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This chapter reviews what has been learned about animal thinking from the study of animal communication and considers what we might hope to learn in the future. It begins with a discussion on the importance of informational versus non-informational interpretations of animal communication and then considers what inferences can be drawn about the cognitive requirements of communication from the communicative abilities of simple organisms. It discusses the importance of context to the meaning of animal signals and the possibility of asymmetries in the neural processes underlying production versus reception. Current theories on the evolution of human language are reviewed and how the study of animal communication informs these theories.

Communication is a central topic in animal behavior studies and yet the dispute over what constitutes communication is far from settled. This chapter provides an integrative framework that views communication, in its elementary form, as an interaction between two individuals (sender and receiver) involving the use of signals by the sender as well as the processing of and responses to those signals by the receiver. This framework defends the concept of information but rejects the notion that senders are generally selected to “provide” information and that information is “encoded” within a signal. The notion that animals process information creates a bridge from studies of communication to those assessing the cognitive underpinnings of communicative behavior.

This chapter discusses the complex communication of plants and animals. The co-evolutionary dynamics of this communication happens when the colour vision, and the senses that animals rely upon most for evaluating distant environment, evolved as an adaptation to locate colourful fruits against a predominantly green background. These dynamics further result in fine-tuned communication as plants provide energy rewards that provoke the sensory systems of mutualistic animals. The chapter also presents the connection between the plant–animal communications, and the communication theory. It concludes that studying plant–animal communication can be used as a model to advance the study of evolution of complex communication networks. The evolutionary significance of complex interactions for communication is also given some explanations.

Since the advent of the cognitive revolution in the 1960s, animals have been viewed as goal-seeking agents that acquire, store, retrieve, and internally process information at many levels of cognitive complexity. This paved the way for an immensely productive research program. While this field benefited from insights into the proximate causes of animal behavior, awareness grew of the importance of taking a species’ evolutionary history and ecological adaptation into account, an insight which led to a multitude of field studies with a large range of animal species. Studies in the field and lab are now performed in concert to compensate for their respective limitations. It is this combined approach which makes current cognitive behavioral studies so rich. This identifies key questions at the frontier of present research and discusses how these questions can be translated into experiments and observations.

Linguistic theory has been traditionally (but uncritically) committed to an approach that sees language as a particular instance of a larger class of systems of communication. Within a biolinguistic perspective, this position translates into the contention that language is a particular “animal communication system,” a natural kind comprising an extremely heterogeneous set of behaviors based on the externalization/exchange of signals between organisms. Putting aside some other previous criticisms concerning this tenet, the book's main objection is that this approach drives the evolutionary study of language to a dead end, because the concept of “animal communication system” does not refer to a true natural kind and thus no substantial evolutionary generalizations can be based on it.

This chapter argues that solving small grammatical puzzles involves some fundamental decisions on basic assumptions about human language and especially meaning. The work shows that the fact that a particular general view makes it possible to solve a number of more and less classic specific grammatical problems constitutes evidence for the usefulness of this general view. The chapter also describes major theoretical issues on human specialization, common ground and the construal configuration, human and animal communication, and the theory of argumentativity. The roles of argumentation and auxiliary syntax in the balance between objectivity and intersubjectivity are illustrated in Dutch and English. The prospects of adopting a usage-based, constructional approach to grammar are explained.

Honeybees navigate and communicate in the context of foraging and nest selection. This chapter presents a novel technique (harmonic radar tracking) that has been applied to foraging behavior. On the basis of the data collected, a concept that assumes an integrated map-like structure of spatial memory has been developed. Characteristic features (long-ranging landmarks) and local characteristics are learned during exploratory flights. Route flights and information about target destinations transferred during the waggle dance are integrated into the map-like memory, enabling bees to make novel short-cutting flights between learned and communicated locations and to perform decisions about their flight routes. Cognitive terminology is applied to describe these implicit knowledge properties in bee navigation.

This chapter focuses on sensory systems of animals that are commonly involved in plant–animal communication. Animals perceive the world around them quite differently from humans. The spectral sensitivities to light reflected from objects around humans are different from those of most other animal groups. For example, birds and primates can discriminate flowers and fruits from their background by their colours over a range of tens of metres while insects can use the chromatic information of flowers only on a range of centimetres. Humans, however, perceive the smell of plants within a range of tens of metres. Perceptual differences among animals exist in all sensory modes. This chapter explains the ecological sensory differences of animals and the ways in which these senses are used to interact with the biochemistry of plants.

Collective intelligence allows groups of individuals to solve problems which otherwise could not be solved by a single individual. Insect workers have tiny brains, but by functioning as part of a self-organized colony, they find sophisticated solutions to vital organizational problems (e.g., finding a suitable new home or exploiting the best food sources in a changing environment). In consensus decision making, unanimity among workers is crucial. In contrast, combined decision making requires that different groups of workers within the colony choose different options. Communication and learning are often fundamental in collective decision making. However, as workers gain experience, communication may lose importance as an information source for workers. How social insects collectively solve problems parallels decision making in other biological systems (e.g., neuronal networks), and investigation into social insect collective decision making has inspired new solutions to optimization problems in areas such as computer sciences and the organization of communication networks.

This chapter describes how human impacts alter animal communication. It addresses the ecological and evolutionary consequences of altered animal communication, and emphasizes on their effects in animal behaviour. It investigates how animals utilize social signals in performing daily tasks, and examines the influence of anthropogenic communication disturbance regarding survival patterns, change in the magnitude and direction of natural and sexual selection, and impingement of basic evolutionary processes like reproductive isolation and hybridization. It looks into some of the processes of disturbance that reduces the efficacy of communication such as weakening the signal production, distorting or attenuating signals as they travel to the receiver, or hampering perception. It also highlights certain environmental changes that can modify distribution of signals.

This chapter addresses the place of language and literature in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, setting it within the context of evolutionary continuity in animal life and communicative activities throughout the biosphere. Examining his description of the gestural origins of speech in Phenomenology of Perception and his account of infant entry into language in Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, the chapter links his theory of the embodied quality of linguistic behavior with the cognitive and communicative activities of other animals, especially apes. It goes on to show how this work is related to Philip Lieberman’s work in the cognitive neuroscience of language evolution and behavior, and also the new interdisciplinary field of biosemiotics. Concluding with an account of Merleau-Ponty’s description of literature and the other arts as the human voicing of immanent meanings in the world, the chapter ends with a reading of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi that dramatizes the interdependency and uneasy communication among living creatures that must coexist but also kill and eat each other.

In the late nineteenth century, we begin to see a new representational concern with the problem of animal signification – manifesting itself in a special focus on the animal track, trace, or marking as a form of legible signification. If we turn to fiction of this period, we can see a new interest in animal signification that can be understood in relation to Charles Darwin and Charles Sanders Peirce’s investigations into nonhuman semiotics. Considering a lecture by Thomas Huxley, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Priory School” and The Hound of the Baskervilles, and several Thomas Hardy novels, this chapter argues that Hardy can be understood as trying to create a novelistic form that might more satisfactorily transcribe nonhuman agency or sign-making – recognizing it as signification – while still respecting or acknowledging its difference. This chapter thus demonstrates the ways later-Victorian novelists struggled to find new ways to acknowledge animal agency, consciousness, and even signification within a literary form (the novel) that remained, at the core, anthropocentric.

This chapter reviews some issues on plant–animal communication that originate from the integration of ideas across different chapters of this book. This type of communication and its evolution is more complex than the traditional binary sender–receiver models; thus, plant–animal communication can be instrumental to advance the concept of communication theory by integrating ecology and multiple species interaction into it. This chapter validates this conclusion by examining the costs and benefits associated with plant–animal communication, and by discussing its fundamental aspects. Adaptations, constraints, and implications of evolutionary communication in multiple species interactions are also outlined by exemplifying different scenarios.

This chapter presents evidence from songbirds of evolutionary convergence with certain features of the vocal flexibility found in humans, addresses human communication skills as a reference, and analyzes the possible convergences in animal species, highlighting a particular social songbird species. It suggests that animal communication may offer a useful reminder that the evolution of most basic principles of communication rules and contextual sensitivity may not have required higher cognitive processes. The chapter also proposes that regulations of vocal interactions, their contextual sensitivity, and dependency upon social experience indicate further convergence with human communication.

This chapter examines communication, cooperation, and play behaviour in dogs. These activities share many aspects of behavioural coordination; in many situations they occur in parallel. Playing dogs are communicating, and also cooperating in broad sense and cooperation is also unlikely to occur without any communication. All three behavioural manifestations play an important role in dog training that brings in a specific aspect of applied research.

This essay examines Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar in which, through the filmic congruence of animal and human bodies, we are made to rethink the meaningfulness of the distinction that separates animal and human forms of embodiment—specifically, we are asked to rethink the roles of reason and will in making us who we are, a reconception that owes a debt to “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” For Montaigne animal communication, which does not depend on speech or even voice, has a human equivalent in involuntary gesture and posture.

The final chapter first recaptures the most important claims made in the book and outlines issues and dimensions within RT that deserve further thought in the service of improving the theory. Next, suggestions are presented for how an RT analysis of modes, media, and genres not addressed in this book might be developed. The book ends with a recapitulation of why it is useful to adopt RT as the overall model for the analysis of visual, multimodal, and other forms of communication—although it will always have to be complemented by insights from other theories and models. Given that the relevance principle inextricably links communication to perception and cognition in all living species, RT’s insights may feed into experiments both with humans and with other primates, and even non-primates, and may help theorize robotic communication.