Griceian ethology

Fragments from section

"Ethology, Communication, and Expression"

in Bar-On/Green:

"Some apparatus from the evolutionary biology of communication will help us traverse some of the ground that the just-mooted Continuity story must cover. A core issue in that field concerns the conditions under which signaling systems are stable. Where signalers‘ interests are at least roughly coordinate, they have no incentive to deceive one another. Humans and honeyguide birds (Indicator indicator), for instance, depend on one another to find and destroy beehives, and neither has a motive for deception (Isack and Reyer 1989). As a result, we may expect honeyguide signals directed toward humans to be reliable. In more agonistic situations, creatures derive an advantage from deceptive signaling. To escape predation some anurans bear bright colors even when they are neither poisonous nor noxious. Although in any given case a signal can misrepresent, the stability

(20 For the notion of ‗fossilized speaker meanings‘ see Blackburn (1984) Ch. 4, as well as Bar-On (1995))

over time of any signaling system mandates that it be on the whole reliable. The proliferation of ―cheating‖ frogs, who bear bright colors without being noxious, would threaten, over time, to make frog coloration something predators can ignore Natural selection thus tends to find ways of vouchsafing the veracity of signals among creatures whose interests are not coordinate."

"Here is some terminology to help articulate this last thought. A cue is any feature of an entity that conveys information (including misinformation). That information might pertain to how things were, how things are, how things will be, or how things ought to be.21 A signal is a cue that was designed for its ability to convey the information it does. The design in question may be the result of natural selection, artificial selection, or conscious intention. Not all signals are reliable, but for those that are, their reliability is sometimes vouchsafed in beautifully simple ways. For instance, funnel-web spiders, Agelenopsis aperta, find themselves in contests over webs. Two spiders will vibrate on a disputed web. Reichert 1984 found that if two contesting spiders differ in weight by 10% or more, the lighter spider retreats 90% of the time rather than fighting. Furthermore, a losing spider can be made into a winner by placing a weight on its back. This strongly suggests that vibrating on a web is a spider‘s signal of its size. What‘s more, in the absence of scientists placing weights on their backs, funnel-web spiders can‘t fake these signals. Signals that can only be faked with great difficulty as a result of physical limitations on the organism are indices."

"An index not only signals some property of the organism; it also shows that property: the extent of the spider‘s vibration shows the spider‘s size, and thereby its resource holding potential (RHP). Further, it is its ability to show, rather than merely signal, this property that vouchsafes the stability of this signaling strategy. Yet if natural expressions are signals, then they are not merely

(21 Strictly, whether something is a cue, and of what, is relative both to the receiving organism and its ecological niche: our preferred usage is C cues information I relative to receiver R in niche N. That is why paw prints are cues of a predator‘s presence for you or me but not for an aphid; it is also why pheremones are cues of an ant‘s presence for aphids but not for you or me. Nevertheless, to facilitate presentation we will here elide these details).

"behavioral symptoms of the mental states that cause them: instead, they are a species of communicative behavior. The organisms we encounter in our natural environment all exhibit symptoms of various conditions they are in; but not all organisms exhibit behaviors designed to communicate the presence and character of their conditions to some designated audience. Expressive behavior does just this. What‘s more, we intuitively think of expressive behavior as showing what‘s within the expresser: In expressing my anger I show it, and so on for many other cognitive, affective and experiential states. If this is right, then given what we‘ve said thus far, a natural expression is also an index."

"Expressive behavior may be automatic rather than willed, and may even happen against one's will rather than in accordance with it. Through expressive behavior a creature manifests or displays various aspects of its inner life, be it an emotion, a cognitive state, or an experiential state. That ―inner life‖, however, typically will have its own complexity. For instance, a state of fear will embody a certain disposition to act, but will also be directed upon some object or affair, thereby exhibiting a familiar duality of modality and content. Expressing one‘s fear, then, might involve indexing both dimensions of this affective state. The ―modality‖ side might be indexed with a facial expression or tone of voice; the ―content‖ side might be indexed with a way of drawing a viewer‘s attention to the object of that fear: a predator, a fire, or what have you. One might draw attention to an object or state of affairs with a gesture, bodily orientation, or even something as simple as gaze. Put together a directed gaze with a terrified face and a shriek, and you have a pretty good approximation to a creature expressing a fear of something particular—for instance its hawk-terror."

"What makes expressive behavior reliable, that is, an index rather than just a signal? Sometimes reliability is due to a confluence of interests, such as we noticed above in the case of honeyguide/human interaction. In other cases, expressive reliability is due to its automaticity: many expressive behaviors simply befall us and other creatures, and their occurrence is for that reason a reliable indication of what they signal. (Think of blushing and tears for the non-thespian, human case.) In addition, expressive behavior is the stock-in-trade of social creatures. Among the more sophisticated social creatures, various members of a group have one or another kind of standing or status. Social mammals such as wolves, baboons, and many others are hierarchical, so that one‘s status in a group is all-important. That status will determine things like feeding order, mate choice and grooming protocols, and among many social creatures, one‘s reliability in signaling is followed as well.22 Reliability in expressive behavior will, then, be secured in a ―crying wolf‖ way: those who are unreliable are eventually called out, whence those who have not been can be presumed reliable."

"We propose, accordingly, that naturally expressive behavior is designed (in a biological sense) to show the presence, kind, degree and object of an expresser‘s states of mind to suitably endowed consumers/recipients (typically, conspecifics) so as to enjoin them to act in appropriate ways. Yet the structure and success of expressive behavior requires neither intentions to communicate or transmit information nor cognitively sophisticated interpretation. Expressive behavior can show the presence and character of an animal‘s state in a way that moves observers to appropriate action without the animal intending to tell that things are thus and so—indeed without having a concept of other minds at all. Further, insofar as natural expressions are products of co-evolution between signaler and receiver, recipients of such expressions may also exploit sensitivities thereto without any interpretation or intentional intervention. The production and uptake of naturally expressive behavior thus place considerably weaker demands on the cognitive capacities of the expresser as well as the recipient, than, e.g., Grice places on creature X and his audience.23,24"

(22 Cheney and Seyfarth 1988. For a detailed study of social hierarchies among baboons, see Cheney and Seyfarth 2007)


"What allows expressive behavior to move observers to action? For all we have argued here, expressive behavior may achieve its purpose by conveying to the observers information about the expresser‘s state of mind, or the expresser‘s impending action. On this, more conservative ‗information-communication‘ view, the intake of expressive behavior leads its observer to form a belief, which coupled with the observer‘s desires, would lead to the appropriate)

"So far we‘ve described behaviors ethologists call affective displays, which are routinely contrasted with behaviors that have proper semantics (or are at least ‘functionally referential’). Using our earlier terminology, an affective display m-expresses a creature‘s state, but its product – a certain behavioral pattern – is not like an English sentence; it need not be construed as expressing a proposition. Yet as we saw, so-called emotional displays are janus-faced: a frightened facial expression manifests the animal‘s state of fear, pointing inwards, as it were; but with the aid of direction of gaze, it also draws attention outward, to the fear‘s intentional object, thereby enjoining appropriate action on the part of the behavior‘s ‗recipients‘. This, we suggest, allows expressive behavior to acquire at least proto-semantic properties."

"In the next section we draw out this line of thought by revisiting the case of avian calls."