Competition and Cooperation in Language Evolution: A Comparison Between Communication of Apes and Humans - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 93

If my most immediate goal is that I capture the monkey unbeknownst to you, then I will not
be doing much communicating [ ::: ] and so, chimpanzee group hunting would not seem to
be a highly facilitative context for the emergence of cooperative communication because it
is not a truly collaborative enterprise in the narrow way we have defined collaboration here,
as joint goals with coordinated plans/roles.

So, since chimpanzees—and apes in general—have forms of only individual
intentionality, their communication is mainly individualistic: they communicate
only in an imperative way in order to request things relevant to their own scopes and
not to freely exchange valuable information. They do not communicate to inform
others (chimpanzees are not capable of helping by informing), and they do not
comprehend pointing when it is used in an informative manner: they do not seem to
grasp an informative communicative intent. For example, when apes were searching
for hidden food and a human pointed to a cup to inform them of its location, the
apes did not understand (Tomasello 2006 ). This occurs because “Chimpanzees do
not operate with anything like a Gricean principle of cooperation—fittingly, in their
natural worlds—and thus they have no basis for making the appropriate relevance
inference” (Tomasello 2009 : 18). The same is true for ape alarm calls and food calls.
They are not generated by an informative intent because when apes detect a predator,
for example, they give their alarm calls even if all of the other members of the group
are right there looking at the predator and screaming themselves. Similarly, they
give food calls when they discover a rich source of food, even if the whole group
is with them already. According to this interpretation, apes do not use calls to help
others since they give alarm independently of what others know.

5.4 Toward a More Continuistic View: Altruism

of Knowledge in Chimpanzees

Although cooperation among humans clearly differs from cooperation among
animals, recent more naturalistic studies suggest that the contrasts are not as severe
as initially proposed (Brent et al. 2013 ; De Wall 2009; Seyfarth and Cheney
2012 , 2013 ). For example, chimpanzees in the wild engage in several cooperative
actions with long-term social partners that sometimes are risky activities (Mitani
2006 ). Concerning cooperation in communication, recent studies by Crockford and
colleagues ( 2012 ) and Schel et al. ( 2013b ) on chimpanzees' vocal communication
highlighted that some of the assumptions of Tomasello's model do not apply in
general.
Crockford and colleagues ( 2012 ) used an alarm-call-based field experiment,
observing the response of members of a group of wild chimpanzees to a snake
model, a viper, positioned on their path of travel. Although snakes are not
predators of chimpanzees, they are nevertheless highly dangerous to them. There-
fore, providing information about the presence and specific location of a viper
will be valuable to others. At the same time, vocal production is costly and
may be inhibited if it attracts the attention of predators or hostile individuals.