). In their first 14 months humans go from dyadic interactions in which behaviors and emotions are shared to triadic forms in which goals and perceptions are shared and later to a proper collaborative engagement based on shared attention and intentions. Thus humans differ from the other primates because they have not only intentionality but shared intentionality. Tomasello’s present point of view explicitly refers to analytical philosophy and the positions we have discussed in the third paragraph that consider shared intentionality as a mental state. This thesis fails to interpret observations made on the field on chimpanzees showing that there are situations where they can collaborate. During hunt chimpanzees seem to be able to synchronize and coordinate their movements, to anticipate others’ behavior and change their respective roles (Boesch, 2005). Moreover, recently the skill to collaborate has been at least partly demonstrated also in an experimental setting. Chimpanzees understood when to attain a goal a collaborator was necessary and chose the partner who had previously proven more effective (Melis, Hare, & Tomasello, 2006). I have argued that to explain all the data the concept of sharedness has to be separated by the concept of action (Airenti, 1999, 2003, 2009). In fact there are two forms of sharedness. Sharedness as a primitive mental state is the basis for communication. Only humans have this capacity and this can be derived by the fact that only humans participate to interactions that have no specific goal. Newborns interact with their mother before they can have any aim. Older children share with adults their discoveries and their amazements. Adults use a notable part of their communication just to keep in touch with others. There is another form of sharedness. It is the fact of doing something in coordination with someone else. This always implies a goal. It is a modality necessary to enlarge one’s own possibilities. To make the simplest example, two persons can lift a weight that one alone cannot lift. This capacity is not typically human. It has been shown in an experimental situation that chimpanzees could collaborate in lifting a weight (Povinelli & O’Neill, 2000). There are differences in the exercise of this capacity. Humans can

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