Speakers, Listeners, and their Common Ground

Michael Tomasello is one of the heroes of this blog because of his extensive work establishing the importance of joint attention in human communications and its complete absence from primate interactions. (See for example: Speech Prerequisites)  So of course I am delighted that this coming Tuesday (September 30th) he is publishing a new book, The Origins of Human Communication.

Tomasello begins with one of the central tenets of this blog—chimpanzees are smart enough to use at least protolanguage—and asks why apes still do not talk. The answer he favors is also favored on this blog: the great apes are social but not cooperative. 

Tomasello opens his book with a consideration of the “infrastructure” that enables people to tell one another things. Apes do not have this infrastructure and the absence leadis to scenes like this one:

A “whimpering chimpanzee child” is searching for its mother; the other chimps in the area are smart enough and social enough to recognize why the chimpanzee is whimpering; sometimes one of the chimps present will know where the mother is, and of course chimps have the physical ability to raise an arm point out the mother; even so, chimpanzees never help forlorn infants by pointing to the mother.

Why not?

There is a straightforward, Darwinian explanation for the ape’s mum’s-the-word behavior. Individuals don’t help non-kin. There is nothing in it for the informed adults to help the whimpering child of another. But Tomasello comes at the question from another perspective. Humans typically do help out whimpering children, even if the child is a stranger. An adult, happening upon a solitary, unknown, whimpering child is very likely to stop and ask what is wrong, take charge, and stick around until the problem is resolved. This activity strikes us as perfectly natural, normal behavior, even though it is contrary to so many of the rules in Darwin’s book. What, Tomasello wonders, is there about humans that makes such behavior easy and routine? His answer: “a psychological infrastructure of shared intentionality” [p. 12].

Tomasello is not especially jargon-prone, but here a bit of translation might help, especially with that word intentionality. Among phenomenological philosophers of language, intentionality has a specific meaning which is irrelevant to Tomasello’s usage. A less confusing term would be to speak of shared sympathy and understanding. We understand ourselves as part of a “we” rather than simply an “I.” Infrastructure is also a bit more fancy than needed. Put more simply: humans have the psychological tools that make a shared sympathy and understanding not just normal, but expected. That sentence is what I take to be the premise of tomasello's book. The sub-premise is that apes do not have those tools, so we need an evolutionary explanation of how the human lineage got from a society of “I”s to a community of “we”s.

The psychological tools Tomasello refers to are cognitive and emotional. The cognitive tools give us the understanding to engage in joint purposes and joint attention. The emotional tools provide us with the motivation for helping and sharing with others. These tools enable people to act together on a “common ground.”

Tomasello’s notion of a common ground is very handy and I expect to refer to it many times in future posts. I often refer to the speech triangle—speaker, listener, and topic—that identifies the basic relationship distinguishing speech from non-human forms of communication. I want to add common ground to this picture.

The picture shows two people, either of whom can be the speaker or the listener, and two potential topics. One of the topics, the car, is part of their common ground and the two can talk about it. The other topic, a bicycle, is outside of the ground. One of them doesn’t care or maybe doesn’t know anything about bikes and they cannot discuss the topic intelligibly.

Several times in this book, although not in the chapter specifically devoted to infrastructure, Tomasello refers to a human’s “bird’s eye view” of a relationship. That is to say, each member of the speech triangle sees from two perspectives at once. They have their own perspective and a bird's eye view as well. Thus, while person A sees matters from A’s view and person B sees it from B’s view, both of them also understand the relationship from the same perspective as shown in the diagram. I find this idea very powerful and informative.

First of all, it makes it easy to grasp how we are intellectually different from apes. They cannot imagine themselves from some other perspective than their own, so they cannot see themselves as sharing common ground with another. A universal bit of moral advice is to put oneself in another’s shoes. This precept requires more than empathy. Apes may be able to feel empathy and yet still not understand themselves as somehow interchangeable with the other. To follow the universal moral tenet people must be able to see themselves and another from this neutral perspective.

The recognition of common ground requires a number of elements that are unknown to other primates. One of them is joint attention, the ability to pay attention to a topic and simultaneously know that another is also paying attention to it. Atomistic philosophers describe the phenomenon recursively, “I know that I’m paying attention, and I know that you’re paying attention, and I know that you know that I’m paying attention, and you know that I know ….” A simpler way to talk about it is to speak of those paying attention as a “we.” We are paying joint attention to the topic. But to speak that way you have to have access to the bird’s eye view of the scene.

Common ground also requires the ability to form joint purposes. Thus, if you tell me something, I understand the reason for your telling me. If I don’t know why you said something I will either ignore it or ask you why you said that. Animals are different. As Tomasello puts it at the very start, “you simply cannot tell animals anything, even nonverbally.” They cannot imagine why you are doing whatever bizarre action is required to tell them something. Gesture, speech, writing... it’s all a mystery to them.

Common ground further requires “prosocial motivation.” People want to help others. If we see a whimpering child, we want to step in and help. That is peculiar in itself. Animals are not so motivated.

Immediately one can imagine all sorts of peculiarities that would arise in people who lack some part of these needs. Some people might have the prosocial motivation but not the cognitive ability to form a bird’s eye view. Perhaps autistic-spectrum disorder includes this difficulty. Others might have the cognitive ability, but not the prosocial motivation.  There’s your sociopath, in a nutshell.

The basic evolutionary question is how did our lineage acquire the psychological tools to make a shared sympathy and understanding the default condition of human communities.

I will make at least two more posts about Tomasello’s new book. To speed things up I will not wait until next week for the next post, but will have something to say tomorrow, the book’s official publication date.

Comments

[Michael]

Thanks for this great and comprehensive post. Im really looking forward to reading Tomasellos book as well as your discussion about it. If youre interested in linguistic apsects of the phenomenon of common ground, you should check out the work of Herbert H. Clark, especially his 1996 "Using Language", which is where I believe Tomasello takes his concept from.
----------------------------------------------
BLOGGER: Tomasello cites as his major intellectual sources Herbert Clark's 1996 notion of a common conceptual ground, Jerome Bruner's 1983 book (Child's Talk) for joint attention, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

[JoseAngel]

You say: "As Tomasello puts it at the very start, ''you simply cannot tell animals anything, even nonverbally.' They cannot imagine why you are doing whatever bizarre action is required to tell them something. Gesture, speech, writing... it’s all a mystery to them."
Surely that's too sweeping, isn't it -- as any dog owner will tell you. Not to mention the experiments with chimps and "protolanguage" you report elsewhere. I think the discussion could be more profitably carried out in terms of "more or less", a matter of degree, not "all-or-nothing". There are many kinds of situations where you can share relevant contextual assumptions with a dog, and communicate with him. And yes, even get him to listen to what you have got to speak. And that's something.
----------------------------------
BLOGGER: Dog owners say things to their dogs all the time, but whether the dog gets it is unlikely. You can train them to behave on command, but Tomasello is not talking about training. Tomasello has done extensive work with chimpanzees and his book is filled with detailed information about what they can and cannot do. In summary: they can request things, but not inform one another about anything.

[JoseAngel]

You say: "As Tomasello puts it at the very start, ''you simply cannot tell animals anything, even nonverbally.' They cannot imagine why you are doing whatever bizarre action is required to tell them something. Gesture, speech, writing... it’s all a mystery to them."
Surely that's too sweeping, isn't it -- as any dog owner will tell you. Not to mention the experiments with chimps and "protolanguage" you report elsewhere. I think the discussion could be more profitably carried out in terms of "more or less", a matter of degree, not "all-or-nothing". There are many kinds of situations where you can share relevant contextual assumptions with a dog, and communicate with him. And yes, even get him to listen to what you have got to speak. And that's something.

[JoseAngel]

Well, requesting things or actions through language is surely one kind of "telling" that some animals can understand. Mind, I agree with the essentials of your thesis about joint attention to a conceptualized situation, but I think that the ground between language and non-language is fuzzier than the post would seem to allow.
------------------------
BLOGGER: When I am taking my own stand, my position is that the difference between animal and human communications is that humans can include the speech triangle. Tomasello phrases it differently, and maybe a little ambiguously, but his point is pretty close to the one favored by me.

[speech writing]

Wonderful article, thanks for putting this together! "This is obviously one great post. Thanks for the valuable information and insights you have so provided here. Keep it up!"

[Fina]

thank you for the posting. really helps me a lot. wish i could have the book...