Abstract: Research on human communication have adopted mentalistic interpretations of communicative exchanges, including rich attributions of mental states. Signallers and recipients routinely make inferences about meaning that take them in many cases beyond the information available. Despite the great strides that researchers focusing on primate communication have made towards a more cognitively informed discipline, there is still progress to be made. One potential avenue is to connect intentional (goal-directed) communication and theory of mind. Warren and Call (2022) argued that inferential communication is the next frontier in our quest to understand nonhuman ape communication and the evolution of language. Using the accumulated comparative evidence on goal-directed and social inference as a springboard, I will discuss the possibility that great apes might be capable of applying social inferences in a communicative setting, which would explain some of the observed complexity and flexibility of ape communication and pave the way for better theories about language evolution.

Josep Call  https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/psychology-neuroscience/people/jc276/

School of Psychology and Neuroscience

Global Research Centre for Diverse Intelligences https://grcdi.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/

University of St Andrews