IS GRICEAN COMMUNICATION NECESSARILY COOPERATIVE?

摘要

1．Is Gricean communication necessarily cooperative? A common view in language evolution research is that we can use ape gestures as a model for the communicative interactions of our early hominin ancestors, out of which language evolved. However, while it is widely accepted that human communication has a Gricean intentional structure (Grice, 1957), it is equally accepted that ape gestural communication could not. One source of this claim is [1] the assumption that Gricean communication requires socio-cognitive abilities that apes lack (Tomasello, 2006; 2008). A second argument -also defended by Tomasello (2006, 2008) - is [2] that Gricean communication pre-supposes cooperative tendencies that are uniquely human.