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On Scott-Phillips’ General Account of Communication

On Scott-Phillips’ General Account of Communication The purpose of this paper is to critically engage with a recent attempt by Thom Scott-Phillips to offer a general account of communication. As a general account, it is intended to apply equally well to both non-human and human interactions which are prima facie communicative in character. However, so far, Scott-Phillips has provided little detail regarding how his account is supposed to apply to the latter set of cases. After presenting what I take to be the most plausible way of filling in those details, I argue that his account would appear to be too narrow: it (minimally) fails to capture a range of human interactions which strike us as instances of communication. To wit, these are cases in which some but not all of the information an act is designed to convey to a reactor actually reaches that reactor. An alternative account incorporating Scott-Phillips’ main insights is then sketched, and it is suggested that this account, or something like it, would accommodate the full range of non-human and human interactions that are intuitively communicative. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Acta Biotheoretica Springer Journals

On Scott-Phillips’ General Account of Communication

Planer, Ronald
Acta Biotheoretica , Volume 65 (4) – Aug 8, 2017
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References (35)

Publisher
Springer Journals
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
Subject
Philosophy; Philosophy of Biology; Evolutionary Biology
ISSN
0001-5342
eISSN
1572-8358
DOI
10.1007/s10441-017-9313-8
pmid
28791536
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to critically engage with a recent attempt by Thom Scott-Phillips to offer a general account of communication. As a general account, it is intended to apply equally well to both non-human and human interactions which are prima facie communicative in character. However, so far, Scott-Phillips has provided little detail regarding how his account is supposed to apply to the latter set of cases. After presenting what I take to be the most plausible way of filling in those details, I argue that his account would appear to be too narrow: it (minimally) fails to capture a range of human interactions which strike us as instances of communication. To wit, these are cases in which some but not all of the information an act is designed to convey to a reactor actually reaches that reactor. An alternative account incorporating Scott-Phillips’ main insights is then sketched, and it is suggested that this account, or something like it, would accommodate the full range of non-human and human interactions that are intuitively communicative.

Journal

Acta Biotheoretica – Springer Journals

Published: Aug 8, 2017

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