October 16, 2015

October 16, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

This writing is a first response to “What do Animals Mean?” (2009) by D. Randall, M. Owren & M. Ryan. I use the evidence gathered by these animal researchers to point out the biological origins of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). It doesn’t come as a surprise that “animal communication studies” are as much troubled by metaphoric “constructs such as information encoding and transfer”, (which don’t map onto the biological world), as human communication studies. The term ‘anthropomorphism’ has neither prevented us from anthropomorphizing nor has it enhanced our understanding of the situation in which we are inclined to get carried away by our verbiage.

The SVB/NVB distinction, however, is aligned with these researchers, who “focus instead on concrete details of signal design as they reflect and interact with established sensory, physiological and psychological processes that support signalling and responding in listeners.” Only of SVB we can say that the speaker supports “signaling and responding in listeners”, that is, only the SVB speaker evokes the listener to become a SVB speaker as well. The NVB speaker doesn’t “support signaling and responding in the listeners.” Moreover, the NVB speaker prevents the listener from speaking or will condition him or her to speak in a NVB manner. These authors explain aspects of SVB and NVB because “the alternatives we advocate also explicitly acknowledge the different roles and often divergent interests of signallers and perceivers that can yield fundamental asymmetries in signalling interactions, and they therefore shift the focus of interpretations of animal communication from informing others to influencing others.” It is of crucial importance for  our understanding of human communication that we “shift the focus” from “informing others to influencing others” as this is what we as human do every day. The SVB/NVB distinction will facilitate this shift.  

The information-processing paradigm, which dominates both animal research and human communication research, uses metaphors to obfuscate the fact that humans, like primates, influence each other with their sound. For example, “Dall et al. (2005, page 192) recently observed that ‘evolutionary and behavioural ecologists do not adopt consistent, rigorous concepts of information… [instead] informal use of the term information is the norm’. Dall et al. go on to consider how such traditionally loose and informal concepts of information are now inadequate for many of the emerging problems in behavioural ecology.” Unless we adopt the SVB/NVB distinction, that is, unless we adopt a standard for our human nonverbal interaction, we will keep on beating (nonverbally) around the (verbal) metaphoric bush.

As we think our communication problems are verbal, we continue to believe that “consistent, rigorous concepts of information” will be the solution. The SVB/NVB distinction shows that our communication problems are nonverbal and can only be solved if we pay attention to how we sound while we speak. The authors don’t object to the fact that they remain verbally preoccupied. Their “arguments are prompted by the same problem because research in animal communication similarly suffers from the lack of clear and rigorous definitions of information, yet none the less affords the construct a central explanatory role.”

Instead of grooming they are just splitting hairs; the latter is NVB, the former is SVB. It is irrelevant whether “Hauser (1996, page 6) defined signals as ‘[carrying] informational content, which can be manipulated by the sender and differentially acted on by the perceiver’”, or whether “Bradbury& Vehrencamp (1998, page 2) characterized communication as ‘provision of information from a sender to a receiver’, going on (page 3) to say that ‘true communication’ is ‘information exchange’ from which both sender and receiver benefit.” All of this is based on verbal fixation, which characterizes NVB. In SVB there is a connection between what we say and how we say it. Authors who know about SVB will not over-emphasize the verbal and only pay lip-service to the nonverbal.

The use of “informational and linguistic constructs in animal research” was never really the problem. The problem is always the exclusion of the nonverbal, the environment with which the verbal human interacts. This sets the stage for NVB. However, like most scientists, these authors seem to think it is merely a matter of developing more well-defined constructs. They write that “Grounding the idea of communication in undefined informational constructs renders both those constructs and others that flow from them untenable.” Of course, they have a point, but they miss the more important point: how humans talk with each other will determine how they will think about animal communication.

When it comes to human interaction there is simply no such a thing as as a verbal “quantifiable information construct” by itself. Regardless of what is said or read, our verbal behavior is always accompanied by our nonverbal behavior. We again and again make the big mistake that our verbal behavior can be considered by itself and by doing so we engage in NVB. By acknowledging that our verbal and our nonverbal behavior cannot be separated from each other, we will engage in SVB, which is characterized by alignment of our verbal and nonverbal expressions.

The authors drew a great picture of two monkeys sitting opposed from each other. One is the “signaler” and the other the “receiver.” A cloud above the first monkey (the signaler) contains “reprerepresentational… ideation…generate message…encode…transmit”, while the cloud above the other monkey (the receiver) contains “retrieve representation…

recover message…decode…receive.” Between the monkeys is a cylinder with the word “information” on it and an arrow going from the sender to the receiver. This simplistic drawing of uni-directional interaction is a visual image of NVB. In SVB, in which the speaker is also the listener and the listener is also the speaker, there is always bi-directional interaction. This picture might as well be about human beings. The authors wrote “The burden of communication falls squarely on the disembodied ‘packet of information’ encoded in the signal flowing from signaller to receiver.” That they wrote this demonstrates ignorance about SVB, which deals with both the verbal as well as the nonverbal.