July 3, 2015

July 3, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing is my fourth response to “What do animal signals mean?” by Rendall, Owren & Ryan (2009). In yesterday’s writing I commented on the mentalist view that courtship signals “must be honest to be be functional.” Since humans, in the process of learning how to read and write join their speaking and listening behaviors, literacy involves the development of the speaker-as-own-listener, that is, of consciousness. “Honesty” is a word  only used in certain environments. Although under certain circumstance we make the sound which is functional, we don’t decide to be functional or to make that particular sound. 

Skinner once said “men think they shape the world, but they are shaped by it.” However, when SVB can happen it will happen and this not a matter of honesty. 

“How the courtship signaling dynamic plays out and where it is at any point in evolutionary time will depend on inevitable asymmetries in the reproductive interests of males and females coupled to constraints placed on signal production and perception by morphological and neurological limitations.” 

In conclusion to responding to this paper, I want to change the author’s question “What do animals mean?” into “What do humans mean?” Ultimately, if we learn anything from animals, it will be that we, like them, have evolved to influence each other rather than to send, decode, store and retrieve information. 

Language is a recent event in evolutionary history. This animal research provides the contrast we need to loosen up about our verbal fixation, which obfuscates the fact that we are either influencing each other in ways which are positive or negative. In NVB we are negatively influencing each other, but in SVB we are positively influencing each other. What we say can only play a significant role in SVB, but in NVB it is mainly about how we say it. Anyone familiar with the SVB/NVB distinction agrees that in NVB, the speaker always threatens, forces, provokes, overwhelms, intimidates, agitates, denies, rejects, frustrates, ignores, disrespects, abuses and violates the listener.  

The question “What do animals mean?” is better than “What information do animals convey?” as it leads humans to the  acknowledgement that they are influencing each other with  NVB or with SVB. This sets in motion a development in which we will be able to decrease our NVB and increase our SVB.  

The sound of the speaker induces an appetitive or an aversive experience in the listener. While we speak, we always influence the listener (the listener within our own skin included) with an appetitive or an aversive contingency. I agree with the author’s “emphasis on influence that stays closer to the basic evolutionary principles in ascribing signalers and perceivers distinct roles and potentially divergent interests in communication processes.” NVB is ubiquitous because we have not yet looked at our way of talking from an evolutionary perspective.  We assumed all sorts of things about our human interaction that distracted from what we do biologically: we are emotionally and intellectually influenced by each other.   

“The corollary is that we must also accept that signaling phenomena will often entail asymmetries not generally observed or modeled in formal systems like language.” With our sound we signal whether we as speakers are feeling safe, supported or threatened. The speaker's anxiety, anger, fear, stress or confusion is audible in his or her voice and this immediately affects the listeners. Whether we know it or not, our voice sets the tone for our conversations.  I agree that “understanding animal signaling is likely to be the key to working out the evolution of human communication behavior as well.” 

The authors conclude with “It is also both teleological and circular in using constructs developed for one recently evolved and possibly highly derived system of communication (language) to model processes involved in scores of other simpler and phylogenetically older systems in other species.”  NVB is based on phylogenetically older systems such as fight and flight, but SVB is based on the more recently developed "highly derived system of language." In other words, NVB is not and cannot be scientific and only SVB can be scientific. 

In NVB we are again and again putting the horse behind the wagon. “That [informational] approach always gets the evolutionary and the epistemological logic completely backwards.” Without knowing it the authors have also provided evidence for SVB and NVB in nonverbal organisms. “Instead, and as in other areas of ethology and biological inquiry, it is by comparing phenomena across a wide range of animal taxa that we discover the general principles with which to understand the characteristics of any single one.” 

It is 5:00am and the birds are singing. I appreciate these ethologists for reinforcing our understanding of human language. Interestingly, those who object to a behavioral account also object to an evolutionary account. Their NVB prevents SVB, in which we have “more agreeable and biologically realistic accounts of animal behavior.”