Competition and Cooperation in Language Evolution: A Comparison Between Communication of Apes and Humans - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 91

to participating with others in acts of shared intentionality is the ability to understand
others as cooperative agents. As Searle ( 1990 : 415) maintained, this ability “is a
necessary condition of all collective behavior.” According to Tomasello, the ability
to understand others as cooperative agents can be broken down into two elements:
the cognitive skills for creating joint intentions and attention (a common conceptual
ground with others) and the social motivations for helping and sharing with others.
Common ground represents the context of communication, that is to say, what
is relevant to social interaction (Clark 1996 ;Levinson 1995 ). It includes shared
knowledge among participants in social interactions, facts about the world, what
people generally find salient and interesting, and so on. Common ground is
necessary for the receiver to determine both what the communicator is focusing her
attention on (referential intention) and why she is doing it (social intention). The
critical point is that to construct common ground, people have to put aside their own
egocentric perspective on things. Indeed, in the construction of common ground,
people have to pursue a common goal together in order to know that together they
are focusing on certain things relevant to the common goal.
The other element of shared intentionality is represented by humans' cooperative
social motivations. Tomasello's idea ( 2008 , 2009 ) is that humans have cooperative
motivations because they have cooperative motivations for communication in the
first place. 1 There are three such fundamental motivations that emerge earliest in
ontogeny and that are products of phylogenetic processes. These motivations are:
1. Requesting : I want you to do something to help me (requesting help or
information).
2. Informing : I want you to know something because I think it will help or interest
you (offering help, including information).
3. Sharing : I want you to feel something so that we can share attitudes/feelings
together (sharing emotions or attitudes).
The first motivation is a characteristic of the intentional communication of all
apes. Informing and sharing, on the contrary, according to Tomasello, seem to
be uniquely human. Particularly relevant to the aim of this paper is the second
motivation: informing. This motivation (together with the capacity of creating
common ground), indeed, is crucial for the evolution of language and represents the
element that, according to the author, makes human communication qualitatively
different from ape communication.
1 This idea recalls Paul Grice's principle of cooperation (Grice 1975 ), which has been a theoretical
milestone elaborated in linguistic pragmatics (e.g., Sperber and Wilson 1986 ). The principle of
cooperation can be formulated in the following way: make your conversational contribution what
is required at the stage at which it occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange
in which you are engaged. On this point, see also Castelfranchi and Poggi ( 1998 ) in which Grice's
cooperation principle is conceived as an instantiation, in language, of Trivers' reciprocal altruism:
namely, they posit the existence of an altruism of knowledge. Incidentally, the importance of
beliefs for human agents, as their primary route to planning, decision, and action, accounts for
why deception is viewed as an aggressive act, a violation of the fundamental principle of altruism
of knowledge , and of the natural right of humans to come to know beliefs relevant for their goals.