Why Grice is the best

Green/Bar-On conclude their study as follows:

"A chief skeptical challenge to Continuity is to explain how the gap between the nonlinguistic and the linguistic could be bridged without crediting nonlinguistic creatures with complex, audience-directed intentions to communicate propositional attitudes. In response to this challenge, a plausible Continuity story must show us how to traverse the palpable distance between the rigid and programmed (albeit impressively complex) encoding characteristic of, say, bee dances, on the one hand, and the complex communication speakers of a language routinely exhibit, on the other hand. Our discussion suggests that even Marler‘s birds are different from the bees, and a closer
27 For a recent study documenting significant refinement of birds‘ courtship songs over as few as 2-4 generations, see http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/songbirdculture/
28 Relevant here is Cheney and Syfarth discussion in (2007) of playback experiments with Vervet monkeys.
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"understanding of their behavior shows us how a portion of this distance can be traversed. For example, avian alarm calls, as we have construed them, are not merely instinctive behaviors biologically designed to transmit information to other birds. Instead, we suggested that birds' alarm calls are, in the first instance, expressive behaviors. And expressive behavior amounts to more than mere transmission of information. Such behavior is the hallmark of social, minded creatures, for it is biologically designed to show an animal's state of mind to suitably attuned witnesses so as to move them to act in appropriate ways, perhaps via contagion (or empathy, in more developed creatures) and other mechanisms. When the expressed state of mind is world-directed, so that an act (m-) expressing it articulates its intentional object, appropriate action will involve that object. An alarm call, showing an affective state that is directed at a specific kind of threat will enjoin other birds to, say, run away from that threat. The ground is laid for the behavior's product (in this case a vocal pattern) to take on a (proto-semantic) life of its own and to become a stand-in for the relevant object."

"Thus, in the Continuity story we‘ve adumbrated, in contrast with Grice's Continuity story, the behavior that puts non-linguistic creatures on the way to linguistic communication (m-)expresses affective states . Such behavior serves its communicative purpose even in the absence of the animal's intending to communicate information to others, or of the receivers figuring out the producer's intentions."
This is but one manifestation of the traditional preoccupation (not to say obsession) with the indicative, the
assertoric, and the cognitive, in the realm of the philosophical understanding of language and thought.
ii For a useful summary, see McDowell (1983) §1.
iii Our discussion in this section follows closely Bar-On (1995).
iv [Give Sellars’ 3-fold distinction]
v According to a recent suggestion – “the unbearable automaticity of being” – due to Bargh (200x), a great deal of our
behavior, including our communicative behavior, is like that.
vi Strictly, whether something is a cue, and of what, is relative both to the receiving organism and its ecological niche:
My 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 I shall elide these details in the text below.
vii Cheney and Seyfarth 1988, 1990. For a detailed study of social hierarchies among baboons, see Cheney and
Seyfarth 2007.


"As the case of Marler's birds suggests, such behavior can issue in vocal signatures, which can be seen as rudimentary 'imperatival labels' of the relevant objects. Creatures among whom a small repertoire of such labels has developed - a proto vocabulary - would be at least as much on their way to linguistic communication as Grice's X. Yet they would have no need for Gricean reflexive intentions; nor would their behavior need to be governed by Sellarsian rules of
reason. Expressive behavior thus merits the attention of both proponents and opponents of Continuity."