Received: 14 March 2018 Revised: 11 June 2018 Accepted: 26 July 2018

DOI: 10.1111/phc3.12550

ARTICLE

Gricean communication, language development,

and animal minds
Richard Moore1,2

1
Humboldt‐Universität zu Berlin
2
Australian National University
Correspondence
Richard Moore, Berlin School of Mind and
Brain, Humboldt‐Universität zu Berlin, Unter
den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany.
Email: r.t.moore@gmail.com
Abstract
Humans alone acquire language. According to one influen-
tial school of thought, we do this because we possess a
uniquely human ability to act with and attribute “Gricean”
communicative intentions. A challenge for this view is that
attributing communicative intent seems to require cognitive
abilities that infant language learners lack. After considering
a range of responses to this challenge, I argue that infant
language development can be explained, because Gricean
communication is cognitively less demanding than many
suppose. However, a consequence of this is that abilities for
Gricean communication are unlikely to be uniquely human.

1 | I N T RO DU CT I O N

Humans do many things that other species cannot. While many species communicate, we are—so far as we can tell
—the only species that learns to use natural languages to produce syntactically structured utterances. Even if other
species possess some language relevant abilities—perhaps primitive elements of syntax, semantic categorisation, or
vocal control—no other species possesses all of the relevant abilities and combines them in the ways that we do.
Perhaps because of this, no other species produces philosophical arguments, reads and writes poetry, or organises
general elections.
A central question for the science of the mind is why it should be that humans do all of these things, when other
species do not—and seemingly cannot. One way of trying to answer this question is to look for the fundamental
building blocks of human cognition—the features of our cognition that enable us to learn to do the things that no
other species can. If we can entertain philosophical arguments only because we use natural language, then it is
pertinent to ask why humans but not other species learn to use natural language.
In recent years, cognitive scientists have defended (1) the claim that natural language acquisition requires the
ability to act with and attribute communicative intentions—that is, intentions with a “Gricean” intentional character
(the set of psychological states diagnosed by Grice as necessary and sufficient for acting with communicative
intent—see Sections 4 and 5). This necessity claim is combined with a further premise (2) that entertaining

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communicative intentions requires the ability to represent others' mental states. Further, it is argued (3) that
entertaining such thoughts requires abilities that only humans possess. By the conjunction of (1) and (3), only humans
can acquire language.
There may be further abilities that non‐humans lack that are also needed for full‐blown language use—not least,
abilities for syntax (Berwick & Chomsky, 2015; Christiansen & Chater, 2016), cooperation (Tomasello, 2008), or
imitative learning (Fridland & Moore, 2015; Moore, 2013; Tomasello, 1999). But where interlocutors could not act
with and attribute communicative intentions, natural languages could not be learned or developed. Thus, communi-
cative intentions are thought to play a deep and important role in human communication and no role at all in the
communicative interactions of other species.1

2 | C O M M U N I C A T I V E I N T E N T I O N S A N D LA N G U A G E US E

Communicative intentions have been hypothesised to play at least three roles in our linguistic interactions: (A) They
explain how humans can communicate in spite of the under‐determination of word and sentence meanings; (B) they
provide a foundation for the emergence of conventional linguistic forms; and (C) they help explain how communica-
tors who do not know the meanings of words and sentences can come to learn them.

(A) Indeterminacy

As Sperber and Wilson have shown (e.g., Sperber & Wilson, 1995, 2002), building on work by Grice, the mean-
ings of words and sentences are an imprecise guide to what speakers try to achieve by uttering them. For example,
depending on the circumstances of its utterance, the sentence
(a) John is a soldier
can be used to communicate a number of quite different propositions. These include
(a1) John fought in Iraq,
and
(a2) John is persistent.
A consequence of this under‐determination is that we cannot explain the success of human communication only
by appeal to interlocutors' knowledge of word and sentence meanings. Even where speaker and hearer have overlap-
ping beliefs about their meanings, words and sentences are too ambiguous to be a wholly reliable guide to commu-
nicative intent. However, if interlocutors understand one another because they can keep track of one another's
communicative intentions and take others' utterances to be evidence for their communicative intentions, the threat
of this ambiguity is attenuated. Interlocutors can use background knowledge (e.g., knowledge of the speaker) and
contextual information (e.g., the speaker's emotional expressions) to better interpret the speaker's goals. Thus, com-
municative intentions can serve as a foundation upon which linguistic interactions can be modelled.

(B) Linguistic conventions

Grice (1987) also identified a second reason for taking communicative intentions to be foundational to natural
languages. He took the notion of what a speaker intends to communicate on a given occasion to be basic to the
characterisation of the conventional meanings of words and sentences. An account of sentence meaning could therefore
be given only by leaning upon the conceptual framework laid out in his analysis of communicative intentions, but an account
of acting with communicative intent could be given independently of any account of word and sentence meaning. He
envisaged that an account of the meanings of words and sentences would specify their meanings in terms of something
like what it is that speakers typically—if not always—seek to communicate by uttering those words (Grice, 1987). In that
case, communicative intentions can also play a foundational role in the emergence of language conventions.
MOORE 3 of 13

This way of thinking about meanings does not entail a Humpty Dumpty theory of meaning (Carroll, 1871)—
wherein speakers can make words mean what they want them to mean. Where communities come to use words
in regular ways, communal practices will come to constrain what others can intend to communicate using those
words.2 Thus, for example, the established meaning of the sentence “It's raining outside” constrains what one can
intend to communicate by uttering it. Nonetheless, over time, what fixes the conventional meaning of sentences will
ultimately be the practices of speakers acting with communicative intentions. As speakers' practices change, so too
will the meanings of words, and the utterances that they can be used to perform.3

(C) Learning

As authors like Tomasello (1999, 2008) have shown, because communicative intentions can be expressed and
understood even in the absence of language, they can also serve as an entry point into language. For example, if
an infant who can attribute communicative intent watches her mother point to a picture of a dog and say “Dog!”, then
she can learn something about the uses of that word. Children on the cusp of language are remarkably good at such
understanding, and thus pointing has been hypothesised to play a foundational role in language development. Young
children can attribute a range of communicative goals to speakers, on the back of subtle verbal and non‐verbal cues.
For example, in a study carried out by Akhtar, Carpenter, and Tomasello (1996), 2‐year‐olds played with three toys
with their mothers and an experimenter. When the child's mother left the room, the experimenter introduced a
fourth toy to their game. When the mother returned, she looked towards all of the toys and exclaimed “Look! A
modi!” Children inferred (correctly) that the modi was the object that the mother had not previously seen. Somehow
they grasped that their mothers would be more excited by and so more likely to name the novel object.
Studies like this one show why communicative intentions are hypothesised to be foundational to language
development in humans. If infants and children grasp others' communicative intentions and know that words provide
evidence for communicative intentions, then they can use this knowledge to produce utterances of their own
(Moore, 2013; Tomasello, 1999, 2008).
Thus, there are at least three ways in which communicative intentions contribute to the success of our linguistic
interactions.

3 | C O M M U N I C A T I V E I N T E N T I O N S A N D HU M A N U N I Q U E NE S S

Studies of child communication leave it open whether non‐human species act with and attribute communicative
intent. Many have assumed that they could not. This scepticism is somewhat puzzling, although not unmotivated
(see Section 5). At least in limited ways we communicate with animals in the same ways that we do with one another.
While we should beware of hasty anthropomorphisation, domestic dogs understand the same sorts of points
hypothesised to play a role in infant language development (Hare & Woods, 2013), and individual animals have
demonstrated impressive feats of language comprehension. A border collie named Rico learned the names of 200
objects and was able to understand requests involving them. Additionally, when faced with a group of familiar objects
and an unfamiliar one and asked to “Fetch a modi!” (or another unfamiliar name), he reliably fetched the unfamiliar
object (Kaminski, Call, & Fischer, 2004).
Although domestic dogs have undergone selection pressure to better understand human communication (Hare
& Woods, 2013), they are not the only species capable of understanding it. Unlike dogs, non‐human great apes are
poor at pointing comprehension (e.g., Hare & Woods, 2013; Tomasello, Call, & Gluckman, 1997). However, when
raised in human‐like environments, they perform well (Lyn, Russell, & Hopkins, 2010). Furthermore, Kanzi, an
enculturated bonobo who was raised in a language‐rich environment, has been shown to understand utterances
of novel, syntactically complex English sentences around the same level as a child of 2.5 years (Savage‐Rumbaugh,
Shanker, & Taylor, 1998).
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As we learn more about the natural world, more impressive feats of communicative interaction between non‐
humans are discovered. Point‐like gestures have been observed between great apes in both captivity (Moore, Call,
& Tomasello, 2015) and the wild (Hobaiter, Leavens, & Byrne, 2014; Veà & Sabater‐Pi, 1998) and between pairs of
ravens (Pika & Bugnyar, 2011) and even fish (Vail, Manica, & Bshary, 2013; see Moore, 2017b, for discussion).

3.1 | A fundamental difference

Pointing in humans is taken to be a paradigmatic case of an interaction that is possibly only because interlocutors can
act with and attribute communicative intentions (Tomasello, 2008). This is because, as in the case of words and
sentences, a point underdetermines the speaker's message. While it specifies the referent of an utterance, on its
own, the point gives no information about why its producer is pointing to that target. An audience must therefore
reason (in some minimal sense, at least) about what the point's producer is trying to achieve in order to grasp how
they should respond. That is, the audience must engage in pragmatic inference in order to attribute a communicative
goal. Nevertheless, the similar gestures produced by humans and non‐humans are generally taken to be supported by
different cognitive mechanisms. Even when apes and dogs understand human communication, comprehension is
thought to take place via some non‐Gricean mechanism (Scott‐Phillips, 2014, 2015; Tomasello, 2008). This
conclusion is motivated by a number of entrenched assumptions about the psychology of Gricean communication.4

4 | T H E N A T U R E OF GR I C E A N C O M M U N I C A T I O N

The psychology widely thought to be characteristic of human communication was first described by Grice
(1957) (hence its bearing his name) and subsequently elaborated by others (perhaps most influentially by
Sperber & Wilson, 1995).
Grice distinguished between what he called “natural” and “non‐natural” meaning. Natural meaning, as Grice used
the term, is not fundamental to human communication. Rather, it describes a statistical relationship between two
features of an environment. This can be either an entailment relation—if P, then Q—or a reliable indicator that given
P, Q is likely.5 It is the sort of meaning exemplified in statements of the form Those dark clouds mean rain. Natural
meaning is contrasted with the meaning characteristic of utterances in a language—non‐natural meaning. This is
not a statistical relation, but a property of intentional action, and communicative acts in particular. It is exemplified
in statements like His wave meant “Good to see you!”
Grice tried to give an account of the distinctive mental states that are necessary and sufficient for acting with
communicative intent. He argued that what distinguishes communicative acts from other forms of intentional action
is their “overtness.” According to his seminal account (Grice, 1957; see also Green, 2007; Moore, 2017a; Neale, 1992;
Sperber & Wilson, 1995), for a speaker (or gesturer) S to act with communicative intent (i.e., to perform an action
possessing the property of non‐natural meaning), she must intend, through her utterance of x, at least6

(1) to elicit in her interlocutor H some response r (usually the formation of a belief p, or the performance of an
action ψ) and
(2) that H recognise that she intends (1).

In this formulation, the content of the utterance will be related to the goal r in (1). Recovering the intended
content of r will be necessary and sufficient for H's understanding S's communicative goal. Clause (2) is what makes
the act communicative, by making the first clause intention “overt” in the manner characteristic of communication. It
is only with the addition of the second clause intention that an action—S's performance of x—becomes public in the
manner that communication requires.
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5 | S O C I A L C O G N I T I O N A N D G R I CE A N C O M M U N I C A T I O N

A challenge for Gricean accounts of communication—and the reason that many authors have argued only humans
could attribute communicative intent—is that the introduction of the second clause seems to implicate cognitive
skills that not all agents possess. On influential elaborations of Grice's view (e.g., Dennett, 1983; Planer, 2017;
Scott‐Phillips, 2014; Sperber, 2000; Sterelny, 2017; Thompson, 2014; see also Gómez, 1994, and Moore,
2017a, for discussion), understanding Gricean intentions requires at least that speaker and hearer possess the
conceptual apparatus for thinking about one another's mental states and are able to entertain high (typically
fourth‐order) level metarepresentations of each other's thoughts. Grasping intentions that satisfy clauses (1)
and (2) of Grice's analysis seems to require entertaining thoughts like (i) S intends that (ii) I believe that (iii) S intends
that (iv) I believe that p (a fourth‐order metarepresentation) or (i) S intends that (ii) I believe that (iii) S intends that I
ψ (a third‐order metarepresentation).
Some neo‐Gricean views (e.g., Scott‐Phillips, 2014, 2015; Sperber, 2000; Sperber & Wilson, 1995, 2002;
Thompson, 2014) maintain that infants possess the relevant metarepresentational abilities—and so deny that it is
appropriate to talk about Gricean communication as if it were cognitively demanding. These views are sometimes
combined with claims that humans possess special adaptations for acting with and attributing communicative intent.
For example, Sperber and Wilson (1995, 2002) have defended the claim that humans possess a “Relevance” detection
module that functions to infer the contents of speakers' utterances and that works using largely sub‐personal
processes. This proposal fits harmoniously with a further recent proposal by Csibra and Gergely (Csibra, 2010; Csibra
& Gergely, 2009; Gergely, Egyed, & Király, 2007), who argue that humans possess an adaptation for Natural
Pedagogy that, among other things, automatically registers when speakers are acting with communicative intent.
Together these, adaptations would make the process of recognising and inferring communicative intent straightfor-
ward. However, while both Relevance Theory and Natural Pedagogy are influential and live research programs, it is an
open question whether the adaptations they posit exist. Recently, some of the evidence that has been offered in
support of Natural Pedagogy (Senju & Csibra, 2008) has been challenged (Gredebäck, Astor, & Fawcett, 2018; Heyes,
2016; Moore, Liebal, & Tomasello, 2013; Moore, Mueller, Kaminski, & Tomasello, 2015).
If infants do not possess adaptations for attributing communicative intent, the problem of how they acquire language
returns. While many theories of language development suppose that infants can attribute communicative intentions,
evidence suggests that preverbal infants do not possess these metarepresentational abilities invoked by Gricean views.
For example, empirical evidence shows that even 12‐year‐olds struggle to understand fourth‐order metarepresentations
(Liddle & Nettle, 2006). When older children do learn to track higher order mental state representations, their ability
to do so seems to be a consequence of their language development (Low, 2010), not a precursor to it.
In addition to metarepresentational issues, a number of further concerns have been raised about the difficulty of
Gricean communication. Attributing communicative intent is thought to require making difficult inferences about
goal‐directed behaviour (Bar‐On, 2013), compositionally structured propositional thought (Bar‐On, 2013, 2016;
Bar‐On & Green, 2010), the ability to integrate high‐order mind‐reading with real‐time speech processing (Sterelny,
2017), false belief understanding (Breheny, 2006; Scott‐Phillips, 2014; see Moore, 2017a), joint action (Tomasello,
2008; Jankovic, 2014; see Moore, 2018), the motivation to share information about mental states (Bar‐On, 2013;
Tomasello, 2008; see Moore, 2017a, 2017c), and the ability to engage in cooperative reasoning (Tomasello, 2008;
see Moore, 2017c), among other things. Different authors have emphasised different aspects of these cognitive
and motivational demands, but the consensus view is that Gricean communication can be possible for only a subset
of cognitively sophisticated agents—excluding animals and some humans too. Grice himself concluded that such
states were “plainly too sophisticated … to be found in a language‐destitute creature” (Grice, 1986, p. 85).
This poses a problem for proponents of the view that language development requires Gricean communication. At
least on standard elaborations, preverbal infants look no more suited to attributing communicative intentions than do
non‐human animals. If that is right, they could not recruit abilities for pragmatic inference to support their language
development.
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6 | ALTERNATIVES TO GRICE?

Authors in different fields have responded to this problem in a number of ways. Some (Scott‐Phillips, 2014, 2015)
predict that with improving techniques for studying non‐verbal cognition, the relevant abilities will be identified in
infants—although not apes. Tomasello (2008) has proposed that there may be a way to attribute communicative
intentions that does not require high order mental state representations, thus enabling infant language development.
However, if Gricean communication can be cognitively undemanding, it's unclear why great apes could not also act
with and attribute them—undermining Tomasello's idea that Gricean communication is uniquely human (Tomasello,
2008).7 Among philosophers, one strategy has been to accept that Gricean communication is cognitively difficult
while emphasising the effectiveness and sophistication of various non‐Gricean forms of communication. In different
ways, this view has been defended by Millikan (1984, see also 2017), Green (2007), Skyrms (2010), Bar‐On (2013),
Planer (2017), Scarantino (2017), and Sterelny (2017), among others. I outline some recent accounts below.
Bar‐On and Green (Bar‐On, 2013; Bar‐On & Green, 2010; Green, 2007) have both argued that some forms of
communication can take place through the production and comprehension of expressive states and behaviours.8
These are behaviours that enable those who observe them to recognise some aspects of the mental lives of their
producers—because they show both mental states and the environmental features at which they are directed.
Expressive behaviours may have a biological basis, having undergone natural selection for showing aspects of
mentality. However, they can also be learned—including some intentionally used utterances of language (Bar‐On,
2013, 2016). They are found in both humans and animals. A chimpanzee who leaps away from a Gaboon viper can
be understood by an observer to show fear directed towards the snake, and a child's spontaneous shout of “Doggy!”
expresses its excitement at seeing a dog.
Expressive behaviours may be, but are not necessarily, deliberate but are produced without communicative
intentions. Their comprehension requires neither the attribution of communicative intent nor the making of
inferences about their producer's psychological states. However, because expressive behaviours convey detailed
information about the minds of others, they take on “a proto‐pragmatic life of their own qua communicative acts that
are not underwritten by Gricean intentions” (Bar‐On, 2013, p. 368).
Bar‐On suggests that recognising a non‐Gricean class of communicative expressive behaviours can also extend
our understanding of the development of language in both ontogeny and phylogeny:

Recognizing that our nonhuman predecessors were already proficient—though non‐Gricean—sharers of

[expressively communicated] information would free us to focus on the more tractable problem of
explaining how linguistic expressive vehicles came to replace, augment, and transform the nonlinguistic
expressive means to which nonhuman animals are consigned. (Bar‐On, 2013, p. 342)

Bar‐On's idea is that an evolutionary story about the emergence of preverbal individuals who can attribute com-
municative intentions will be unachievable. However, the task of explaining natural language development can be
reconceived. Once an account of expressive communication enters the picture, language evolution researchers can
focus on the “more tractable (even if still very difficult)” (Bar‐On, 2013, p. 362) problem of explaining the emergence
of language‐like tools for communication. Subsequently, one could appeal to language to explain the development of
the abilities needed for Gricean communication.9
A slightly different strategy has been pursued by Planer (2017) and Sterelny (2017). Their goal is to characterise
the communicative abilities of neither extant animals nor infants, but of the sorts of early hominin ancestors from
whom we evolved, like the Homo Erectus who populated the Eurasian landmass 1.9 mya ago. Both agree that the
abilities needed for Gricean communication could not readily be attributed to our ancestors. However, they argue
that these early hominini nonetheless possessed a rich communicative repertoire that was produced intentionally,
learned by imitation, and featured a potentially expansive (and expanding) lexicon. In Sterelny's words, “the practice
of depictive mimes requires nothing like the facility with nested intentional states (beliefs about intentions to induce
beliefs) that ostensive intentional communication supposedly involves” (Sterelny, 2017, p. 13). Nonetheless, such a
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lexicon—which might even possess some basic syntax—would suffice to explain the extensive communicative
interactions of our early ancestors. Moreover, it could provide both the social and cognitive means for developing
the advanced mind‐reading abilities needed for Gricean communication.

7 | A CH A L LE N G E T O N O N ‐ G RI C E A N A P P R O A C H E S

The views discussed above combine an acceptance of the cognitive demands of Gricean communication with a
defence of the claim that more can be achieved using non‐Gricean forms of communication than others have
supposed. These authors provide us with a range of options for characterising the communicative interactions of
humans and animals. Nonetheless, even if it is conceded that much can be accomplished with non‐Gricean
communication, from the perspective of the explanatory task identified at the outset, much is not obviously enough.
In particular, these non‐Gricean views do not yet explain how children could come to acquire natural language, if this
requires the attribution of communicative intentions.
Indeed, while Planer (2017) argues that a language‐like system could be possessed by non‐Gricean communica-
tors, he acknowledges explicitly that there may be no way to acquire language proper without first being a Gricean
communicator.

My arguments do not … conflict with the view … [that] ostensive [i.e Gricean] communication was … a
prerequisite for full‐blown human language. (Planer, 2017, p. 81)

Call this view, defended by both Planer and Bar‐On, the partial dependence hypothesis: While full‐blown forms of
linguistic communication are possible only for Gricean communicators, others can emerge prior to Gricean
communication and enable its development. This hypothesis constitutes a denial of the full dependence hypothesis,
defended by Tomasello and others, which takes it that natural language development is entirely dependent on a more
basic ability for Gricean communication.
Whether the partial dependence hypothesis can explain natural language development will ultimately depend on
which forms of language use require Gricean communication. That some—like irony and metaphor—might be language
dependent need not be problematic, since infants' language development is unlikely to turn on their grasp of ironic or
metaphorical utterances. It is more problematic for the partial dependence hypothesis if communicative interactions
foundational to language—like the comprehension of pointing—cannot be explained in non‐Gricean terms.
Of the authors discussed above, Bar‐On has confronted the developmental aspects of the dependence hypoth-
esis most directly, in committing to the idea that children's acquisition of Gricean communicative abilities may be a
product of their mastery of expressive forms of communication. The route is available to her because she holds that
at least some simple uses of natural language can be non‐Gricean expressive acts, along with the sorts of point‐like
interactions through which children acquire their early vocabulary. She envisages that non‐Gricean communicators
may develop the linguistic abilities needed for Gricean communication on the back of expressive communicative abil-
ities, and through subsequent language development come to engage in the more sophisticated sorts of communica-
tion available only to Gricean interlocutors. Thus, Bar‐On sketches the foundations for a semantics‐first account of
language development, to be contrasted with the pragmatics‐first view defended by Tomasello and others. She
supplements her account of expression communication with a rejection of two claims, B and C, sketched earlier
(see Section 1). She argues that at least in language phylogeny, attributions of communicative intent (or “speaker
meaning”) could have played no role in explaining the emergence of linguistic conventions. Similarly, such attributions
can still play no role in language development in ontogeny (although here children's learning may be facilitated by the
presence of adult Gricean communicators).
Bar‐On's semantics‐first strategy may prove propitious. However, while she presents her approach as one of
substituting an explanatorily demanding task (explaining the emergence of non‐verbal Gricean communicators) with
a simpler one (explaining the gradual replacement of expressive behaviours with language‐like tools), this may be too
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fast. In particular, to explain the emergence of Gricean communicative abilities on the back of expressive
communication will require that two substantial explanatory demands are met:

(i) An account of how expressive forms of language can be mastered by those who cannot attribute communica-
tive intent, and
(ii) an account of the specific ways in which mastery of these forms supports the development of the mind‐reading
needed for Gricean communication.

With respect to (ii), natural language acquisition seemingly does support the development of mind‐reading. In
particular, mastery of complement clause syntax—structures of the form “ F knows that p”—is predictive of children's
ability to reason explicitly about others' belief states (e.g., Lohmann & Tomasello, 2003; Low, 2010). Nonetheless, the
first part of Bar‐On's project may be far harder to cash out. Current accounts of children's language development
take it for granted that infant learning turns on the attribution of communicative intent, and the data may not
otherwise be explicable. Satisfying (i), then, will require establishing that specific forms of communication currently
considered Gricean need not be—making them available to interlocutors with only limited socio‐cognitive abilities.
If these explanatory requirements can be met, Bar‐On's approach would be vindicated.10

8 | MINIM A LLY G RI CEAN COMMU NI CATION

In contrast to Bar‐On et al., the author of this article has defended an account of language development that takes
pragmatic inference to be foundational. Unlike proponents of both non‐Gricean approaches and of standard versions
of the pragmatics‐first view, I argue that traditional accounts of the cognitive prerequisites of Gricean communication
have been needlessly intellectualised (including by Grice himself, 1969) and are not entailed by Grice's characterisa-
tion of communicative intent (Grice, 1957, 1969). A range of cognitively unsophisticated agents might therefore
produce utterances possessed of non‐natural meaning—including not only preverbal infants but also chimpanzees,
dogs, and potentially even fish (Moore, 2016, 2017a, 2017b). What differs between humans and animals may
therefore be less the Gricean status of their utterances than the complexity and number of the utterances that they
produce and understand.
Central to the “minimally Gricean” account of communication is a recasting of Grice's second clause, which is
interpreted as giving expression to a functional constraint on intentional communication.11 Since often interlocutors
will seek to interpret and respond only to utterances addressed to them, competent communicators must both
address their utterances to the attention of others and recognise when they are being addressed. The publicity
requirement in Grice's (2) is fulfilled when communicators deliberately address their utterances to others, as a
way of soliciting them to respond. This is something that we do deliberately, albeit unreflectively—typically by using
eye contact to address our words and gestures to them. It is not an action that requires reflecting on others' mental
states so much as a fundamental and cognitively undemanding feature of intersubjectivity that has many correlates
in the animal kingdom. For example, all great ape species also make eye contact before gesturing (Gómez, 1996;
Moore, 2016).
On account of the basic embodied character of communication and the role of eye contact in particular, high
orders of metarepresentation seem to be largely unnecessary for Gricean communication (Gómez, 1994; Moore,
2017a, 2017b). While speakers may sometimes reflect on an interlocutor's mental states, possession of folk psycho-
logical concepts is often also unnecessary for acting with communicative intent (Moore, 2017a, 2017c). Attributing
communicative intent does require attributing goals to others and so requires limited meta‐representational abilities,
as well as the ability to infer others' goal states. However, utterances that satisfy Gricean characterisations of
meaning can have simple and readily identifiable contents, and their interpretation may be facilitated by
accompanying expressive behaviours—making goal attribution undemanding. Since minimally Gricean
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communication also requires neither joint action nor cooperative reasoning (Moore, 2017c, 2018), it can play a role
in explaining both language development in ontogeny and phylogeny, and the evolution of cooperation. In that case,
there is no mystery of how infants attribute communicative intent—but their doing so is unlikely to be a uniquely
human ability.

8.1 | Anticipating objections

A possible objection to the minimalist Gricean account is that the communicative acts it posits are not really Gricean.
Were that true, the explanatory (not to mention rhetorical) force of appealing to communicative intent would be lost
—and potentially infant language development would remain unexplained.
I think this complaint is unwarranted. First, minimally Gricean acts retain the key features of Gricean communi-
cation (Moore, 2017a, 2017b): They are goal‐directed (satisfying Grice's (1)), overt (satisfying Grice's (2)), and their
comprehension requires attributing some form of goal to their producer. They also depend for their success on
processes of reason and inference (Moore, 2017b). Thus, minimally Gricean acts satisfy the analysis of non‐natural
meaning first articulated by Grice (1957, 1969)—although their contents may be much simpler than the examples that
he gave. Minimally Gricean communication lacks only the onerous cognitive prerequisites of Grice's account—and
these were not central to his characterisation of acting with communicative intent, so much as an unfortunate
corollary. Since original accounts intellectualised Gricean communication, correcting this failure does not weaken
the explanatory power of appealing to it as a foundation for language.
A related but slightly different objection would hold that minimally Gricean communication is not sufficient for
Gricean communication proper and that a story about the transition from the former to the latter is therefore needed.
Again, this objection is not persuasive. Children's mind‐reading evidently develops with their language (as Bar‐On
would agree). As infant communicators develop language, they acquire new tools for thinking about others' minds.
As and when they are needed for the articulation and interpretation of specific utterances, children will be able to
recruit mental state concepts into their communicative repertoire. However, this enrichment of their communicative
abilities is not a transition from mock to true Gricean forms. It is merely an extension of the socio‐cognitive resources
that subjects can recruit in support of acting with and attributing communicative intent. A similar process would have
occurred in phylogeny, as generations of early humans developed new linguistic tools for talking about others'
perspectives on the world.

9 | C LO S I N G R EM A RK S

Contra Bar‐On, but following Tomasello, Sperber, and Wilson, and others, I am sceptical about the prospects of
an account of natural language development that does not depend on the ability to attribute communicative
intent. Nonetheless, non‐Gricean approaches to communication are complementary to, rather than inconsistent
with, the minimally Gricean approach. There evidently are behaviours, including expressive behaviours, that can
be grasped independently of communicative intentions and that provide insights into the mental lives of their
bearers. With respect to language development, these can facilitate the interpretation of communicative inten-
tions—even if they cannot substitute for them. At the same time, the minimally Gricean approach to communi-
cation can supplement expressive accounts, by showing why communicative acts are less socio‐cognitively
demanding than supposed. It can therefore help to answer the first challenge posed for Bar‐On's account—but
without sacrificing the explanatory power that comes from recognising that preverbal infants can understand
and attribute communicative goals. If this is right, children's acquisition of natural language need no longer be
mysterious. However, as a corollary, we should recognise that non‐human animals might also act with and
attribute communicative intent.
10 of 13 MOORE

ACKNOWLEDGEMEN T Jessica Keiser

Thanks to Dorit Bar‐On, Jessica Kesier, Ron Planer, Lialin Rotem‐Stibbe, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful
comments on this paper.

CONF LICT OF INT E RE ST

The author confirms that none exists.

ENDNOTES
1
The ability to attribute communicative intentions is sometimes described as an ability to make pragmatic inferences.
However, caution is needed when reading some primate cognition researchers' writing on this subject. They (e.g., Fitch,
2010; Wheeler & Fischer, 2012; see also Seyfarth & Cheney, 2003) use the term “pragmatics” in a slightly different way,
related to the contextual interpretation of primate alarm calls, and so argue that pragmatic interpretation is present in
primates. However, they do not claim that primates who engage in contextual interpretation can attribute communicative
intent. See Bar‐On and Moore (2017) for discussion.
2
Well‐known discussions of Grice's work—including (Searle, 1969)—have missed this point.
3
The meanings of sentences will depend not only upon the meanings of words but additionally upon the syntactic rules
that govern their construction. Here I take no stand on whether syntactic rules are also fixed, ultimately, by the practices
of speakers acting with communicative intentions, or whether (as Chomskian nativists maintain) syntactic rules are fixed
by an innate universal grammar that is independent of human communicative activities (e.g., Berwick & Chomsky, 2015).
The claims made in this paper are consistent with both possibilities.
4
A further consideration in positing different cognitive states in animals is parsimony. An influential parsimony principle,
Morgan's Canon, holds that

In no case is an animal activity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes if it can be fairly
interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development.
(Morgan, 1903, p. 59)

While some use this to argue against positing continuity between animal and human cognition, arguments from cladistic
parsimony (Sober, 2005) provide reasons for assuming continuity between human and animal cognition. In that case, while
Morgan's Canon remains influential, there is no straightforward argument from parsimony for establishing that animal
communication could not be Gricean.
5
Natural meaning was described by Grice (1957) as factive: If P naturally means Q, then P entails Q. Following Scarantino
(2015), I adopt a weaker reading according to which P makes Q likely. This weaker reading is consistent with some of
Grice's own examples and with ordinary language users' intuitions (Over & Evans, 2003).
6
Here I will not discuss either Grice's original third clause, or Neale's (1992) alternative. They have generated a substantial
literature though. For discussion, see Moore (2017b).
7
Sperber (2018) has recently argued that forms of ostensive communication may be present in the animal kingdom. Since
the details of his view are still being developed (via a series of ongoing blog posts), I won't discuss them further here—but
readers should look out for new work by him in this area.
8
In more recent work, Green (2017) has developed an account of the communicative acts produced by creatures who lack
minds altogether. Thus, he has characterised a set of behaviours that are organically meaningful. Since organic meaning is
only indirectly relevant to issues of human language development, I do not discuss this here.
9
Scarantino has recently defended a similar strategy to the one pursued by Green and Bar‐On, in his development of a
“theory of affective pragmatics” (Scarantino, 2017; see Moore, 2017c, for relevant discussion).
10
For an even more radical approach to explaining language development that dispenses with any appeal to pragmatics,
see Millikan's (2017) important new volume Beyond Concepts, which starts to develop an account of language use
grounded only in what Grice called natural meaning. This volume's contribution to the themes discussed in this article
deserves a much longer and more substantial response than any that can be attempted in a short review article like
this one.
11
While I (2017a) do not think Grice's original clause (3) essential to acting with communicative intent, I have argued that
minimally Gricean communication nonetheless satisfies one interpretation of the original clause's primary intended func-
tion—namely, ensuring that communication is grounded in reason and inference (Moore, 2017b). These are weaker
characterisations of reason and inference than Bar‐On thinks necessary for Gricean communication (see also Thompson,
2014, for relevant discussion). This may provide a basis for a further objection to the Gricean Minimalist view—although
space constraints prevent development of that point here.
MOORE 11 of 13

ORCID
Richard Moore http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4649-7676

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Richard Moore (PhD Philosophy, Warwick, 2010) is a wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (assistant professor) at the
Berlin School of Mind and Brain and in the Department of Philosophy at the Humboldt‐Universität zu Berlin. His
work addresses philosophical issues related to human cognitive development in ontogeny and phylogeny and
includes empirical studies of the communicative abilities human children and primates. This article was written
while Moore was an RSSS Visiting Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the Australian National University,
in March and April 2018.

How to cite this article: Moore R. Gricean communication, language development, and animal minds. Philos-
ophy Compass. 2018;e12550. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12550