Dept of Philosophy, Lund University, Sweden ingar.brinck@fil.lu.se

A fundamental problem in explaining the evolution of human language is to account for the transition between informational communication, aimed at directly influencing the behaviour of the recepient, and intentional communication, aimed at indirectly influencing the behaviour as a consequence of changing the mental state of the recepient. Intentional communication is often held to depend on language and conceptual representations.

Informational communication is goal-directed. In goal-directed agency the goal is represented in, or during, acting, i.e., while the action is performed (Searle 1983). Informational communication aims at influencing the behaviour of the recipient to the advantage of the sender, usually by conveying information about the sender. It is successful when the recipient responds to the act (say, by fleeing when a warning call is emitted), or copies, or reproduces, the act (as sometimes is done with warning calls). Examples are the butterfly signalling that it is not edible by not being visible against the background of the flower it is sitting on, and the dog showing its teeth in anger.

Intentional communication is purposeful or deliberate, goal-intended, and about something else than the sender herself: the intended object. That it is goal-intended means that the sender represents the goal prior to acting (Searle 1983). The representation of the goal is independent of whether the action actually is performed or not. The aim of intentional communication is to change the mental state of the recipient and as a consequence the behaviour. A typical case is linguistic acts. Successful communication depends on that the recipient understands and recognizes the intention, or point, of the communicative act (Grice 1989; Sperber and Wilson 1986). One requirement for doing so is that sender and recepient succeed in sharing the intentional object.

The leap from informational to intentional communication can be explained by the emergence of certain areas of the brain. The question remains what made these areas evolve. I suggest that ways of communicating intentionally existed before language as we know it now developed. Pressures from existing quasi-intentional communicative strategies made the brain develop as it did, in order to handle increasingly complex situations, such as the increasing social co-ordination and planning pressed forward by environmental changes (the fourth glaciation); keeping up and cementing social bonds in groups (Dunbar 1993); or cultural adaptation as a result of intraspecies competition (Donald 1991).

To explain how communication can be intentional without language, I will address two questions: first, the nature of non-conceptual intentionality, and, second, how an intentional object may be determined and shared without language.

An important characteristic of intentionality is directedness (Brentano 1973): intentional states are about something (they have a content), and they are aimed at an object. Furthermore, the intentional object may not exist, and the representation of it is independent of any particular contextual constraints on the content. Full-blown intentional communication can make use of both referent- and context-independent representations (Tomasello and Call 1997).

I maintain that the elements necessary for intentional communication emerge with the capacity for attention-focusing. Attention-focusing has directedness in common with intentionality. To explain the notion of attention-focusing and how it is intentional, I will start from a general account of attention.

Attention is important for any information-gathering system, since it helps the organism in sifting among input. It has been debated wether there is an early selection or a late selection among input. Recent research suggests that there is selection at different stages of information-processing. Stimuli rejected at an early stage is less completely analysed than at a later stage. Semantic processing occurs late, while perceptual processing occurs early. Attention thus proves to be complex, making use of different kinds of processing (sensational, perceptual, conceptual) and working against different kinds of memory (iconic, procedural, perceptual, semantic, etc).

I distinguish between three attention-mechanisms: scanning, attention attraction, and attention-focusing (Brinck 1997). Under normal conditions animals (and humans) are immersed in a constant flow of information that provides a basic state of arousal. It functions as a background against which the subject herself and the part of her environment that she attends to stand out (Luria 1973; Gibson 1986). Attention consists in an increased awareness of something either external or internal to the subject. It can be directed at behaviours, sensations, perceptions, or conceptions, and may be involuntary as well as deliberate.

Scanning of the environment is continuous. Information is registered in a search directed at discovering possibilities to act (Gibson 1986). It guides movements and triggers actions in particular contexts. Action is supported by pragmatic representations that represent object attributes as affording specific motor patterns, not as cues for a given perceptual category (Jeannerod 1994). This does not call for binding attributes to a single entity. Crick and Koch (1990) hold that a fleeting awareness detects innate or overlearned features, while a serial attentional mechanism is in use when detected features are novel and unbound. Bodily movements, perception, and environmental changes are continuously attuned in an on-going, on-line co-ordination, forming an equilibrium (Shanon 1993).

Attention is attracted by events that are at odds with what is expected on the basis of previous experience. The perceptual system is geared to perceive changes in real time (Freyd 1987). Such changes shift the direction of the scanning and the behaviour. Discrimination in scanning and attention attraction depends on the detection of dissimilarity or similarity between items. Whether two items are discriminated or, on the contrary, perceived as similar, will depend on the context and on with what else they are juxtaposed.

In some cases, the subject will focus on that which happened to attract her attention and categorise it perceptually (Barsalou and Prinz 1997; Mandler 1992, 1997). She freezes a piece of the transient reality by suppressing most of the incoming information and simultaneously adding information in making perceptual inferences based on previous encounters with similar situations.

I maintain that attention-focusing makes it possible to focus on context-independent types of attentional objects. It is central for the capacity to re-identify events and objects across contexts and thus for grasping identities through time and space. Attention-focusing is necessary for context-independent content as used in intentional communication.

By producing an intentional object that can be shared among communicators, attention-focusing makes possible goal-intended communication. Goal-direction is a direct consequence of attention attraction, triggered by the environment and tuned to a particular action. Goal-intention, to the contrary, is generalised and the goal may be formed independently of the context. Since the sender’s attention is towards categorised items, she can communicate about something else than herself.

The recepient can know what the sender intends and share the attentional object if sender and recepient engage in joint attention. Joint attention is, as noted by Gomez (1994, 1998) and Tomasello (1998, to appear), the clue to intentional communication. In what follows I develop the general notion of joint attention. The concepts of shared object and goal-intention are central to the account.

Joint attention is based on the ability of two or more subjects to focus their perception simultaneously on a shared attentional object: to engage in object-focused attention. An item is shared when two or more subjects can interact with or use it in a similar way. Sharing does not imply that subjects share all possible ways to interact with it. The notion is instrumentalist. Shared objects do not only exist beforehand, like trees to climb in, but can be created in interaction with the environment and other subjects, like branches as (chimpanzee) nutcrackers.

In subject-focused attention, attention is directed at the behaviour of other subjects. By, e.g., looking at each other, two subjects can find out their respective attentional objects on the basis of the direction of their respective movements in combination with a salient object that functions as a target. Co-ordination of attention based on saliency and behavioural co-ordination result in mutual attention-focusing. Note that perceptual saliency of features is connected to species-specific as well as individual values and affordances.

Mutual attention-focusing can spread automatically as a function of attention-attraction. Consider the behaviour of a group of antelopes when a predator is approaching. The predator attracts the attention of an antelope, and the other antelopes have their attention attracted by the behaviour of the first antelope. Attentive behaviour may spread automatically without resulting in mutual attention-focusing, if the object that attracted the attention of the first animal is no longer present or salient when the attentive behaviour of the group as a whole has been co-ordinated.

Joint attention consists in subject-subject attention. The subjects attend to each other as subjects capable of attending, and, moreover, of attending in a goal-intended way, i.e., in a way that is not controlled by the object of attention (as in attention attraction). Goal-intention provides for the capacity to either direct or follow the attention of the other subject in the absence of salient objects. This means that attention-focusing can be guided by the subjects’ mutual attention to each other instead of by the environment.

Animals capable of subject-subject attention attend to each others attentional states, not to the behaviour that is a consequence of attention. They distinguish non-attentional head and body-orientation from attentional gaze and can engage in attention contact, during which they simultaneously check each others state of attention, e.g., by eye contact (Gomez 1994).

Directing somebody by gaze and pointing are ways of making one’s focus of attention accessible to others. It is the target of the attentional state that is shared and made available for others, not the mental states themselves or their internal content. To achieve joint attention higher-order intentional states are not necessary. Since attentional states are manifested behaviourally, one does not need to represent the mental contents of other subjects in order to make them behave as one intends.

It is the perceivable directedness and implicit imperative force of gaze and gestures that make them communicative. Joint attention is referential, and reference serves the aim of inviting action. Thus communication can by exploiting attention be intentional without being metarepresentational or conceptual.

 Conference site: http://www.infres.enst.fr/confs/evolang/