The Abstracts

Ruth Millikan has argued that the representational content of desire can be reduced and naturalized by saying, roughly, that the biological function of a desire is its own satisfaction. Some theorists have worried that this is circular, because the desire’s function then seems to presuppose a prior account of representational content. I argue that Millikan’s view can be developed in a way that fully takes care of the worry. Basically, desires are dumb, and the only content they have as such is that they aim at their own termination. However, the organism’s representational system will assign more sophisticated contents to individual dumb desires. Thus we arrive at smart desires - dumb desires combined with representations - which are easily explained by broadly biological considerations. Representations increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the organism’s attempts to achieve desire-satisfaction, especially relative to the vast network of dumb desires it carries over extended periods. This new account of desire has many advantages. For example, it explains the fundamental difference between belief and desire, makes a teleofunctionalist theory of representation more palatable, and helps to separate the representational properties of a state from its functional properties. 

What role do desires play in a representational theory of thought? Desire ascriptions are often used in explanations and justifications of behavior. In rational creatures like us, these ascriptions are supposed to correspond to internal representations that figure into the inferences that drive behavior. My argument is that desires get their representational contents from characterizations of the conditions in which a desire is satisfied. These characterizations have mind-to-world (belief-like) direction of fit. On the account of satisfaction that I endorse, desires are satisfied when certain mental states of wanting are brought to an end. I show how this account has implications for solving various puzzles about the communicative function of attitude verbs.

We are incentivized to have some beliefs because of what they communicate to others and the manipulations that they thereby induce. I have argued that, in virtue of having this communicative function, such beliefs are literally signals. Prominent among these are beliefs that function as signals of group identity and commitment (e.g., political or religious beliefs). In addition to having incentives to acquire such belief signals for ourselves, third-parties (e.g., family or in-group members) are often incentivized to mindshape us so that we acquire beliefs that communicate our group identities and commitments. This can be because they are invested in our social flourishing or otherwise benefit from us advertising our group commitments (e.g., we add to the group numbers or help maintain the signaling system). I will explain the purpose and form of such mindshaping, which is a special case of imposed self-deception. 

There are many different genres of human conversation. But there is no consensus on how to explain and describe these genres. Thus, many have assumed that all conversation is really a form of joint inquiry, or elimination of possibilities. Others tend to give long lists without any principled way to distinguish, say, storytelling from negotiation, or adversarial conversation from conciliatory ones. We propose and develop a new theory. In our view, genres are constituted by specific relations between the plans and intentions of participants. We apply Bratman's work on joint intentional activity to Grice's influential treatment of conversation as having an accepted purpose or direction. More specifically, we propose that genres are easily recognisable packages of shared plans, which help to explain the characteristic balance of a conversation: shared assumptions about shared plans make speech production and interpretation more efficient and effortless. We also distinguish cognitively basic genres from more local and cultural practices, which are often studied by sociolinguists, and argue that they are universal to the normal structure of human pragmatic competence.

Non-human great apes inform one another in ways that can seem very human-like. Especially in the gestural domain, their behavior exhibits many similarities with human communication, meeting widely used empirical criteria for intentionality. At the same time, great ape gesture does not appear to exhibit the same open-ended richness of human communication. How to account for these similarities and differences in a unified way remains a major challenge. Here we make a key distinction between the expression of intentions (Ladyginian) and the expression of specifically informative intentions (Gricean), and we situate this distinction within a ‘special case of’ framework for classifying different modes of attention manipulation. We reinterpret video footage of great ape gesture as Ladyginian, and we describe how the attested tendencies of great ape interaction— to be dyadic rather than triadic, to be about the here-and-now rather than ‘displaced’, to have a high degree of iconicity, and so on — are products of its Ladyginian but not Gricean character. We distinguish several varieties of meaning that are cognitively continuous with one another, and we conclude that the evolutionary origins of meaning lie in gradual shifts in what modes of attention manipulation is enabled by a species’ cognitive phenotype: first Ladyginian and in turn Gricean. The second of these shifts rendered humans, and only humans, language-ready 

Human communication is built around interlocutors’ common ground (CG), or the information they assume to share. Despite having been the focus of intense interdisciplinary research for more than 60 years, we do not yet understand how CG works, or even what exactly it is. In this talk I will introduce a new research program that is essential to understanding CG: I propose to study CG as a product of cultural evolution. This approach requires identifying (i) those cognitive capacities that are required for the emergence of CG in human cognition, and (ii) how those capacities interact in (a) the development of CG through children’s social learning across cultures; (b) its formation through social interaction across the lifespan, and (c) its management in conversation across languages. I hypothesize that forming and using CG is a complex human ability that emerges from the interaction of three cognitive capacities — joint attention, joint memory, and the use of reference systems — under a rationality principle. This is what I call the Cognitive Trinity of Common Ground.