Speech Acts and Animal Signals

Abstract

In everyday speech, we often use words more to do things (e.g., greet, make bets, accuse, ask, marry, etc.) than to make statements of fact. In the philosophy of language, viewing utterances as these sorts of speech acts (Austin 1962), or as moves in a language game (Wittgenstein 1958), challenged the view of communication as an exchange of true or false propositions. For ethologists, applying similar concepts to animal signals may help keep concepts like information, manipulation, and honesty in their proper perspective. This essay shows the many parallels between speech acts and animal signals, and touches on their implications. According to this perspective, the main function of signals is not to state facts, although facts (e.g., about honesty, intentions, and external referents) are crucial for the evolutionary stability of signals. Just as the speech acts in a marriage ceremony resist translation into facts outside of the social system of which they are a part, most animal signals will likely resist translation into general classes of messages or functions. Nonetheless, if the rules that govern the use of signals are sufficiently understood, the parts played by manipulation and information in the evolution of those rules can also be understood.KeywordsAlarm CallAnimal CommunicationLanguage GameVervet MonkeyAcoustic CommunicationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.