Past event
GRCDI Discussion Hour with Dr Christophe Heintz
In place of an abstract, Christophe would like to discuss the following themes:
Further debates based on the talk I shall give on May 6th: “Diverse pathways to satisfying informative intentions”, in particular concerning:
i- recognising humans' diverse ways to satisfy their informative intentions, opening the question about why one way rather than another is selected at any given time.
ii- what mind-reading capacities can be ascribed to non-human great apes: recursive mind-reading, why not?
iii- the selection pressures for the emergence of human ostensive communication:
– they are first and foremost about ostension—producing and processing evidence of communicative intentions—not so much about language.
– they come from a partner choice ecology in which there are multiple win-win opportunities.
Can there me non-mentalistic ostension?
Several papers, including Sperber and Wilson recent one:
Rethinking ostensive communication in an evolutionary, comparative, and developmental perspective
Although the idea has some appeal, I do not think it is the case: ostension is best characterised as providing evidence for one's communicative intention.
Commitment: what it is, and how it is involved in ostensive communication.
Speaker bio:
Christophe Heintz is working on the role of adaptive cognition in shaping cultural evolution and cooperation. He is a cognitive psychologist at Central European University (CEU), Vienna. His webpage can be found here: http://christophe.heintz.free.fr/