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| A model of communication in which the message is encoded by the signaller, and then decoded by the receiver. To be contrasted with the ostensive-inferential model |
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| An interaction in which an action causes a reaction, where both the action and the reaction are designed to be part of the interaction |
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| An intention to make it manifest to the audience that one has an informative intention |
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| A signal whose form is the combination of two (or more) other signals, but whose meaning is not simply the sum of the meanings of the component signals |
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| A reliable association between signal and meaning that holds by virtue of the fact that every member of the community agrees that it holds. To be contrasted with natural code |
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| The process by which cultural traits gravitate towards particular forms, and away from others |
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| The recognition of communicative intentions and informative intentions. Along with ostension, it is one half of ostensive-inferential communication |
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| An intention to change the audience's representation of the world; more colloquially, an intention to inform the audience. Informative intentions are embedded inside communicative intentions |
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| intentional communication |
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| Communication that involves the purposive production of signals. related to, but not the same as, ostensive communication |
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| The suite of cognitive traits that allows us to acquire and use languages |
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| Rich, structured collections of conventional codes that exist within a community, and which collectively augment the expressive capacity of ostensive communication |
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| The literal, 'decoded' meaning of a linguistic utterance. To be contrasted with speaker meaning. Sometimes also called 'linguistic meaning' or 'utterance meaning' |
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| a representation of a representation |
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| The expression of communicative intentions and informative intentions. Along with inference, it is one half of ostensive-inferential communication |
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| ostensive-inferential communication |
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| The expression and recognition of intentions; specifically, communicative intentions and informative intentions |
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| The trade off between worthwhile changes to one's representations (e.g. new, useful, and true information), and the processing effort required to achieve these changes |
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| The action in communication i.e. the action that causes a reaction in another organism, where both action and reaction are designed to be part of the interaction. |
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| The meaning that the speaker intends to communicate with a linguistic utterance. To be contrasted with literal meaning. Sometimes also called 'intended meaning' or 'utterer's meaning' |
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| The fact that the literal meaning of an utterance does not fully determine the speaker meaning |
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| What explains the expressive power of human language according to Scott-Phillips (see Chapters 1 and 2)? |
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| The capacity for ostensive-inferential communication, which is probably uniquely human, allows us to create new signals at will, and to use them in highly flexible, expressive ways |
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| Explain why Scott-Phillips thinks that language is unique to humans (see Chapter 4). |
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| Because of all primate species, only we began to live in social groups so large and complex that there was natural selection for the sort of advanced social cognition (in particular recursive mindreading) that made ostensive-inferential communication, and hence language |
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| In Scott-Phillips’ view, why does language have the form and structure that it does? (See Sections 5.6-5.7.) |
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| As languages propagate through a community, they are changed in non-random ways, such that they gravitate towards particular forms, which are more compatible with human goals and dispositions, and away from others. this process is called cultural attraction |
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| According to Scott-Phillips, what is the evolutionary function of language? (See Sections 6.2-6.3) |
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| The evolutionary function of linguistic communication is, like all ostensive communication, mindreading and mental manipulation (see S6.3). It evolved within a specifically social ecology, as a way to better navigate that environment. If there is a dedicated language faculty, its evolutionary function is to make the acquisition and processing of languages more straightforward than it would otherwise be. |
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