Competition and Cooperation in Language Evolution: A Comparison Between Communication of Apes and Humans - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 90

The problem of explaining the evolution of honest information is also recognized
by Dessalles ( 1998 , 2000 , 2007 ). He proposed a political account for the origins of
language. In his opinion, in order to explain the evolution of linguistic communi-
cation, it is necessary to start from the fact that ancestral humans were capable of
forming large coalitions (Dunbar 1996 ). Among humans, coalitions are essential to
the survival of individuals (they offer some security to their members) and have
an important political dimension. The power of single individuals, in fact, will
depend on the number of allies they can acquire. Leadership of a group cannot
be exercised without support from at least some of its members. As a consequence,
when coalitions are established, individual competition for leadership is replaced by
competition among the several coalitions within the group. In this context, according
to Desalles, what is important is not physical strength but the ability to enter a
successful coalition. The idea is that speech emerged in this context as a way for
individuals to select one another when forming alliances. Relevant information may
have replaced physical strength as a determining factor in the decision to join a
coalition and remain in it. By living in a social group, indeed, individuals gain status
from pointing out salient and correct information (about neighbors, about imminent
danger, about food) in the environment. Therefore, the original motivation of human
language was to trade relevant information for status (for a discussion, see Hurford
2007 ; Machery et al. 2010 ).

5.3 In Search of a Cognitive Explanation: Tomasello's

Cooperation Model

The models presented briefly so far explain the evolution of communication by
pointing mainly at the possible selective pressures that could have driven the evolu-
tion of language. It is not our intention here to discuss the evolutionary plausibility
of these hypotheses. What we want to highlight is that any naturalistic model of
human language origins has to be formulated also in reference to cognitive systems
involved in the genesis and evolution of linguistic faculties (e.g., Corballis 2011 ;
Gärdenfors 2003 ; Ferretti 2013a ; Ferretti and Adornetti 2014 ; Origgi and Sperber
2000 ; Sperber et al. 2010 ). One important model for the cognitive foundations of
human communication has been recently elaborated by Tomasello ( 2008 ). It is
centered on the key role of cognitive systems underlying cooperation as the elements
that explain the transition from ape communication to human language.
According to Tomasello, human beings are able to communicate because they
have unique cognitive ways of engaging with one another socially in general. In par-
ticular, human beings cooperate with one another in species-unique ways on the
basis of processes of shared intentionality. Shared intentionality can be conceived as
behavioral phenomena that are both intentional and intrinsically, irreducibly social
because the agent of the intentions and actions is the subject “we” (Gilbert 1989 ;
Searle 1995 ; Tomasello and Carpenter 2007 ). The basic psychological underpinning