LingLunch: Thom Scott-Phillips (Central European University)

Thom Scott-Phillips (Central European University): Great apes & the cognitive foundations of language 

Why are humans, and only humans, a linguistic species? Non-human great apes inform one another in ways that can seem very human-like: especially in the gestural domain, their behavior exhibits many similarities with human communication. At the same time, great ape interaction does not seem to exhibit the same open-ended richness of human communication, especially language. In this presentation I will connect insights from the philosophy of language and the cognitive science of human communication — especially Relevance Theory — to account for these similarities and differences in a unified way. Specifically, I will present a key distinction between the expression of intentions ("Ladyginian") and the expression of specifically informative intentions ("Gricean"). I will reinterpret great ape gesture as Ladyginian, and describe how patterns of great ape interaction are products of its Ladyginian but not Gricean character. I conclude that the evolutionary origins of meaning lie in gradual shifts in what modes of attention manipulation is enabled by a species’ cognitive phenotype, and I will briefly sketch how this conclusion connects with constructionist approaches to grammar.

Scott-Phillips, T. (2025). Communication & grammar: A synthesis. Psychological Review.

Scott-Phillips, T., & Heintz, C. (2023). Great ape interaction: Ladyginian but not Gricean. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(42), e2300243120.

Heintz, C. & Scott-Phillips, T. (2023). Expression unleashed: The evolutionary & cognitive foundations of human communication. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 46, e1.

Scott-Phillips, T. (2015). Speaking Our Minds. Palgrave Macmillan.