‘Pragmatics First’: Animal Communication and the Evolution of Language

Research on the evolution of language is often framed in terms of sharp discontinuities in syntax and semantics between animal communication systems and human language as we know them. According to the so-called “pragmatics-first” approach to the evolution of language, when trying to understand the origins of human language in animal communication, we should be focusing on potential pragmatic continuities. However, some proponents of this approach (e.g. Seyfarth and Cheney Animal Behavior 124: 339–346, 2017) find important pragmatic continuities, whereas others (e.g. Origgi and Sperber 2000) find sharp discontinuities. I begin (in Section 1) by arguing that this divergence is due to the fact that the proponents implicitly rely, respectively, on two different views of pragmatics, corresponding to different conceptions of what is involved in context-dependence – one “Carnapian”, the other “Gricean”. I argue that neither conception is fit to serve the purposes of pragmatics-first approaches to the evolution of language. In Section 2, I examine a recent formal “semantic-pragmatic” analysis of monkey calls, due to Philippe Schlenker et al. (in, e.g., Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (6): 439–501, 2014, Trends in Cognitive Science 20 (12): 894–904, 2016a, Theoretical Linguistics 42 (1–2): 1–90, 2016b), which appears to improve on the Carnapian and Gricean conceptions. However, I argue that the appearances are misleading and that the S-P analysis is no better suited than Carnapian analyses for the purposes of those seeking to establish human-nonhuman pragmatic continuities. Understanding why this is so will point the way toward my preferred, genuinely intermediate conception of pragmatics (as defended in Bar-On Biology & Philosophy 36 (6): 1–25, 2021), which – I argue in Section 3 – is better fit for these purposes. Drawing on recent discussions of chimpanzee communication, I briefly indicate which aspects of extant primate call communication – both gestural and vocal – could potentially count as pragmatic according to this conception.