Narrative Persuasion. A Cognitive Perspective on Language Evolution (Interdisciplinary Evolution Research, 7) 3031092058, 9783031092053

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Interdisciplinary Evolution Research 7

Francesco Ferretti

Narrative Persuasion. A Cognitive Perspective on Language Evolution

Interdisciplinary Evolution Research Volume 7

Series Editor Nathalie Gontier, AppEEL, Centre for Philosophy of Science, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal Editorial Board Members Michael Bradie, Department of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA Maria Botero, Department of Psychology and Philosophy, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, USA Ian Davidson, Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences, University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia Francisco Dionisio, Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Change, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal Charbel El-Hani, History, Philosophy, and Biology Teaching, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil Arantza Etxeberria, IAS-Research Centre for Life, Mind and Society, University of the Basque Country, San Sebastián, Spain Roslyn M. Frank, European Society for Astronomy in Culture, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA Francesco Ferretti, Department of Philosophy and Communication, Roma Tre University, Rome, Roma, Italy Augusta Gaspar, Centre for Psychological Research and Intervention, Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal Benedikt Hallgrimsson, Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada Misato Hayashi, Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Inuyama, Aichi, Japan Lydia Hopper, Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago, IL, USA John Hunter, Department of Comparative and Digital Humanities, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA Mary Lee Jensvold, Fauna Foundation, Carignan, QC, Canada Carl Knappett, Department of History of Art, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada David Leavens, Department of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK David Morrison, Sequence Alignment and Phylog. Networks, Systematic Biology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

Roland Mühlenbernd, Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Berlin, Germany April Nowell, Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada Mark Pagel, School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, UK Elena Pagni, Department of Psychology, Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), Juiz de Fora, Brazil Anna Prentiss, Department of Anthropology, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA Timothy Racine, Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada Eugenia Ramirez-Goicoechea, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, National University of Distance Education, Madrid, Spain António J. Santos, William James Centre for Research, ISPA - University Institute, Lisbon, Portugal Peter Saunders, Department of Mathematics, King’s College, London, UK James A. Shapiro, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA Chris Sinha, Department of Cognitive Science, Hunan University, Changsha, China Sune Vork Steffensen, Department of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark David Suárez Pascal, Department of Evolutionary Biology, UNAM, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico Franceso Suman, Pikaia -The Evolution Portal, University of Padua, Padova, Italy Sandra Swart, History Department, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa Monica Tamariz, PPLS, Dougal Stewart Building, The Univ of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Ian Tattersall, Division Anthropology, Central Park, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, USA Natalie Uomini, Language Origin Society, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany Natasha Vita-More, Information Science Department, University of Advancing Technology, Tempe, AZ, USA Slawomir Wacewicz, Department of Linguistics, Nicolaus Copernicus University Torun, Torun, Poland Douglas Zook, Boston School for the Environment, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA

Francesco Ferretti

Narrative Persuasion. A Cognitive Perspective on Language Evolution

Francesco Ferretti Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts Roma Tre University Rome, Italy

ISSN 2199-3068 ISSN 2199-3076 (electronic) Interdisciplinary Evolution Research ISBN 978-3-031-09205-3 ISBN 978-3-031-09206-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09206-0 Translation from the Italian language edition: L’istinto persuasivo. Come e perché gli umani hanno iniziato a raccontare storie by Francesco Ferretti, © 2022 Carocci Editore SpA. Published by Carocci Editore, Rome, Italy. All Rights Reserved. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). The author (with the friendly support of Dr. Alessandra Chiera, Roma Tre University, Italy) has subsequently revised the text further in an endeavour to refine the work stylistically. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

To summarize in a few words, the content of this book is easy to illustrate. Its arguments revolve around two fundamental theses: first, the idea that communication at any level (both human and animal) is a form of persuasion and, second, the idea that humans, unlike other animals, began to tell stories with the aim of being more effective in communication and, therefore, more persuasive. On this view, the ability to tell stories distinguishes humans from other animals, and the invention of storytelling corresponds to the invention of the inherently human mode of communication. The central topic of this book is the analysis of the transition from animal to human communication (the topic of language origins). If the reading of the first lines of this book is merely drawn by a vague curiosity, then you can stop here: the above statements are enough to outline the general framework without the need to proceed further. On the other hand, if curiosity goes along with the attempt to understand why and how humans have marked their communicative destiny by beginning to tell stories, then you should sit back and resign to reading all the following pages. Many of the claims included in this book are not intuitive in nature. For example, arguing that communication at any level is primarily a matter of persuasion challenges common sense as well as a long tradition of thought. Indeed, the prevailing idea has been to consider communication in terms of transmission of information. As we shall see extensively in the next pages, however, this classical idea of communication conceals many more difficulties than its intuitive character would suggest. The persuasive model is able, if not to resolve, to strongly weaken these difficulties. My adhesion to the persuasive model has a twofold motivation. First, it allows us to outline a model of human communication in continuity with animal communication—considering narrative as the tool used by humans to enhance their persuasive abilities is a way to recognize that in communication humans respond to the same functional principle as other animals do, namely to have effects on the other’s behavior. The second motivation for my adhesion to the persuasive model is that, in addition to providing a line of continuity with animal communication, it also allows to account for the distinctions between language and other forms of

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communication. Since the characteristic feature of human communication is the ability to tell stories, compliance with the persuasive model is an effective way of holding together the aspects of language that can be interpreted in terms of continuity and those that can be interpreted in terms of specificity. In the light of these considerations, the ultimate challenge is the analysis of the characteristic traits that marked the transition from animal to human communication. Since these traits are related to the narrative foundation of language, the first issue to be addressed concerns why humans began to tell stories. The general functional answer, as already suggested, is that they did so to enhance their persuasive abilities. That said, if communication at any level is persuasive in nature, why did humans had to enhance what was already present in animal communication? Why did humans require a surplus of persuasion compared to other animals? The answer to these questions is strictly linked to the nature of our cognitive systems. As humans, we are able to tell stories primarily because we are able to represent experience in the form of stories. Even the simple act of perceiving involves the dimension of storytelling: it is impossible, let us say, to look at a ring without remembering who is no longer there, or how nice it would be if she were still there, or how the person I intend to give it to will feel. Later in this book, I will examine the network of cognitive systems capable of extending our representations of reality in space and time, giving each of our experiences an essentially narrative character. Possessing a “narrative brain” gives a great adaptive advantage: navigating into the past to relive experiences useful for the present, projecting into the future to anticipate events that have not yet occurred, or mentally moving through space to imagine places different from the current one characterize human cognition in terms of great flexibility. The forms of detachment from the here and now allowed by these systems make possible extensions of reality capable of projecting humans into a space-time distinct from the current one. Cognitively, these forms of detachment translate into the possibility of hypothesizing about counterfactual situations and preparing well in advance for events that might happen, even though they have not yet happened. At the heart of this book is the idea that, well before the invention of storytelling as a communication tool, what made humans capable of storytelling was the extended representation of reality enabled by the cognitive systems comprising the narrative brain. Notwithstanding, the strength of the narrative brain in cognitive terms turns out to be a weakness on the communicative level. Since the representation of reality in the form of stories connects each individual experience to a particular point of view, interlocutors act in the communicative context from a specific perspective view of reality. The different perspectives of individuals in communication pose a serious problem because they introduce conflict between the interlocutors. It is exactly to this difficulty that the question of why humans should be more persuasive than other animals is related. If the interlocutors engage in conversation assuming different points of view (even when they tend to agree with each other), then communication cannot be described by reference to the classical model of information transmission.

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The idea that the listener is informed by the speaker of what it is good for her to know is not a good description of what happens in actual communication between humans. Communicative contexts are characterized by competition, before cooperation, between interlocutors. As we will see in the final part of this book, cooperation is not excluded from this interpretive model, but it is considered as the outcome of an effort of convergence between interlocutors, rather than the basic assumption from which communication starts. For this reason, the idea that communication is simply a matter of information transmission is not sufficient to account for how humans communicate with each other. Human communication is inherently persuasive, and the surplus of persuasion required to convince those who have a different point of view is the selective pressure that led our ancestors to invent a narrative form of communication. As we will see in chapter “Narrative and Persuasion”, the reason why humans began telling stories to communicate is related to the extraordinary persuasive power of stories. Questions about the why of stories concern the evolutionary reasons that led our ancestors to invent a type of communication distinct from that of other animals. However, to understand how humans could give rise to a communication based on storytelling, reference to selective pressures should be complemented with reference to both the structural and material conditions underlying human communication. This is a general problem that goes beyond the specific issue of language origin. Indeed, from an adaptive point of view, the selective pressures toward change in a certain structure or capacity are always associated with the nature of that structure or capacity. The drive to the enhancement of persuasive capacities cannot be separated from the brain structures our ancestors were endowed with. What kind of brain did they need to possess to begin telling stories? In chapters “Beyond the Social Brain” and “The Narrative Brain”, I will examine the cognitive systems comprising a brain capable of processing the narrative dimension and, most importantly, I will provide arguments and empirical evidence in favor of the idea that the narrative brain is the condition that our ancestors had to display before they began to tell stories. In other words, I will claim that a brain capable of elaborating narrative representations of reality is the structural prerequisite that enabled our ancestors to cope with selective pressures in favor of the enhancement of persuasive communication. Finally, to account for the narrative origin of language, a further step is required. If it is plausible to ascribe to our ancestors a brain suitable for representing experience in the form of stories, the next step is to understand how they could gain the first forms of narrative communication. Therefore, it is crucial to hypothesize an effective expressive means through which narrative took shape in actual communicative exchanges. In chapter “Stories Without Language”, I will argue that our ancestors used pantomime to begin telling stories. On this perspective, pantomimic storytelling predates the possibility of telling stories through verbal language. By means of pantomime, archaic humans initiated a communication that, because of its narrative character, entailed a crucial change of course from animal communication. In any event, the ability to tell stories through pantomime also marks the origin of language

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in terms of continuity, since pantomime is the narrative tool used by our ancestors to enhance the persuasive instinct that characterizes communication at every level. In the light of these considerations, the hypothesis of the narrative origins of language is a way to account for both the similarities that link human and animal communication and the specificities that characterize human language. Rome, Italy

Francesco Ferretti

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of research and studies carried out over the last few years. I am grateful for the long, intense discussions, but mostly for the carefree time spent together at the Cosmic Lab (Roma Tre University), to Ines Adornetti, Alessandra Chiera, Daniela Altavilla, Isabella Poggi, Valentina Deriu, Alessandro Acciai, and Samuel Algherini. For the topics addressed in this book, I owe a deep intellectual debt to Michael Arbib, Steven Brown, Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Monika BorutaŻywiczyńska, Riccardo Chiaradonna, Chris McCarroll, Stefano Gensini, Nathalie Gontier, Giuseppe Iaria, Andrea Marini, Alfredo Paternoster, Francesca Piazza, Ljiljana Progovac, Paolo Quintili, Mauro Serra, Marta Sibierska, Giovanni Valeri, Slawomir Wacewicz, Jordan Zlatev, and Przemysław Żywiczyński. A special thought and memory to Michael Corballis: I had the pleasure and honor of discussing many of the topics at the heart of this book with him. Finally, I am grateful to my lifelong friends Stefano Canali, Mario De Caro, Mauro Dorato, Giovanni Iorio Giannoli, and Massimo Marraffa.

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Contents

Narrative and Persuasion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Persuasive Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Rhetoric and Pragmatics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Homo Narrans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Functional Role . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Stories and Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Plot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Time and Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Time and Plot in Cognitive Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Narrative and Desire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Engagement and Transportation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Storytelling and Desire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Adaptive Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 4 5 7 7 8 11 13 15 16 18 19 20 21 23 24

Two Models of Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Classical Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 The Mathematical Model of Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Limitations of the Informative Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Manipulative Model of Animal Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Selfishness vs. Cooperation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Responses to Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 A Synthetic Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Co-evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Towards a Rhetorical-Pragmatic Model of Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Cognitive Effort in Comprehension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Communication is a Form of Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

27 28 29 29 35 36 38 39 40 43 43 45

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4.3 Language and Sexual Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Beyond the Social Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Thought as a Social Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 The Primacy of Factors External to the Individual . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Language and Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Social Origin of Language: the Cognitive Perspective . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 The Social Brain Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The Ostensive-Inferential Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Global Coherence and Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Global Coherence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Mindreading and Storytelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 The Extended Nature of the Narrative Dimension: Why the Social Brain Is Not Enough . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

53 54 56 57 60 61 62 68 68 72 74 75 76

The Narrative Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Oldowan Niche . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Navigation in Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 The Sense of Direction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Hippocampus and Cognitive Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Landmarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Navigating Space-Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 The Spatiotemporal Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Time and Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 The Narrative Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 The Default Mode Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Narrating Means Navigating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 The Narrative Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Building the Plot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Space/Time and Coherence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

81 82 84 84 85 86 87 88 88 93 93 98 99 100 102 104 105

Stories Without Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 How to Invent Language? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Stories Without Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Bodily Mimesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Pantomime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Animal Pantomime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Verbalization and Grammar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 The Issue of the Expressive Means . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The Issue of the Represented Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Communication and Conversation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 The Emergence of Modern Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Narrative and Persuasion

Abstract The topic of this chapter concerns the selective pressures towards persuasive communication, focusing on two different persuasive strategies: argumentation and narrative. In an evolutionary perspective, argumentative communication does not seem a plausible candidate to account for the nature of the early forms of communication since it requires complex grammars to work. Instead, it is claimed that persuasive narrative might have represented a tool capable of enhancing the persuasive efficacy of communication without involving the use of persuasive arguments, i.e., without involving the use of language. To validate this claim, the chapter shows that the persuasive instinct is shared among animals: consistent with studies coming from adaptive rhetoric, the ability to influence others is widespread in animal species that are able to communicate. In this view, human language evolved certain features in response to the same selective pressures which characterize the evolution of other forms of communication. Keywords Persuasion · Narrative · Adaptive rhetoric · Plot · Event cognition “He’s the most powerful man in the world, and all he wants to do is make sure I’m safe, that I’m OK”. These were the words pronounced by Ashley Faulkner after George W. Bush’s comforting hug, which helped her break the silence in which she had been enveloped since her mother’s death in the 9/11 attacks. A hug that has been immortalized in a photo taken by Lynn Faulkner, Ashley’s father, on May 6, 2004, in Lebanon (Ohio). The photo began to circulate online and went “viral”, as they say nowadays, to the point that The Progress for America Voter Fund (a conservative organization established to support Bush) asked Lynn Faulkner to film a campaign ad about the story behind that photo. It became the most expensive ad (6.5 million dollars) of the 2004 presidential campaign, but it was money well spent: in a competition between the Democrats and the Republicans surrounded by uncertainty, “Ashley’s Story” determined an unprecedented success in the history of American political campaigns’ (Salmon 2007). What made this success possible? According to Salmon (2007), the answer lies in the Shaharazād strategy carried out by Karl Rowe to increase Bush’s approval ratings, that continued to register lows © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Ferretti, Narrative Persuasion. A Cognitive Perspective on Language Evolution, Interdisciplinary Evolution Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09206-0_1

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because of the protracted conflicts in Iraq. The strategy can be summarized in the precept: “When policy dooms you, start telling stories—stories so fabulous, so gripping, so spellbinding that the king (or, in this case, the American citizen who theoretically rules our country) forgets all about a lethal policy” (Salmon 2007, p. 101). At the beginning of the third millennium, the narrative turn marks a new communication strategy: the shift from-message-to-stories in persuasive techniques is not just a change in communication but it represents also an epistemological shift. Applied to politics, this new strategy exploits to perfection the performative rhetoric of storytelling as a powerful tool of persuasion. This gives rise to a process of communication that goes beyond the transmission of information. As Mayer (2014) and Salmon (2007) highlighted, the criteria of a good political communication increasingly obey a performative rhetoric that no longer has the objective of transmitting information, but that of acting on the emotions and feelings of voters, seen as the audience of a show. For this reason, more than arguments and programs, it is important to offer characters and stories. The persuasive storytelling technique today boasts applications across a wide array of fields, including but not limited to marketing, management, journalism, political communication, scientific dissemination, and psychological rehabilitation techniques. The use of narrative for persuasive purposes is so pervasive as to raise reasonable suspicions: the threat of propaganda and manipulation lingers in every form of persuasion. This represents a real issue deserving of great attention. In this book, I will deal with it by considering the role of the receiver in the communicative process—a role that is anything but passive, as we shall see. That said, in the following pages I will not go into detail about every possible field in which storytelling abilities work successfully at the service of persuasion, nor will I examine the intentionally distorted use of persuasion for propagandistic and manipulative purposes. In my view, although important, these issues are only the surface of a deeper process. My focus of interests here is to understand what makes stories powerful means of persuasion, a question closely related to the issue of language origins. Such a question is independent of both the social and political uses and consequences of exploiting stories for persuasive aims. In fact, regardless of the effects (positive or otherwise) they may have, the persuasive power of stories is an indisputable fact. The main aim of the present book is to understand how and why stories have this extraordinary power, and what are the evolutionary reasons that led humans to invent language for telling stories. At the basis of my hypothesis (the proximate aim of the book) is the idea that persuasion, in addition to being a technique to be learned, is part of the natural equipment of human beings, as characterized by a persuasive instinct. The focus on this instinct is motivated by a deeper purpose (the ultimate aim of the book), related to the issue of the origin of language. My idea, in fact, is that the secret of such origin strictly pertains to the persuasive abilities of humans and, more specifically, to their ability to tell stories. Unlike other animals, humans invented language to tell stories because narrative is an extraordinarily effective tool of persuasion—narrative is the natural way in which human beings represent reality and communicate with each

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other. In this sense, the interest in investigating the persuasive power of stories is to understand the characteristic traits of human communication and its origins. In the light of these considerations, it is a basic assumption of my line of argument that storytelling, rather than being a product of the ingenuity of poets and novelists, is a quite natural ability, available to all human beings. In line with Labov and Waletzky (1967), all spontaneous forms of storytelling—stories of everyday conversation rather than those told by professional storytellers—relate to a natural narrative: Most attempts to analyze narrative have taken as their subject matter the more complex products of long-standing literary or oral traditions. (...) In our opinion, it will not be possible to make very much progress in the analysis and understanding of these complex narratives until the simplest and most fundamental narrative structures are analyzed in direct connection with their originating functions. We suggest that such fundamental structures are to be found in oral versions of personal experiences: not the products of expert storytellers that have been retold many times, but the original production of a representative sample of the population. By examining the actual narratives of large numbers of unsophisticated speakers, it will be possible to relate the formal properties of narrative to their functions (Labov and Waletzky 1967, p. 12).

The idea that storytelling is a spontaneous and natural ability has been considered by Fludernik (1996), who has offered a cognitive-oriented perspective on narrative. Both from a methodological and conceptual point of view, my approach to the topic of narrative is marked by the reference to the cognitive foundation of storytelling. My hypothesis is that stories have a strong persuasive power because storytelling is the natural way in which humans represent reality, long before than a modality for communicating their narrative representations of reality to others. How to endorse this hypothesis? The answer to this question passes through the answer to the three fundamental questions underlying the present work. The first concerns the question of what makes narrative an effective tool of persuasion (the analysis of the distinctive features that define narrative as a specific type of representation); the second concerns the issue of why humans invented stories to communicate (the analysis of the selective pressures which led narrative communication to take on an adaptive function); the third question concerns how it was possible to produce stories for communicative purposes (the analysis of the structural and material conditions that allowed our ancient predecessors to develop narrative communication strategies). The issue of the selective pressures towards persuasive communication will be considered in the next chapter; the structural conditions underlying narrative competence (the cognitive architectures at the basis of the narrative brain) will be analyzed in chapters “Beyond the Social Brain” and “The Narrative Brain”; the issue of the material conditions (the expressive systems capable of giving form to narrative competence) will be the subject of chapter “Stories Without Language”. In this chapter, the primary focus will be on general issues concerning the properties of narrative and its effectiveness at the persuasive level. The first step to address the problem of the persuasive function of stories is to understand what it means to persuade.

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1 Persuasive Communication Reflection on persuasive techniques and abilities has an ancient tradition (Barilli 2011; Piazza 2004). At the heart of this tradition is Aristotle (1958), who offers many arguments that are relevant to contemporary reflection. The beginning of the first book of the Rhetoric is of great impact in this regard: Rhetoric is analogous to dialectic. Both are so concerned about things like come, more or less, within the common ken of all men and belong to a certain science. Accordingly, all men use, more or less, both; for to a certain extent all men try to discuss and support statements, to defend themselves and to attack others. Ordinary people do it either at random, or in practice and on the acquired habit. In both possible cases, the issue could be resolved systematically, as it was possible to find out why some speakers were successful in practice and others spontaneously; and everyone will immediately agree that such an investigation is a function of art (Rh., 1354a 1–15).

The hypothesis that language was invented to enhance human persuasive abilities is strongly consistent with the Aristotelian idea of persuasion as a human capacity that, before being cultural, is natural. Certainly, learning the right method helps rhetoricians to enhance their persuasive skills, but humans tend to persuade independently of a specific form of apprenticeship. As Piazza (2008, p. 29) points out (adapting the opening phrase of the Metaphysics by Aristotle), “all humans by nature tend to persuade”. Aristotelian arguments fit well with the idea of the rhetorical origin of human communication. There are two things to point out in this regard. First, considering language in terms of an adaptation driven by persuasion is a way to understand the specificity of human communication within a continuity framework (as we will see in the next chapter, the intent to persuade others to act in a certain way is the key to understanding the general functioning of animal communication). Second, the idea that persuasion is the adaptive function of language opens the way for the thesis of the pragmatic foundation of human communication. In particular, the key to the study of language origin is the relationship between rhetoric and pragmatics (rhetoric as part of a more general perspective on language as action). In line with Venier (2008, p. 11), indeed, my idea is that “rhetoric can be conceived as a field of pragmatics, if we understand persuasion as one of the possible actions that can be performed through language”. More specifically, I argue that communication is a form of action whose aim is to promote the actions of others. In this view, persuasion is not only one of the possible actions that can be performed through language, but the basic condition from which the evolution of a specifically human form of communication began. My argumentation stems exactly from the view of rhetoric as an action inducing others to act in a certain way.

1

Persuasive Communication

1.1

5

Rhetoric and Pragmatics

Before going into detail, there are some general considerations to be premised. The history of the various events of rhetoric from the classical era to the present reveals a clear return to the past in contemporary thinking (Piazza 2004). The main characteristic of this trend is that rhetoric develops through the re-appropriation of the argumentative theory, which for a long time was the exclusive prerogative of philosophical investigation. The recovery of argumentation is a crucial step in favor of the thesis that human communication has a persuasive character. Indeed, for many authors referring to persuasion in communication means referring to argumentation. The model proposed by Sperber et al. (2010), which will be extensively discussed in this chapter, fits perfectly into this interpretive framework. Nonetheless, my hypothesis is that the persuasive character of human communication (especially in the initial stages that led to language emergence) pertains to narrative, long before argumentation. From my point of view, the recovery of argumentative theory in contemporary rhetoric must coincide with a similar recovery of poetics. Indeed, the contemporary debate, centered on the idea that persuasion has to do primarily with argumentative strategies, is marred by a distinction between poetics and rhetoric that deserves to be seriously revised (Green and Brock 2000). In such a debate, argumentation and narrative are often considered in opposition to each other (Bruner 1986). Although being useful at an explanatory level, this opposition fails to recognize the “presence of narrative elements in arguments and rhetorical arguments in narratives” (Bilandzic and Busselle 2013, p. 200). As we will see in the last chapter, my idea is that argumentative persuasion is the evolutionary product of narrative persuasion and that, from an evolutionary perspective, the earliest stages of human communication were driven by the ability to tell stories rather than the ability to construct arguments. Before giving shape to this proposal, the thesis of the argumentative character of human conversation requires to be examined.

1.1.1

Communication as Persuasive Argumentation

In human communication, the speaker, along with the problem of being understood, is engaged in the attempt to make the other party accept to believe (and, accordingly, to behave in a certain way) what she expects her to believe (and therefore to do). This is proven by the fact that the listener can understand a message without behaving according to the requests that the speaker induced. It follows that the speaker and the listener play different roles in the communicative process: while the former is moved by the intention of persuading, the latter resists and opposes that intent. The resistance of the listener is realized through a series of defensive strategies, named by Sperber (2001) “epistemic vigilance”, which allow the addressee to constantly evaluate the communicator’s reliability. Referring to epistemic vigilance, Sperber and colleagues (2010; Mercier and Sperber 2017; Mercier 2020) have strongly

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questioned the thesis of human communication as based on the listener’s trust in the speaker’s honesty (in her commitment to convey true information). The defense strategies used to detect potential manipulative intents highlight the active role of the listener in the communicative process. That said, what kind of strategies might be used by the speaker to cope with epistemic vigilance and make the listener accept the message, thus realizing the ultimate aim of her persuasive intent, namely changing the other’s beliefs and behaviors? Epistemic vigilance is a defensive mechanism that primarily pertains to the receiver, but it is also a tool in the hands of the communicator. If the listener constantly evaluates the coherence of communicated information, in fact, a good way to convince addresses is to actively help them check the coherence of your claims with what already believe (...) or, even better if possible, to help them realize that given their beliefs, it would be less coherent for them to reject your claims than to accept them. In other words, as a communicator addressing a vigilant audience, your chances of being believed may be increased by making an honest display of the very coherence your audience will anyhow be checking. A good argument consists precisely in displaying coherence relationships that the audience can evaluate on their own (Mercier and Sperber 2017, p. 195).

At the heart of the speaker’s persuasive abilities is the strategy based on the argumentative theory of reasoning (Mercier and Sperber 2009; Sperber 2001; Sperber et al. 2010) which, following the Socratic method, focuses on the idea that interlocutors should search within themselves for reasons to evaluate whether or not to change their own point of view. If the main function of reasoning is to construct arguments aimed at persuading, what follows from such a perspective is the idea that reasoning is a tool for communication, before being a tool for knowledge (Sperber 2001). Although emphasizing the primarily communicative function of reasoning skills does not imply underestimating their cognitive role, it however entails the idea that reasoning in non-communicative contexts is an extension of the capacity for epistemic vigilance realized in conversational exchanges (Sperber et al. 2010). The arguments proposed by Sperber and colleagues represent an effective way of understanding communication in terms of persuasion (see also Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1958). However, my idea is that the reference to argumentative strategies, while explaining some key aspects of human communication, is not suitable to account for its initial stages. In fact, inferential reasoning underlying argumentative strategies (as we will see in detail in chapter “Stories Without Language”) requires a fully-fledged language to work (Benitez-Burraco et al. 2021; Ferretti and Adornetti 2021; Ferretti et al. 2022). The main difficulty of the argumentative model of communication is that it works only by presupposing language: this is an unacceptable assumption if we are interested in the issue of the origins of human communication. In order to investigate this issue, it is necessary to refer to forms of persuasion that are more basic than the argumentative ones. It is my claim that storytelling is the basic persuasive form that allowed the transition from animal to human communication. The persuasive character of stories, then, is the lens through which exploring the origins of language. Narrative lends itself to an

2

Homo Narrans

7

understanding of the earliest stages of human communication since it supports persuasion before and independently of any form of argumentation.

2 Homo Narrans Although with important differences between them, the idea that the ability to tell stories is the hallmark of humans is widely accepted among scholars (cf. Boyd 2009; Corballis 2017; Gottschall 2012; McBride 2014; Thompson 2010). For example, Niles (1999) defines the individuals of our species as Homo Narrans and Thompson (2010), emphasizing the distinction between narrative and storytelling, argues that humans should be described in terms of Homo fabulator. According to Corballis (2015, p. 107): If there is anything that defines our species as unique (...), it is the telling of stories, and the invention of language as the means of doing so (...). Other animals (...) may well undertake limited mental travels through limited domains, but stories allow us to expand our mental lives to unlimited horizons.

The claim that narrative is what distinguishes humans from other animals entails a constraint on a specific idea of language to be used in the debate on the origins. To give an example, arguing that humans are distinguished from other animals by their ability to tell stories is very different from founding the distinction between language and animal communication on the ability to construct syntactically complex sentences—as proposed by the mainstream in cognitive science based on Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (UG; e.g., Berwick and Chomsky 2016; Hauser et al. 2014). I will address this point when introducing the structural issues; here the focus is on the functional issues, related to the why of stories. What are the selective pressures toward narrative communication?

2.1

Functional Role

Many authors argue that narrative abilities are the product of biological evolution with specific adaptive purposes (Boyd 2009; Collins 2013; Dautenhahn 2002; Gottschall 2012; Gottschall and Wilson 2005; Herman 2013; Hirstein 2005; Scalise Sugiyama 2005). Determining what these adaptive purposes are is a source of debate and controversy: some look at the role of stories in the development of children’s imaginative capacities (Engel 1995), others consider the role of stories in social cohesion (Bietti et al. 2019), and still others, like Gottschall (2012), view stories as tools that allow humans to experience situations without any of the risks they ordinarily involve. In general, many of the theoretical proposals on the adaptive function of stories hinge on their cognitive value. In this regard, with explicit reference to Aristotle, Corballis (2017, p. 103) holds:

8

Narrative and Persuasion Aristotle wrote that poetry is more important than history because it deals with possibility rather than with what has actually happened, and therefore stretches the mind – just as physical exercise stretches the muscles and adds to our well-being. By “poetry” he meant fiction, or works of the imagination, which can of course include some of what we now understand as poetry but also novels and plays, and had Aristotle been alive today he would undoubtedly have included movies and television soaps. He might have even watched them.

Stories have a strong cognitive value. As we will see in the next paragraph and in the chapters on cognitive architectures, in fact, stories affect the way humans represent reality. That said, my idea is that the primary adaptive function of stories lies in their communicative function rather than in the cognitive one. As already mentioned, stories are tools of extraordinary persuasive power and the main purpose of communication is to convince rather than to inform. A prominent aspect of the adaptive role of stories is related to the fact that persuasion provides a useful means for avoiding the other’s physical reaction. If we want someone to get up from his chair to take his place, we can push him violently away. The risk of using such a strategy, however, is that those who are sitting comfortably may oppose our intentions and react to defend their position. The attempt to persuade someone to act in a certain way does not rule out that a type of force is being exerted. Persuasive force is no less “force” than physical force: instead of using rejection, it exploits involvement. As Simmons (2001, p. 108) argues, stories are “more like a powerful magnet than a bulldozer”. The shift from the physical to the magnetic pull of stories is a matter of efficacy more than of good manners: stories penetrate our minds by changing our belief systems and, then, the roots of our behaviors. Following these considerations, the main reason behind the origin of storytelling in human communication is related to its persuasive effectiveness. What makes stories so persuasively effective? Why do stories have the power of converting words (and ideas) into a drive for deliberation (and therefore action)? The first step in answering these questions comes from the analysis of the properties that distinguish storytelling from other forms of representation.

2.2

Stories and Arguments

According to Bruner (1986, p. 11), stories and arguments are two different forms, not reducible to one another, of representing experience: A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds. Both can be used as means for convincing another. Yet what they convince of is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. The one verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. The other establishes not truth but verisimilitude.

Similarly, Kornell (1987) distinguishes between formal thought, which is governed by explicit reasoning (in which the prevailing criterion is truth, supported by the connection between premises and conclusions), and narrative thought, which has to

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Homo Narrans

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do with implicit forms of reasoning (characterized by plausibility and verisimilitude, instead of truth). Emphasizing the distinction between truth and verisimilitude as two features typical of two different kinds of thought, Kornell (ibid., p. 203) argues that the power of narrative thought “is in allowing us to act reasonably in the real world”. Along the same line of thought, for Dahlstrom (2014, p. 13615) this distinction between two modes of thought implicates two distinct modalities of communication: Because logical-scientific communication aims to provide general truths as an outcome, the legitimacy of its message is judged on the accuracy of its claims. In contrast, because narrative communication instead aims to provide a reasonable depiction of individual experiences, the legitimacy of its message is judged on the verisimilitude of its situations.

The distinction between the two modes of thought proposed by these scholars entails a sharp difference between two forms of representation of reality: that of science and that of common sense. However, it is likely that such radical separation does not really exist. If narrative is the typical human means of reality representation, then it is reasonable to assume that it is also the way in which scientists represent reality. Observing the scientific practice of women and men who are engaged in actual research, rather than speaking in abstract terms, a less radical perspective than that proposed by the proponents of the distinction between scientific representation and that of common sense emerges. An important example in this direction is the case of scientific dissemination: storytelling is broadly used as strategy to communicate to non-expert public (Avraamidou and Osborne 2009; Norris et al. 2005). In Dahlstrom’s view (2014), storytelling is the prevalent form for disseminating science because of the privileged relationship of narrative with thought. In acknowledging this relationship, an important aspect of the role of storytelling in scientific practices emerges. Since, in addition to being a tool of communication, narrative is also a tool of knowledge, storytelling is used not only for dissemination but also extensively in research activity. According to Bruner (1986), many scientific hypotheses start their lives as metaphors and brief stories that only later are formalized and tested empirically. Considerations of this kind support the idea that narrative is the main mode of human representation of reality. As suggested by Bruner (1991, p. 4), in fact, “we organize our experience and our memories of human happenings mainly in the form of narratives—stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on”. Narrative is the hallmark of the representation of human experience, because the representational capacities made possible by narrative do not appear reducible to any other form of representation. In addition to the fact that some phenomena “can only be known, or be known best, via narrative” (Morgan and Wise 2017, p. 4), another interesting aspect is that narrative makes humans capable of hypothesizing alternative scenarios to the current one: narrative is crucial not only for describing what happens but also for predicting what might happen. Indeed, the imagination of counterfactual situations makes it possible to do hypotheses and predictions about a reality different from the one currently experienced. Moreover, it is in reference to the fictitious character of the stories employed in science that we can well understand why the description of

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Narrative and Persuasion

facts (and the consequent primacy usually given to truth as an intrinsic character of the scientific enterprise) is not the unique characteristic feature of actual research practices. The above considerations have important implications on the issue of language origin. In From animals into gods: A brief history of humankind, Harari (2014) argues that fictional stories drove the earliest stages of human communication. In his view, indeed, the distinctive trait of language is not providing a full account of what happened, but rather “the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched, or smelled” (ibid., p. 33). The pleasure we feel when we are immersed in a story does not come from knowing that the events narrated are true (on the relationship between fictional entities and emotions, see Barbero 2017). From an evolutionary perspective, Tooby and Cosmides (2001) have considered the ability to construct fictional worlds as a human universal and Parrish (2014, p. 34), describing fiction as “the most useful counterfactual/strategic system humans employ on a daily basis”, claims that human interest in stories is not only independent of truth but it is in many respects at odds with truth. Since verisimilitude, instead of truth, makes stories so attractive and capable of generating pleasure in the audience, then verisimilitude is the bridge that connects the logic of persuasion to the logic of knowledge. The topic of verisimilitude is linked to the notion of mimesis (the imitation of reality), one of the key concepts of classical poetics. Regarding the mimetic character of poetry, Aristotle stresses its natural basis: Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated (Poet., 48b 4–9).

Knowledge deriving from poetry is not marginal and episodic. The activity of the poet (who speaks of universals) is stronger than the activity of the historian (who speaks of particulars). From the interweaving of verisimilitude and imitation emerges the cognitive power of stories, defined by Aristotle in terms of “imitation of an action” (Poet., 50a 4) and, as such, a connection of events. Two aspects need to be emphasized for my purposes. The first concerns the issue of the unitary nature of the story. According to Aristotle, in fact, a story “must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference, is not an organic part of the whole” (Poet., 51a 30–35). This is an important aspect that refers to the holistic dimension of narrative and to the idea that narrative is governed by global coherence (I will deal with these aspects in the following pages). The second aspect to be stressed concerns the priority of the plot (the arrangement of events) over the characters (the typification of the characters). The most important factor related to

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The Plot

11

mimesis in tragedy is the arrangement of incidents. Aristotle, in fact, considers tragedy as. an imitation not of men, but of an action and of life (. . .). Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions. Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all (Poet., 50a 16–24).

The concepts briefly summarized above are developed in the contemporary debate and will be largely examined in the following chapters. The Aristotelian idea of the priority of discourse over character has many adherents in contemporary narratology and deserves to be taken into account. Leaving the classical conception behind, the analysis of the role of plot in storytelling takes us to the heart of the central issues of this book.

3 The Plot In my view, the persuasive power of narrative depends largely on its discursive nature and, specifically, on a property (global coherence) that governs the story plot. At first glance, the reference to plot seems to confirm the Aristotelian position on the primacy of intrigue over character. With explicit reference to Aristotle (1996), Brooks (1984, p. 5) argues that plot is a constant of any form of narrative since it would be impossible to move “through the discrete elements—incidents, episodes, actions—of a narrative” without a principle of interconnectedness and intention. In his perspective, plot is not just an essential element of the structure of narrative discourse but mostly a structural and dynamic constituent of human thought. The framing of narrative as a specific form of thought is of great importance for my purposes. In investigating narrative, my interest is not in conducting a formal or structural analysis of the text (in the manner of Barthes 2019 or Propp 1928/1968). At the heart of my interest is the narrative competence, i.e. the human capacity to process discourse in the form of stories. Although starting from conceptual and methodological assumptions very different from those proposed by Brooks, I share the idea that the focus of attention, more than on the plot itself, should be on the dynamic aspect of narrative, that is, on what “makes a plot ‘move forward’, and makes us read forward, seeking in the unfolding of the narrative a line of intention and a portent of design that hold the promise of progress toward meaning” (Brooks 1984, p. xiii). The role of what makes to move forward in story comprehension is confirmed by the relevance that the end has for understanding the overall meaning of a story. As Kermode (1965, p. 6) argues, it is the ending of a story that makes it “a wholly concordant structure, the end is in harmony with the beginning, the middle with beginning and end”. Ricoeur (1983, pp. 66–67), who I will refer to extensively in the next section, also stresses the importance of the end:

12

Narrative and Persuasion To follow a story is to move forward in the midst of contingencies and peripeteia under the guidance of an expectation that finds its fulfilment in the conclusion of the story. This conclusion is not logically implied by some previous premises. It gives the story an ‘end point’, which, in turn, furnishes the point of view from which the story can be perceived as forming a whole. To understand the story is to understand how and why the successive episodes led to this conclusion, which, far from being foreseeable, must finally be acceptable, as congruent with the episodes brought together by the story.

The ending, the center of attraction that gives unity and direction to the story, has a fundamental role not only in defining the properties of stories but mostly in determining the kind of elaboration processes underlying narrative competence. The ending is the element through which it makes sense to say that a story has been understood—all narratives with an open end give the impression that the overall meaning of the story has not been fully comprehended. This is an important issue for exploring the structure of human communication, since conversation is clearly oriented by an exchange between individuals engaged in the attempt to express their own point of view (we do get angry when someone interrupts us before having finished our statement: without a conclusion, we had no chance to say what we wanted to say, and not by chance what precedes the conclusion should lead up to the closure). The concept of beginning and end connected by the middle (what makes narrative a homogeneous holistic construct), as obvious as it may seem, is worth being deeply explored. The topic of the story’s ending opens the way to a fundamental thesis of the present book: since following the train of thought to catch the story’s end is similar to following a path to reach the goal, my hypothesis is that narrative competence has deep similarities with the ability to navigate and orient in space and time. As we shall see in chapter “The Narrative Brain” by investigating the cognitive architectures underlying narrative processing, spatio-temporal navigation is much more than a metaphor. Before addressing this issue, however, we need to elaborate further the properties characterizing stories. In narratology, the time factor (along with plot and character) is a constitutive aspect of storytelling. As Brooks (1984, p. 10) points out, in fact, the meaning dealt with by narrative, and thus perhaps narrative’s raison d’être, is of and in time. Plot as it interests me is not a matter of typology or of fixed structures, but rather a structuring operation peculiar to those messages that are developed through temporal succession, the instrumental logic of a specific mode of human understanding.

Ricoeur is the one that more has drawn attention to the relationship between time and narrative. In his opinion, temporality is the “structure of existence that reaches language in narrativity and narrativity (is) the language structure that has temporality as its ultimate referent” (Ricoeur 1980, p. 169). My discussion on the role of time in narrative starts from the analysis of one of the most important works of this author.

3

The Plot

3.1

13

Time and Narrative

The relationship between plot and temporality is at the heart of the book Time and narrative by Ricoeur (1983). In his view, the narrative time is inextricably linked to the temporal character of human experience. Ricoeur writes (1983, p. 3): One presupposition commands all the others, namely, that what is ultimately at stake in the case of the structural identity of the narrative function as well as in that of the truth claim of every narrative work, is the temporal character of human experience. The world unfolded by every narrative work is always a temporal world. Or, as will often be repeated in the course of this study: time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience.

As is well known, Ricoeur’s proposal aims at combining the theory of Augustine (2017) (time without narrative) and the theory of Aristotle (1996) (narrative without time), who both reflected on the two horns of the problem without proposing a concordance. The reference to time resides for Ricoeur in the aporias highlighted in the Augustine’s Confessions (2017). From an ontological point of view, time does not exist; the nonbeing of time, however, collides with the everyday perception that humans have of the experience of time and, above all, with their constant language usage of time. How can we speak of time if time does not exist? The first part of Ricoeur’s answer to the question passes through the “psychological” solution to the nonbeing of time offered by Augustine, who relies on the memory of past and the expectation of future: It is abundantly clear that neither the future nor the past exist, and therefore it is not strictly correct to say that there are three times: past, present and future. It might be correct to say that there are three times, a present of past things, a present of present things, and a present of future things. Some such different times do exist in the mind, but nowhere else that I can see: the present of past things is the memory, the present of present things is direct perception, and the present of future things is expectation (Confessions, XI, 26, 20).

The strength of Augustine’s proposal is not only in having identified the psychological referent of time, but mainly in having stressed the dialectics between memory and expectation that takes shape in a form of extended present. According to Ricoeur (1983, p. 16), the key to Augustine’s solution lies in the idea that “the extension of time is a distension of the soul”. This notion is embodied in the concept of the threefold present, that conceives “the activity of a mind stretched in opposite directions, between expectation, memory, and attention” (ibid., p. 18), according to which “it is in the soul, hence as an impression, that expectation and memory possess extension” (ibid., p. 19). That said, the reference to the tension of the threefold present is only one of the cornerstones of Ricoeur’s theory about the relationship between time and narrative. The other conceptual cornerstone concerns the notion of emplotment introduced in the Aristotle’s Poetics (1996). Aristotle, in fact, establishes a relation of quasi-identification between mimesis (imitation or representation of action) and narrative (organization of events). The crux of Ricoeur’s attempt to combine Augustine and Aristotle is to

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show that mimesis can account for the temporal implications of emplotment. In his view, indeed, between the activity of narrating a story and the temporal character of human experience there exists a correlation that is not merely accidental but that presents a transcultural form of necessity. To put it another way, time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence (Ricoeur 1983, p. 52).

In other words, the operation of emplotment in the mimetic process has a mediating function between time and narrative. In his opinion, in fact, the temporal aspects related to emplotment are realized in the act of textual configuration: a story is not merely a sequence of events, but it is the organization of events into an “intelligible whole”, since “emplotment is the operation that draws a configuration out of a simple succession” (ibid., p. 65). For this reason, according to Ricoeur, the configurational act offers a solution to the Augustinian paradox of time. The act of emplotment, in fact, combines (...) two temporal dimensions, one chronological and the other not. The former constitutes the episodic dimension of narrative. It characterizes the story insofar as it is made up of events. The second is the configurational dimension properly speaking, thanks to which the plot transforms the events into a story. This configurational act consists of “grasping together” the detailed actions or what I have called the story’s incidents. It draws from this manifold of events the unity of one temporal whole (ibid., p. 66).

And again, more precisely: On the one hand, the episodic dimension of a narrative draws narrative time in the direction of the linear representation of time. (...) the episodes constitute an open series of events, which allows us to add to the “then, and then” a “and so forth”. (. . .) The configurational dimension, in its turn, presents temporal features directly opposed to those of the episodic dimension. Again, it does so in several ways. First, the configurational arrangement transforms the succession of events into one meaningful whole which is the correlate of the act of assembling the events together and which makes the story followable. Thanks to this reflective act, the entire plot can be translated into one “thought”, which is nothing other than its “point” or “theme”. However, we would be completely mistaken if we took such a point as atemporal. The time of the “fable and theme”, to use Northrop Frye’s expression, is the narrative time that mediates between the episodic aspect and the configurational aspect (ibid., p. 67).

The configurative character is widely considered as one of the constitutive features of narrative. It represents an aspect of great interest when investigating the relationship between the properties of narrative and the form of thought characterizing human beings. The close relationship between narrative and thought leads us to switch from general theoretical considerations to the study of a topic central to this book: the narrative competence, that is, the study of the systems and cognitive processes that enable humans to understand and invent stories. A first step in this direction concerns the analysis of Jerome Bruner’s culturalist psychology, a theoretical perspective that has great influence in contemporary debate and deserves attention, for both outlining the aspects of continuity and marking the points of divergence with the thesis of the present book.

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The Plot

3.2

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Time and Plot in Cognitive Psychology

Bruner’s great merit is his emphasis on the relationship between narrative and thought. In his view, narrative is the specific way through which humans represent experience. Specifically, at the basis of his proposal is the identification of the characteristic traits that make stories effective tools for representing reality. In this regard, a prominent role is held by the inherent temporal character of narrative representation. It is not by chance that Bruner (1991, p. 6) makes explicit reference to Ricoeur: A narrative is an account of events occurring over time. It is irreducibly durative. It may be characterizable in seemingly nontemporal terms (. . .), but such terms only summarize what are quintessentially patterns of events occurring over time. The time involved, moreover, as Paul Ricoeur has noted, is “human time” rather than abstract or “clock” time. It is time whose significance is given by the meaning assigned to events within its compass.

Consistently, Dautenhahn (2002) argues that narrative allows humans to extend their temporal horizons: unlike non-narrative modes, irrevocably linked to the here and now, stories permit to travel in time (into the future as well as into the past) to create realities that are imaginary or alternative to the current one. In addition to projection in time, many scholars identify in the causal sequence of events connected to each other in a coherent whole (the Aristotelian intrigue) the mark of narrative representation. Stories allow the construction of scenarios governed by global coherence: a story, in fact, extracts from the steam of experience a delimited set of participants, states, actions, and events and structures into a coherent whole what might otherwise be reabsorbed back into the atelic and unbounded time’s passing. Further (...), stories situate the protagonists, antagonists, and other characters in a recognizable, coherence-giving action structure that involves conflicting goals and plans for achieving those goals (Herman 2013, p. 234).

As is clear from Herman’s words, the binding of events into an action structure is governed by a principle of coherence. Global coherence, as we shall see below, is the internal structure of discourse, in which the constitutive elements of narrative (time, plot, and character) are mixed together. Global coherence, in fact, is the property underlying the holistic character of stories, since “a story weaves detail, character, and events into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts” (Simmons 2001, p. 31). Scalise Sugiyama (2001) agrees in identifying the functional role of stories in reference to this character, as storytelling allows humans to generate a holistic simulation of experience. The functional effectiveness of such a form of simulation depends on the fact that storytelling is the optimal level through which human beings experience reality, since “stories are instruments for sense making that are optimally calibrated for molar minds” (Herman 2013, p. 83). The molar character of the mind (as opposed to its molecular character) is what makes stories particularly effective for thought: narrative representation is the mode through which humans experience physical and social reality at an optimal level of interaction. According to Warren and Shaw (1985a, b), the optimal level of human experience is the level of

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“terrestrial events” (Gibson 1979/1986), at which humans relate to medium-sized entities (humans interact with tables, chairs, and entities perceivable as a unitary whole). Moreover, emphasizing the holistic character of storytelling implies a commitment to the evolutionary advantage it provides. In this regard, Scalise Sugiyama’s (2001, p. 225) thesis is that through storytelling humans are able to “simulate” experience while avoiding “the costs involved in first-hand information acquisition”. Gottschall (2012) shares the idea that the adaptive role of storytelling is related to its simulative character. He considers the telling of stories as analogous to navigating in a flight simulator: by means of stories we can navigate through life’s experiences without any of the risks they ordinarily involve just as, through a flight simulator, we can simulate driving an airplane without the risk of a mistake in maneuvering during a real flight. In any event, the reference to holistic simulation and global coherence as crucial properties of narrative should not undermine the functional role of the internal constituents of a story. At the core of such constituents are events. I will now draw attention to the notion of event and the central role it plays in narrative competence.

4 Events Any discussion about the holistic character of stories and the role of plot in temporal reconfiguration would be meaningless in the absence of a notion of event. From a general point of view, it is possible to consider stories as a sequence of events causally connected in time. Then, events turn out to be the basic constituent of any narrative representation of reality. What should be meant by event? The definition of event is at the center of a lively philosophical debate characterized by various theoretical approaches (from metaphysical ones to those that study events by analyzing the logical form of the propositions describing them). The focus of interest of this book is the cognitive notion of event. Radvansky and Zacks (2014) consider this notion as the product of a long tradition including reflections from various disciplines. In addition to Kant, a milestone is represented by Gestalt psychology and, specifically, by its representative idea involving the study, at the molar level, of the functional interactions between individuals and real objects. In this framework, events are the basic structure of the psychological activity through which individuals do interpret reality. In general terms, an event can be conceived as “a segment of time at a given location that is conceived by an observer to have a beginning and an end” (Zacks and Tversky 2001, p. 3). In other words: Events are what happens to us, what we do, what we anticipate with pleasure or dread, and what we remember with fondness or regret. Much of our behavior is guided by our understanding of events. We perceive events when we observe the world unfolding around us, participate in events when we act on the world, simulate events that we hear or read about, use our knowledge of events to solve problems (Radvansky and Zacks 2014, p. 1).

4

Events

17

Stressing the unitary character of the notion of event does not imply overlooking the internal structure of events. For example, Barwise and Perry (1983) have defined events with reference to several properties and components (individuals, relations, states and spatio-temporal localizations). According to Sinha and Gärdenfors (2014, p. 72), events concern situations in which individuals “figure as agents, performing actions directed to other agents and to objects”. They highlight a deep relationship between events and language: the structure of language provides evidence of the priority of events in human cognition, since “event structure, the combination of constituents encoding objects, actions, location, and motion, is the fundamental building block for sentence meaning”. Referring to event as a gestalt whole, rather than in relation to its internal components, Radvansky and Zacks (2014) develop a different line of thought compared to Sinha and Gärdenfors. In their view, the perception of events is related to discourse processing (which includes the narrative plan), rather than sentence processing. According to Radvansky and Zacks (2014, p. 79), in fact, the mechanisms underlying discourse processing are not really about language as such, but about event cognition. This makes for a powerful synergy between the study of discourse comprehension and the study of event perception: language provides unique opportunities to study event comprehension more broadly, and event cognition offers unique insights into how we process language.

Identifying individual events is a basic condition of discourse comprehension. Specifically, discourse-level comprehension process is a case of a more general cognitive skill, that is, event segmentation. Understanding discourse, indeed, requires processes analogous to those involved in the segmentation into events that make up the flow of everyday experience. Moreover, according to Radvansky and Zacks, event segmentation is related to an ability with a strong adaptive value, that of making predictions about what will happen in the future, thus preparing individuals to act in front of changes in the situation, without those changes actually occurring. The anticipatory and predictive character of event segmentation is crucial in narrative competence since “one major function of event models in language comprehension is to enable prediction about what information is coming in the discourse” (ibid., p. 59). Experimental evidence support the relevance of segmentation in narrative comprehension. Zacks et al. (2009), for example, have shown that in a story the clauses judged as event boundaries by readers were passages associated with a more effortful and time-consuming reading process. Increases in the reader’s mental effort coinciding with the likelihood of event segmentation during reading has also been found by neuroimaging experiments (Speer et al. 2007). However, event segmentation is not the only mechanism underlying narrative processing. A complementary mechanism allows the addressee to grasp the sequence of utterances as referring to a coherent and integrated whole. Along segmentation, therefore, the cognitive systems used to process the causal relationship and the temporal order between events are equally important. I will analyze both the functioning and structure of these systems in the following chapters. Here, it is sufficient to point out that both systems are cognitive, rather than linguistic. As

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Radvansky and Zacks (2014, p. 76) argue about the causal relationship between events: One of the most important aspects of the event models conveyed by language is the causal structure of the described events. Although causal information is conveyed in a text via the words used, information appears to be primarily represented at the event model level, not the surface (...). Causal relations serve as the backbone for understanding and remembering the narrative as a whole.

As we shall see, the same argument can be extended to the temporal cognitive systems. Perception of events through processes of segmentation and integration, navigation in space and time, projection into the other’s mind (by simulating the protagonist’s point of view): these are the processes required to account for the ability to elaborate the narrative dimension. Before exploring in detail the cognitive architectures underlying narrative competence, however, some argumentative steps deserve to be further elaborated. In the next section, I will explore the relationship between storytelling and emotions, that is central to evaluating the adaptive value of stories as means of persuasion.

5 Narrative and Desire The invention of fire (sporadic control: 1 million years ago; regular control: 400,000 years ago) is without doubt a crucial stage in human phylogeny. Among the several advantages that such an invention enabled, the capacity for cooking meat is one of the most important: it determined a decisive shift in the diet of our ancient ancestors with important anatomical and cerebral consequences (Wrangham 2010; Stanford 1999). Defense from wild animals and cold were further critical adaptive factors, among others. For my purposes, of great interest is the role that the discovery of fire played in the ability to tell stories. In her account of conversations among the Ju/‘hoan (!Kung), a Bushmen population living between Namibia and Botswana, Wiessner (2014) highlights the substantial difference between day and nighttime conversations told by firelight. In her view, in fact, by extending the day, the firelight also extended the effective time for social interactions, with important consequences on the type of communication used to interact. Unlike day conversations, night conversations acquire a specific narrative character: they are more intimate and serve to convey shared beliefs, contributing to the transmission and consolidation of cultural values common to group members. Wiessner (2014, p. 14030) holds: Through stories and subsequent discussion, people collected experiences of others and accumulated knowledge of options that others had tried. The nitty-gritty of egalitarianism, food sharing, kinship dues, and land tenure were thus regulated by day; night talk was critical for transmitting the big picture of the workings of marriage, kinship, xaro exchange, and cosmology/trance healing.

Confirming that storytelling around the campfire functions as a social glue that can increase cooperation between individuals, Dunbar (2014, p. 14014) argues that

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19

nighttime conversation “provides direct evidence for the importance of charismatic storytellers—those skilled in the art of entertainment—as core foci around whom community bonding revolves”. The persuasive abilities of charismatic storytellers are known and well documented in all social groups (Ventura 2019). A good storyteller can arouse the interlocutor’s desires and emotions, as one of the primary features of stories “is the addition of emotional content and added sensory details in the telling” (Simmons 2001, p. 31). Similar skills highlight the relationship between the persuasive power of stories and their ability to make the interlocutor being emotionally engaged.

5.1

Engagement and Transportation

The above considerations lead to examine an important aspect related to the persuasive function of narrative. Most of the persuasive power of stories depends on their ability to transport the interlocutor from the real world to the reality told in the story. Referring to some of Gerrig’s (1993) suggestions, Green and Brock (2000, p. 703) argue that: individuals reading stories may become transported into a narrative world. Transportation is a convergent mental process, a focusing of attention, that may occur in response to either fiction or nonfiction. The components of transportation include emotional reactions, mental imagery, and a loss of access to real-world information; the resulting transportation may be a mechanism for narrative-based belief change.

Transportation into the narrative world turns out to be a very effective tool of persuasion, mostly depending on the possibility to control the strategies of resistance and defense realized by interlocutors. In the previous sections, the distinct roles of communicators in conversational exchanges have been highlighted: the speaker aims at persuading, the listener resists through forms of epistemic vigilance. In conversation, defense against the speaker’s persuasive attempts implies forms of counterargumentation (Sperber et al. 2010). A useful strategy to overcome the listener’s epistemic vigilance is to try to convince her without the listener catching the speaker’s persuasive intention. Stories are a powerful tool for bypassing defensive strategies, since they allow to fly under the radar (Dal Cin et al. 2004), i.e., to achieve the persuasive end while hiding the persuasive intent of the storyteller. The mechanisms of engagement and transportation underlie this ability of stories. According to the Transportation-Imagery-Model (which integrates imagination, attention, and sensation), the primary effect of transportation into a story is the loss of access to some real-world aspects (Bilandzic and Busselle 2013). As Green and Brock (2000, p. 702) point out, in fact, the reader loses access to some real-world facts in favor of accepting the narrative world that the author has created. This loss of access may occur on a physical level - a transported reader may not notice others entering the room, for example - or, more importantly, on a psychological level, a subjective distancing from reality. While the person is immersed in the story, he or she may be less aware of real-world facts that contradict assertions made in the

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Narrative and Persuasion narrative. (...) Beyond loss of access to real-world facts, transported readers may experience strong emotions and motivations, even when they know the events in the story are not real (...). For example, when transported into narratives with unhappy endings, transported individuals are likely to engage in what Gerrig (1993) termed anomalous replotting: ‘actively thinking about what could have happened to change an outcome’ (p. 177). A third consequence is that people return from being transported somewhat changed by the experience.

A further effect of stories as tools for bypassing the listener’s epistemic vigilance is emotional, along with cognitive, involvement (Busselle and Bilandzic 2009; Green and Brock 2000). This form of involvement is a key factor in understanding how storytelling allows to fly under the radar, avoiding the interlocutor’s defensive strategies. An important aspect associated with the role of narrative involvement in persuasion concerns the processes of experiential simulation enacted when listening to or reading a story: one possible form of such simulation relates to the possibility for the reader/listener to take on the characters’ perspective, thus vicariously experiencing their life. As we will see in chapter “The Narrative Brain”, the notion of character has an important role in story processing and, therefore, in persuasive processes.

5.2

Storytelling and Desire

The mechanisms of engagement and transportation underlying vicarious experience emphasize the listener’s emotional involvement in the story told by the speaker. The reference to plot as a means of persuasion does not entail a rational process devoid of emotion. If persuading is a way to make someone act in a certain way, the emotional dimension is essential. It is well known that emotions play a central role in rational thought, especially in decision-making processes (e.g., Damasio 1994; LeDoux 1998). Hence, it is not surprising that a successful persuasive speech should be convincing at the level of emotions and affective states. Indeed, when it comes to action rather than knowledge in the abstract, persuasive discourse enters into relationship with desire. As Piazza (2008, p. 113) argues about classical rhetoric, “persuading is not just bewitching or stunning the audience through fine words, but it means involving in a cognitive process deeply characterized by pleasure”. Pleasure and desire are intrinsic features of storytelling. According to Brooks (1984), the dynamics of narrative, the force that moves the narration forward towards conclusion, is governed by desire. Against the eighteenth century’s preoccupation with the machine and reconsidering the nineteenth century’s fascination with the motor, Brooks refers to the Freud’s psychoanalytic concept of instinct. The opposition between machine and motor proves successful in the critique of formalist approaches to the study of narrative. Brooks (1984, p. 61) argues: Narratives portray (...) the motors of desire that drive and consume their plots and they also lay bare the nature of narration as a form of human desire: the need to tell as a primary human drive that seeks to seduce and to subjugate the listener, to implicate him in the thrust of a

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Adaptive Rhetoric

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desire that never can quite speak its name (...). For the analyst of narrative, these different yet convergent vectors of desire suggest the need to explore more fully the shaping function of desire, its modelling of the plot, and also the dynamics of exchange and transmission, the role of tellers and listeners.

Two remarks based on these considerations. The first is that desire is inherent in the story’s plot: considering the functional character of stories, the interweaving of the events appears to be important from a persuasive point of view because plot is a primary condition for the instinctive and emotional involvement of listener/reader. Second, the connection to emotions is the basic element of every animal, even before than human, form of persuasion. Studies in comparative rhetoric have strongly supported the adaptive value of emotional persuasion (Kennedy 1992; Parrish 2014). Questioning cultural constructivism (which considers rhetoric as strictly dependent from language), the proposal made by these studies is of great importance for the purposes of the present book: rather than the basic condition of persuasion, language is the tool invented by humans to respond effectively to the selective pressures of persuasion. Representing an important starting point for sustaining the thesis of the independence of persuasion from language, the last part of this chapter focuses precisely on comparative rhetoric studies.

6 Adaptive Rhetoric As pointed out in the first part of the chapter, Aristotle considers rhetoric an art that can be taught and learned. However, Aristotelian rhetoric is also characterized by the idea that persuasion is a natural ability that human beings possess from birth—a persuasive instinct. At the center of interests of the present book is this natural ability: the idea that persuasion is a trait characterizing humans by nature, in fact, is one of the basic arguments for considering human persuasion in continuity with the persuasive abilities of nonhuman animals. The issue of continuity is a matter of great importance since the first step in highlighting the role of persuasion in language origins implies showing that this ability is (logically as well as temporally) independent of language. Such a hypothesis is closely related to the possibility that some nonhuman animals are capable of enacting persuasive strategies. What does empirical research tell us about this? Kennedy (1992, 1998) pioneered the idea of rhetoric as a natural phenomenon found not only in humans of different cultures, but also in nonhuman animals. Considering rhetoric in these terms opens the way to a framework of continuity, in which the properties characterizing humans (that are animals among other animals) cannot be considered in terms of a qualitative leap. Inspired by the Darwinian tradition, Kennedy (1992, p. 4) argues that “rhetoric is manifest in all animal life and existed long before the evolution of human beings”. These considerations will affect the definition of language and the way of framing its origin in the course of this book.

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In support of Kennedy’s arguments are studies on the ecological perspective of rhetoric, which contend that the ability to persuade has an adaptive value (Parrish 2013, 2014), producing evolutionary benefits for those who possess it. Indeed, rhetoric is a powerful tool for building and strengthening group identity, consolidating the prestige of leaders, as well as convincing the audience of the accuracy of a message. Moreover, emphasizing the role of persuasion in group cohesion opens the way to the idea that the origins of language are related to sexual selection, in addition to natural selection (Foolen 2002; Miller 2000). That said, as already mentioned, the first undisputed advantage is related to the fact that persuasion (instead of being a coercive behavior) is a way to avoid reactive aggression of the interlocutor: since fights can be costly to both aggressors and defenders, “any mechanism that can settle disputes without resorting to violence would seem to be of mutual benefit” (Parrish 2014, p. 40). The attempt to convince others, instead of provoking a conflict, can, therefore, be considered a highly adaptive strategy. As Kennedy (1998, p. 14) claims, “it seems clear that nature has encouraged the evolution of rhetorical communication as a substitute for physical encounters”. Before proceeding further, three clarifications need to be made. First, the reference to the adaptive character of rhetoric does not coincide with a unidirectional perspective based on the priority of biology to the exclusion of cultural factors. Relying on adaptive rhetoric is a way to adhere to a synthetic model that integrates cultural practices and adaptive behaviors. Parrish (2013) proposes a biocultural model to the study of rhetoric by explicitly referring to the theory of consilience of human nature proposed by Wilson (1998). Given that language is the phenomenon where biology and culture converge, such a synthetic perspective is of great importance for the purposes of this book. The second consideration concerns the more general issue emerging when analyzing a given phenomenon in a continuity framework: the comparison with animal forms of persuasion can lead to considering as rhetorical persuasive behaviors that are so generic as to cast doubt on their actual rhetorical persuasiveness. As highlighted by Parrish (2014), we need to ask whether acknowledging the adaptive character of persuasion and constantly referring to forms of continuity with the animal world may undermine the properly rhetorical character of rhetoric. How much rhetorical is adaptive rhetoric? Following Kennedy’s (1992, 1998) considerations, answering this question requires understanding if animal persuasion contains at least some of the characteristic features of human rhetoric. This implies investigating whether the distinctive traits of the three traditional genres of rhetoric (forensic, epideictic, and deliberative) are also present in animal forms of persuasion. In Parrish’s (2014) view, the three genres are concerned with a distinction between present (epideictic rhetoric), past (forensic rhetoric), and future (deliberative rhetoric) events. Having reported numerous empirical cases testifying to the presence of the three forms of rhetoric in nonhuman animals, his final consideration is that “each type of rhetoric is represented in the animal world, just as in the human world” (ibid., p. 45). Therefore, the reference to animal rhetoric in a continuity perspective does not dismiss the concept of rhetoric.

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Conclusions

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The third and most important consideration concerns the relationship between rhetoric and language. A first relevant result of studies on adaptive rhetoric is the critique of the widely prevailing idea of persuasive communication as an exclusive product of language. As Davis (2011, p. 88) points out, classical rhetorical studies, albeit with specific differences, converge on the thesis of the symbolic foundation of persuasion, a foundation that “while it defines the human (‘the symbol-using animal’), is what nonhuman animals purportedly lack”. Describing rhetoric as closely dependent on the symbolic (specifically, on language) is a way of considering it a capacity unique to humans, given that symbolic capacities distinguish our species from other animals in Deacon’s (1997) perspective. Against this thesis, the theoretical arguments and empirical findings supporting adaptive rhetoric may be used to conceive persuasion as a capacity independent of language. Although distinct from communication, in fact, “rhetoric is biologically prior to speech and to conscious intentionality” (Kennedy 1998, p. 26). For Kennedy, insisting on the existence of a “deep natural rhetoric” not only means attributing persuasive abilities to animals that do not display the capacity for language, but it mainly means suggesting that rhetoric may have served as a precursor to human language—in a framework that identifies in persuasion, more than in communication, the primary function of language. Indeed, as Kennedy (1998, pp. 4–5) argues, “communication would not take place without a rhetorical impulse to drive it. There is no ‘zero degree’ rhetoric in any utterance because there would be no utterance without a rhetorical impulse”. This is an important first step towards corroborating the idea that persuasive abilities are the condition of possibility (the evolutionary precondition) of language.

7 Conclusions Evidence that the ability of persuasion is also present in nonhuman animals represent a first important result in favor of the idea that the persuasive instinct fostered the emergence of language. The evolutionary intertwining of persuasion and language is at the core of the present investigation. In my opinion, in fact, the study of language origins is closely connected to the analysis of the specific human persuasion abilities. More specifically, language is the communicative invention created by humans to enhance animal persuasive abilities. Considering the emergence of language as related to the enhancement of persuasive abilities entails a specific way of intending language (both its form and structure). My hypothesis is that language has a narrative foundation. Specifically, to enhance persuasive capacities humans began to tell stories, because stories are an extraordinarily effective tool of persuasion. Before addressing the issue of language origin in more detail, some intermediate steps are required: first and foremost, the analysis of the functional role of language. Answering the question “what is language for?”, in the next chapter I will try to understand what are (and what were) the selective pressures that led humans to invent a narrative form of communication. Understanding the why of language is the first step in studying its origin and

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evolution: investigating the functional role of language, indeed, is a way to account for the persuasive foundation of human communication, which is largely shared with animal communication.

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Parrish AC (2014) Adaptive rhetoric. Evolution, culture, and the art of persuasion. Routledge, London and New York Perelman CE, Olbrechts-Tyteca L (1958) Traité de l’argumentation. La nouvelle rhètorique. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris (Eng. transl. The new rhetoric: a treatise on argumentation) Piazza F (2004) Linguaggio, persuasione e verità. La retorica del Novecento. Carocci, Roma Piazza F (2008) La retorica di Aristotele. Introduzione alla lettura. Carocci, Roma Propp V (1928/1968) Morphology of the folktale. University of Texas Press, Austin Radvansky GA, Zacks JM (2014) Event cognition. Oxford University Press, New York Ricoeur P (1980) Narrative time. Crit Inq 7(1):169–190 Ricoeur P (1983) Temps et récit. Tome 1. Éditions du Seuil, Paris (Eng. transl. Time and narrative, vol 1) Salmon C (2007) Storytelling, la machine à fabriquer des histoires et à formater les esprits. La Découverte, Paris Scalise Sugiyama M (2001) Food, foragers, and folklore: the role of narrative in human subsistence. Evol Hum Behav 22(4):221–240 Scalise Sugiyama M (2005) Reverse-engineering narrative: evidence of special design. In: Gottshall J, Wilson DS (eds) The literary animal: evolution and the nature of narrative. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, pp 177–196 Simmons A (2001) The story factor. Basic Books, Cambridge Sinha C, Gärdenfors P (2014) Time, space, and events in language and cognition: a comparative view. Ann N Y Acad Sci 1326(1):72–81 Speer NK, Zacks JM, Reynolds JR (2007) Human brain activity time-locked to narrative event boundaries. Psychol Sci 18(5):449–455 Sperber D (2001) An evolutionary perspective on testimony and argumentation. Philos Top 29(1/2): 401–413 Sperber D, Clément F, Heintz C, Mascaro O, Mercier H, Origgi G, Wilson D (2010) Epistemic vigilance. Mind Lang 25(4):359–393 Stanford CB (1999) The hunting apes. Princeton University Press, Princeton Thompson T (2010) The ape that captured time: folklore, narrative, and the human-animal divide. West Folk 69(3):395–420 Tooby J, Cosmides L (2001) Does beauty build adapted minds? Toward an evolutionary theory of aesthetics, fiction, and the arts. SubStance 30(1):6–27 Venier F (2008) Il potere del discorso. Retorica e pragmatica linguistica. Carocci, Roma Ventura S (2019) I leader e le loro storie. In: Narrazione, comunicazione politica e crisi della democrazia. Il Mulino, Bologna Warren WH, Shaw RE (eds) (1985a) Persistence and change: proceedings of the first international conference on event perception, vol 2. Psychology Press, London Warren WH, Shaw RE (1985b) Events and encounters as units of analysis for ecological psychology. In: Warren WH, Shaw RE (eds) Persistence and change: proceedings of the first international conference on event perception. Psychology Press, London, pp 1–28 Wiessner PW (2014) Embers of society: firelight talk among the Ju/‘hoansi bushmen. Proc Natl Acad Sci 111(39):14027–14035 Wilson D (1998) Discourse, coherence and relevance: a reply to Rachel Giora. J Pragmat 29:57–74 Wrangham R (2010) Catching fire: how cooking made us human. Profile Books, London Zacks JM, Tversky B (2001) Event structure in perception and conception. Psychol Bull 127(1): 3–21 Zacks JM, Speer NK, Reynolds JR (2009) Segmentation in reading and film comprehension. J Exp Psychol Gen 138(2):307–327

Two Models of Communication

Abstract The analysis of the specificities of language is addressed starting from the analysis of animal communication. Two main models of animal communication are presented and arguments in support of the model which describes it as a matter of influence are provided. In a framework of continuity with both the communication of nonhuman animals and that of our hominin predecessors, the investigation of the specificities of human language calls into play the narrative character, that is unique in the animal kingdom. Focusing on the narrative dimension, the chapter frames the origin of language within a perspective that considers it as a response to the adaptive demands of enhancing the persuasive abilities of our predecessors. Keywords Informative communication · Manipulative communication · Code model · Relevance theory · Animal rhetoric The relationship between animal and human communication is a pivotal topic in the language origins literature. In the previous chapter, I maintained that the persuasive instinct is shared by humans and other animals: studies in adaptive rhetoric have shown that the ability to convince others has implications at the level of biological evolution and it is widely present in the communicative behaviors of many species. Language is no exception to the adaptive constraint of persuasion: the evolution of our specific means of communication responds to the same selective pressures which are responsible for the evolution of animal communication. On the basis of these considerations, I argued that the origin of language responds to the adaptive challenge of enhancing the persuasive abilities of our ancient predecessors. Since language has mainly a narrative character (humans are the only animals known to tell stories), the evolution of this unique trait is what we need to explain. That said, accounting for the uniqueness of language does not mean referring to qualitative leaps or discontinuist perspectives. In this chapter, I will discuss why the thesis of the specificity of language does not entail a sharp distinction with animal communication. In general terms, narrative competence characterizing human communication is both what distinguishes language (it is the typical human way of communicating) and what connects language to other forms of animal communication. For this © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Ferretti, Narrative Persuasion. A Cognitive Perspective on Language Evolution, Interdisciplinary Evolution Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09206-0_2

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reason, the analysis of the specificity of language should start from the analysis of animal communication.

1 The Classical Thesis In this chapter, I will address the relationship between animal communication and language from a specific point of view, which concerns the functional role of communication. At the basis of my interest is the question: “What is the purpose of communication?”. The classical thesis, which also reaches a wider acceptance in the common opinion, is that communication is a useful tool for transmitting information. The analysis of animal communication starts from this thesis. The idea of communication as transmission of information has a strong intuitive character; moreover, the informative model has solid empirical and conceptual foundations. A well-known case in this regard is that of vervet monkeys. Struhsaker (1967) found that these animals exhibit acoustically different alarm calls in response to different types of predators: they give distinct calls warn of leopards, eagles, and snakes. The crucial point is that each call is associated with a specific behavioral response: when a leopard alarm call is raised, the individual who emitted the alarm and those who received it run up into trees; in response to call for the eagles, vervets look up; snake call makes vervets to stand up bipedally inspecting the ground (Seyfarth et al. 1980). This is not an isolated case. Other monkeys can produce acoustically distinct vocalizations in response to different external stimuli (Hauser 1998; Zuberbühler et al. 1999). Gouzoules et al. (1984) analyzed rhesus monkey screams, identifying five acoustically distinct vocalizations produced during agonistic encounters. They found that the information conveyed by the screams is used by members to assess the severity of aggression and the need to help conspecific mates. These cases provide empirical support to the intuitive idea of communication as transmission of information. In a review article aimed at stressing the relevance of this idea for the study of animal communication, Seyfarth et al. (2010) highlight that the thesis of communication as transmission of information is justified by empirical evidence. Even Stegmann (2013, p. 20) claims that “the most straightforward argument for the appropriateness of information is empirical evidence”. Furthermore, the strength of informative accounts of animal communication lies in their reference to an interpretative model of great historical and theoretical relevance: the mathematical theory of information proposed by Shannon and Weaver (1949). It is an “objective” theory, i.e. a theoretical model able to account for communication without referring to complex and unclear notions (like that of “meaning”) or to interpretative processes of supposed intentional agents. As Dretske (1983, p. 55) points out, Shannon and Weaver’s model allow “to think information as an objective commodity, as something whose existence (as information) is (largely) independent of the interpretative activities of conscious agents”. Such a perspective lends itself well to describing the communicative abilities of nonhuman animals.

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The Classical Thesis

1.1

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The Mathematical Model of Information

When it comes to communication, especially if understood in terms of transmission of information, the main issue concerns the nature of the content transmitted in communicative exchanges. The way of interpreting content is a matter of debate and discussion. According to its supporters, the main advantage of the informative model lies in freeing the notion of information from that of content. As highlighted by Shannon and Weaver (1949), in fact, the transmission of information does not entail any supposed entity (any kind of hidden meaning) transmitted by the signal. Information is not a content conveyed by the signal, but the use that the receiver makes of the signal: by reducing uncertainty, the signal allows the receiver to make predictions about the behavior to be adopted. As Owren et al. (2010, p. 759) point out, unlike its use in everyday language, the idea that signals carry information is meant as shorthand for a purely statistical relationship between a given event and all possible sequelea associated with it. The number and conditional probabilities of such sequelae then provide the basis for defining information in quantitative terms, namely as a reduction in uncertainty about one state of the world based upon observing another. Signals can thus be said to be informative in the sense that they allow perceivers to draw inferences about their environment, other individuals, and the like.

Along these lines, information transmission is explained in probabilistic and associationist terms, which represents an important step in outlining an “objective” model of communication. The strength of such a model depends mainly on the fact that it can be described mathematically: probabilistic decision models make it possible to explain communication without referring to entities that are ontologically compromising, such as representations, intentions, or meanings. In the famous essay of 1949, Shannon and Weaver stress this point: The word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary language. In particular, information must not be confused with meaning. In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present viewpoint, as regards information (...). The semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering aspects (Shannon and Weaver 1949, p. 99).

Through this model, communication is explained in an objective way, without introducing processes or mental states of intentional agents. End of the game? Not at all: the objectivity of the informative model and its independence from conceptually compromising notions are a matter of dispute among scholars.

1.2

Limitations of the Informative Model

A first concern for the informative model regards the notion of information content, which remains central in the objective definition of communication. In spite of attempts to remove this notion, indeed, the idea that transmitting information

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means conveying a content packed by the sender is still strong. This poses a serious limitation since undermines the validity of the main feature (the objective character) of the informative model. As the notion of informative content implies semantic issues, for some scholars the informative model is unable to leave out the notion of meaning that it holds to overcome. Stegmann (2013) has stressed this difficulty: who claims that animal signals are physical events emitted to elicit responses in the receiver must claim that those signals are also something else. More precisely, “as the colloquial meaning of ‘signal’ suggests, animal signals are events that convey information to receivers, where information is the content of a signal, or what the signal is about” (Stegmann 2013, p. 2). Stegman raises a crucial issue that concerns not only the semantic value but also the semiotic status of expressive signals: what causes a behavioral response in a monkey that hears an alarm call signaling the presence of an eagle or a snake? Is it the physical sound of the signal (its physical distinctness and association with two different types of stimulus) or the fact that the signal is associated with a specific referent (the snake or eagle that is present in the scene)? Considering animal calls as symbols that refer to specific referents (to entities of the external world) opens the way to the issue of the symbolic or representational character of animal signals which, in turn, necessarily raises the question of the informative content transmitted in the communicative process. The question thus seems anything but solved. Empirical research can contribute to inform about the problem. Gouzoules et al. (1984) have provided experimental evidence in favor of the idea that the behavior of rhesus monkeys depends on the informative content of vocalizations, rather than on the visual stimulus of the observed scene. In their experiments, the monkeys behaved appropriately even when screams were produced in the absence of the corresponding visual scene. The authors interpret these data as evidence that the information necessary for identifying the type of predators is contained in the vocalizations themselves and, therefore, the latter can be interpreted as “representational signals that refer to external objects and events” (ibid., p. 182). Other experiments seem to confirm these results (Slocombe and Zuberbühler 2005, 2006). Similar empirical findings open the field to an important issue for the topics covered in this book: the issue of continuity between animal communication and human language. Considering animal signals as endowed with a symbolic (or protosymbolic) status allows to interpret them as precursors of words. A highly-debated issue concerning the case of vervet monkeys is whether their emissions are “labels” referring to external entities or events in the same way that nouns stand for their referents. In other words, the case of vervet monkeys calls into play the issue of referential capacities and, therefore, of the symbolic character of animal calls: just as in the case of words, the alarm calls refer to specific referents in the external world (the eagles, snakes, or leopards that threat the environment inhabited by the community). Supporting such a position means endorsing the idea that animal communication is based on the transmitted informative content, that is, on something very similar to the semantic content of linguistic expressions. Moreover, it means questioning the objective character of the informative model. In spite of the good

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intentions of its supporters, the informative model turns out to be closely associated with the notion of content and the related representational status of signals. The shift from telephone communication (the focus of Shannon and Weaver’s engineering interests) to animal communication entails a complex conceptual framework in which associationist processes give way to interpretive ones. According to Stegmann (2013, p. 8), if animal calls are labels referring to entities in the world, then, “according to the most demanding view of informational communication, referential signals have content only in the case that receivers infer or predict something from it by means of internal representations”. The issue of whether vervet monkey calls can be characterized in referential terms (as such, precursors of linguistic signs) is an open and debated question (see Fedurek and Slocombe 2011; Fischer and Price 2017; Wheeler and Fischer 2012). Deacon (1997) considers the claim that monkey calls are analogous to words as founded on a completely incorrect use of the term ‘reference’. The serious mistake of interpreting the alarm calls of vervets as corresponding to the nouns of the associated predators would be based on a surface level similarity that has nothing to do with the essential character of the symbolic capacity which, in Deacon’s opinion, represents the Rubicon between humans and other animals. Regardless of the solution adopted in the debate on the symbolic status of animal signals, two issues deserve attention: first, the informative model appears to be inseparable from the notion of content; second, the informative model of animal communication seems strongly influenced by the way human communication is understood.

1.2.1

The Confusion Between Information and Semantic Content

In spite of Shannon and Weaver’s proposal to define communication as free from the cumbrous notion of meaning, the semantic character of the informative content seems to be an unavoidable premise of the informative models of animal communication. According to Krebs and Dawkins (1984), in fact, in such models two different meanings of information tend to be confused with each other: that related to uncertainty reduction and that referring to semantic content. Clearly, it is this second sense that raises a problem. Although explicit references to informative content are rare within the informative model, yet the underlying assumption is that signals carry information since they always have some more or less specific content (Stegmann 2013). Despite the ostracism maintained by Shannon and Weaver, reference to semantic content remains an implicit assumption characterizing informative models of animal communication. Considering communication in terms of uncertainty reduction or semantic content means referring to two distinct notions that should not be merged, since they refer to different ways (that are irreconcilable with each other) of understanding the communicative process. The risk of confusing information with meaning is evident in the use of expressions such as “encoding” of information or even in the idea that signals “convey” information. According to Owren et al. (2010), the reference to

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encoding/decoding processes jeopardizes any attempt to consider animal communication in objective terms. In these cases, in fact, information no longer refers correlations among events, but rather becomes an entity unto itself. (. . .) While familiar and comfortable, this metaphorical view of information is primarily based on intuition and everyday conceptions. It has no connection to Shannon and Weaver’s definition and is not a scientifically grounded construct (Owren et al. 2010, p. 759).

As clear from these remarks, the reference to a supposed entity (the informative content) conveyed in information transmission keeps out any possibility of considering animal communication within the context of Shannon and Weaver’s objective model.

1.2.2

Encoding/Decoding

For some scholars, the main difficulties of the informative model of communication rely on an interpretation of animal communication that is strongly affected by what occurs (or it is presumed to occur) in human communication. Specifically, this interpretation is deeply grounded in the code model of communication, which remains popular both in common sense and scientific discourse because of its intuitive nature. A major conceptual tenet of the reference to Shannon and Weaver’s model by the proponents of informative models of communication is the idea that the information conveyed by the sender to the receiver entails a process of encoding and decoding (Fig. 1). The reference to the process of encoding and decoding is a matter of debate and controversy. As shown in the previous paragraph, the substantial concern is about the nature of the content conveyed by the expressive code: the informative models seem to revolve around the idea that, through a process of encoding, something goes

Fig. 1 Human communication according to the code model. (Figure adapted from Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995)

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from the sender’s head to the receiver’s head. In the so-called classical ecological approach, the main implicit and unexplored assumption is that this something is an unspecified informative content. Moreover, to appear implicit and unexplored is also the question of what kind of operation the encoding process is (and what kind of elaboration process it involves). Some argue that it is a process analogous to a form of translation, which is a very problematic way of conceiving the process of encoding, as we will see in the next section. Here, it is sufficient highlighting that the nature of both the transmitted content and the encoding of informative content is an open question in the informative models of communication (Rendall et al. 2009; Owren and Rendall 2001). Those who criticize these models argue that referring to encoding and decoding without an analysis of the nature of the entities and processes involved makes the entire model vague and scientifically unfounded (Owren et al. 2010). On the basis of these considerations, informative models confuse two distinct aspects of the concept of information: the aspect which refers to reduction in uncertainty and that pertaining to the encoding-decoding and transmission of content. Because of this confusion, any attempt to define animal communication in objective terms is doomed to failure. That said, I will now maintain that the major difficulties of the informative model depend on an implicit projection of the specific way of understanding human communication onto animal communication.

1.2.3

A Model of Language

The first issue to be analyzed concerns the reasons that led some scholars to consider the prevailing model of human communication as a suitable benchmark for investigating animal communication. In humans, the code model has long been considered the reference model, then its analysis represents a useful starting point. Everyone has an intuitive idea, deeply rooted in everyday experience, of what communication is and how language works. When considering that, beyond being intuitive, the code model is also at the center of scientific and philosophical literature, it is quite simple to understand why even the study of animal communication is strongly affected by the conception of language adopted by humans (for a criticism of anthropomorphism in this approach, see De Waal 2016; Owings and Morton 1997, 1998). According to Reddy (1979), the code model is the idea that language is a tool for transmission of thoughts by means of a shared expressive code. Understood in this way, human communication seems to incorporate most of the elements recognized as proper to animal communication by the proponents of the informative model. Indeed, the code model comprises both the idea of communication as information transmission and the idea that information, to be transmitted, must be translated into a convenient code. As shown, the latter is the most sensitive aspect of the informative model since the translation into an appropriate means of expression raises issues about the content to be expressed. Reddy (1979) interprets the encoding processes

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under the conduit metaphor, in which thoughts are “packaged” into linguistic expressions (as if these were containers to be filled). In spite of its intuitive character, the code model raises several questions. Beyond the question of what is encoded, it also raises the issue of how it is encoded. Before going in depth into the analysis of communication systems, it should be recalled that the topic of information encoding concerns cognition long before communication. From its very beginning, cognitive science has been confronted with the issue of transformation (or translation) of external information into symbols serving for computations realized by inferential systems responsible for the choice of appropriate behavioral responses. It is a perspective conforming to the classical sandwich metaphor (Hurley 1998), by which the outer slices of the sandwich, the input-output devices (the sensorimotor systems), are seen as peripheral. The core processes are those concerning central cognition (sandwiched between perception and action): here inferences are processed to identify the problem and find the right solution to respond appropriately. In the sandwich model of the mind, information encoding operated by the input systems is crucial for the central systems to recognize the problem and generate the correct inferences. This idea has been at the basis of cognitive science since its foundation: the sandwich metaphor, in fact, has an eminent forerunner in Craik (1943). He identifies three steps characterizing the relationship between mind and behavior: 1. The “translation” of external stimuli into words, numbers or other symbols; 2. The transition to other symbols by a process of “reasoning”, deduction, inference, etc.; 3. The “re-translation” of these symbols into external processes. Without the translation into the appropriate code, the elaboration of environmental information necessary for an appropriate behavioral response would have no chance to take place. For this reason, Fodor (1983) posits transducers at the basis of the modularity of the mind: input systems that converts distal information into the symbols of a mental code (the language of thought), which allows external information to have access to the chain of reasoning. The close relationship between sensory transducers and linguistic encoding-decoding processes is widely emphasized by Fodor. In his book on the modularity of the mind, he argues for a mechanistic idea of language processing completely consistent with the code model. A similar conception of language processing fits with a specific definition of human communication. In my view, the most interesting aspect is the passive role of the listener in the communicative process; all she needs to do to understand the speaker’s message is listening the verbal input—the brain automatically transforms coded sounds into meanings. In such a perspective, engaging in communication is automatic and effortless (Pinker 1994). Unless obstacles prevent from receiving the correct message, communication cannot fail: “in terms of the conduit metaphor, what requires explanation is failure to communicate. Success appears to be automatic” (Reddy 1979, p. 174). In the conduit metaphor, in fact,

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the listener’s task must be one of extraction. He must find the meaning “in the words” and take it out of them, so that it “gets into his head”. (. . .) Curiously, (...) it is easier, when speaking and thinking in terms of the conduit metaphor, to blame the speaker for failure. After all, receiving and unwrapping a package is so passive and so simple - what can go wrong? A package can be difficult or impossible to open. But, if it is undamaged, and successfully opened, how can fail to find the right things in it? (Reddy 1979, p. 168).

The automatic and mandatory nature of language processing suggests that the code model can apply equally well to language and animal communication. Even authors who challenge the code model as a good description of human communication, like Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995), believe that this model can yet account for animal communication (for a more articulate perspective, see Scott-Phillips 2015). In the next chapter, I will discuss why the code model is completely misleading for explaining human communication. But, as we will see in the following section, the code model is also inadequate to account for animal communication. Important indications in this regard come from a proposal alternative to the informative model of communication.

2 The Manipulative Model of Animal Communication Before addressing the issue of human communication, it is necessary to consider a model of animal communication able to provide a framework for the central issue of this book, that is the origins of language. Since several limitations of the informative model concern an intuitive and unexplored notion of informative content, it might be useful to consider a model of animal communication released from the notion of information transmission. In this direction, a good strategy may involve replacing the informative model with a manipulative model of communication. What are its distinctive features? Maynard Smith and Harper (2003, p. 3) define manipulative communication as “any act or structure which alters the behavior of other organisms, which evolved because of that effect, and which is effective because the receiver’s response has also evolved”. Similarly, Owren et al. (2010, p. 771) describe animal communication “as the use of specialized, species-typical morphology or behavior to influence the current or future behavior of another individual”. The originating proposal of the manipulative model can be traced back to a paper which marked a turning point in the debate over the nature of animal communication. In that paper, Dawkins and Krebs (1978) offer a model of communication centered on the advantages of the sender (the actor) over the receiver (the reactor). In their opinion, in fact, “communication is said to occur when an animal, the actor, does something which appears to be the result of selection to influence the sense organs of another animal, the reactor, so that the reactor’s behavior changes to the advantage of the actor” (Dawkins and Krebs 1978, p. 283). The hypothesis underlying their proposal is that communication is a means to influence (rather than inform) someone to behave in a certain way. Here, the term “influence” must be intended literally as an actual manipulation of the

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individual receiving the message. As the authors stress in a following article, in fact, “there is no fundamental difference between the way a living organism might exploit a stone and the way it might exploit another living organism (...). Both are examples of what we are calling manipulation” (Krebs and Dawkins 1984, p. 383). A first aspect to be noted in commenting on the proposal of Dawkins and Krebs is that the possibility of overcoming the difficulties of the informative model depends on their “radical” definition of influence. Contrary to the case of the encodingdecoding of the informative content, in fact, the manipulative model proposes a conception of communication in which the sender uses a signal to act directly on the receiver’s behavior (on her muscles and brain). Indeed, a signal is here considered “as a means by which an animal (the actor) exploits another animal’s (the reactor’s) muscle power” (Krebs and Dawkins 1984, p. 381). A second aspect of the manipulative model to be considered is related to a feature of persuasion that I described to be particularly relevant from a functional and adaptive point of view: conflict avoidance. On this point, the authors highlight the difference between acting on inanimate objects and acting on living organisms: while an animal trying to manipulate an inanimate object is forced to resort to physical power, when the object it seeks to manipulate is itself another live animal, there is an alternative way. It can exploit the senses and muscles of the animal it is trying to control, sense organs and behavioral machinery which are themselves designed to preserve the genes of that other animal. A male cricket does not physically roll a female along the ground and in to his burrow. He sits and sings, and the female comes to him under her own power. From his point of view, this communication is energetically more efficient than trying to take her by force (Dawkins and Krebs 1978, p. 282).

For my purposes, these considerations are important since emphasize the functional relationship between animal communication and persuasion. However, the manipulative model of communication raised a wide debate with crucial implications for the issue of human communication. I will now focus on this point.

2.1

Selfishness vs. Cooperation

Although being useful to overcome some limitations of the informative model, some aspects of the manipulative model of animal communication have come under strong criticism. Much of the controversy concerns the passive role of the receiver. Within the manipulative model, the adaptive benefit is almost exclusively on the side of the actor, while the reactor appears to have no evolutionary advantages. By strongly questioning the classical ethological model (Marler 1968) based on the idea of a reciprocal benefit between the sender and the receiver, Dawkins and Krebs (1978) have indeed argued that most communicative signals evolved to manipulate other animals to the sender’s advantage (see also Miller 2000). The radical character of the manipulative model (in which the acoustic properties of signals can directly affect sense organs and muscles of the receiver) also appears

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to be closely related to the topic of the passivity of recipients. According to Seyfarth et al. (2010, p. 4), the manipulative model assumes that receivers “are automata that can be manipulated to respond in ways beneficial to the signaler as long as the right nervous-system are pushed”. Criticisms of the manipulative model make use of arguments similar to those employed against the theses claimed in the famous book on the selfish gene by Dawkins (1976). Some of these criticisms are fully justified, especially towards the first formulation of the manipulative model. In fact, in such a model the adaptive benefit seems to be exclusively on the side of the actor, to the extent that Dawkins and Krebs’ (1978) definition of communication does not mention any advantage on the side of the reactor. However, this makes unclear how such a system could have evolved. According to Searcy and Nowicki (2005, p. 8), “if there is, on average, no informational benefit to the receiver on a signal, then receivers should evolve to ignore that signal. If receivers ignore the signal, then signaling no longer has any benefit to the signaler, and the whole communication system should disappear”. As Seyfarth et al. (2010, p. 5) also point out, “an analysis that allows the signaler’s behavior to evolve but does not permit any evolution in the receiver’s response does not make sense”. Along with criticisms of adaptive benefit, other criticisms of the manipulative model focus on the receiver’s passivity and rigidity. In contrast to Dawkins and Krebs’s perspective, the prevailing view is that the role of receivers in the communicative process cannot be reduced to an automatic, mechanical reaction to the acoustic features of the sender’s signals. Seyfarth et al. (2010) refer to several experimental data to support the receiver flexibility, showing that her behavioral response is not determined by acoustic stimuli and providing evidence that receivers can resist the power of signals, since “their responses (. . .) evolve to reflect their own interests, and (. . .) depend on both a signal’s physical properties and the information they acquire from it” (ibid., p. 6). These considerations are grist to the mill of the informative model of communication. According to Seyfarth et al. (2010, p. 6), “when recipients perceive a signal they acquire information, and the acquisition of this information (among other things) changes their behavior. The information that receivers acquire has content, and this content can be studied scientifically”. In stressing the importance of informative content, the authors raise questions regarding acoustic variation of signals produced by animals: why are alarm calls so different within the same species? Why do organisms respond so differently to acoustic calls? Why is there such great interspecies variability in the acoustic features of calls? The reference to the different acoustic characteristics of a stimulus seems to imply different types of informative content conveyed by the signal: this is a way of emphasizing the function of the intrinsic features of the signal in conveying specific types of information.

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2.2

Responses to Criticism

In their precursory paper, Dawkins and Krebs (1978) had foreseen some of the criticisms of the manipulative model. First, the question of the adaptive role of the recipient. Dawkins and Krebs’ hypothesis is that a disadvantage in communication does not always entail a selective disadvantage. Consider the death-trap used by the anglerfish to attract small fish by hanging a lure near its mouth. The adaptive behavior of the actor (the anglerfish) is clear; more controversial is understanding in what sense the reactor’s behavior (the small fish that takes the bait) is also adaptive. According to the two authors, the disadvantage of being captured by a bait that mimics the motion of a worm is offset by the ability to identify worms, which is certainly adaptive. Smaller fish benefit from wiggling worm-like objects because there are a lot of worms good to eat: although sometimes the worm turns out to be a bait, such cases are not statistically significant. Like safety belts used in cars which are designed to save life in case of an accident, in some cases (fire of cabin) they can become a death trap. These cases, however, do not invalidate the functional value of safety belts. Dawkins and Krebs (1978, p. 285) point out that manipulative communication exploits the adaptive features of the receiver for the sender’s advantage: As an inevitable byproduct of the fact that animals are selected to respond to their environment in ways that are on average beneficial to themselves, other animals can be selected to subvert this responsiveness for their own benefit. This is communication. It may happen that both parties benefit by the arrangement, in which case the word subvert will seem inappropriate. But as far as our definition of communication is concerned, whether the reactor benefits or not is incidental.

These arguments try to contain the difficulties related to the passive role of receivers in the communicative process. However, recognizing the adaptive role of the receiver’s behavior is not sufficient to reconsider the role of the receiver from a communicative point of view. This is a crucial point I will analyze since framing human communication in terms of the passivity of the receiver is unrealistic. Two considerations in this regard. First, if we are interested in tracing continuity between animal and human communication, we need models that seriously consider the active role of the receiver in communicative exchanges. Second, and more generally, the passivity of the receiver is also a characteristic feature of the informative model. Indeed, while the receiver has an adaptive advantage in acquiring information, it is also true that the reference to encoding-decoding processes makes the informative model as mechanical and mandatory as the manipulative model. In the light of these considerations, my proposal for emphasizing the active role of the receiver is to maintain a different way of intending communication: a synthetic perspective able to assimilate the strengths of both the manipulative and the informative models, while trying to overcome their difficulties.

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3 A Synthetic Perspective The informative model of communication posits informational altruism as the basis of social cooperation and the idea that communication is honest (true). This model, however, is problematic in that it implies that the sender shares valuable information with the receiver (an evolutionary competitor). According to Miller (2000, p. 349), “truthful communication is rare in nature because altruism is rare”. The sender can, indeed, use information to cheat the other party. Within the framework of Machiavellian intelligence (the strategies displayed by animals to exploit others), Whiten and Byrne (1988) give a prominent role to tactical deception, which is used to induce in another individual a misrepresentation of the state of the world that could be beneficial for the actor (cf. Gozzano 2001). Cheating strategies bring to light the evolution of a type of communication that is completely independent from the reference to truthful information. According to Miller (2000, p. 347), communicative signals “don’t usually convey information about the world, because signalers have so many reasons to lie about the world”. There are two considerations in this regard. The first is that cheating provides benefits not exclusively to the actor; Krebs and Dawkins (1984) maintain that the reactor takes an active role in the communicative process in response to the actor’s defense strategies. In fact, while the sender, in order to make predictions, exploits (through a form of mindreading) the clues offered by the receiver, this last one uses strategies of “counter-espionage” to defend herself: the receiver, therefore, can manipulate the sender’s behavior exploiting to her own advantage the sender’s ability of mindreading. Mindreading and manipulation go hand in hand from an evolutionary perspective: mindreading is a prerequisite for manipulation, manipulation is the evolutionary result of the capacity for mindreading, and signals are the product of co-evolution between mindreading and manipulation (Krebs and Dawkins 1984, p. 389). This co-evolutionary process is of great importance in order to hypothesize a model of language alternative to the code model. The case of epistemic vigilance proposed by Sperber et al. (2010; see Chap. 1) can be considered a human evolutionary adaptation of a defense mechanism against cheating that is reported also in other animals. The idea that manipulative communication exploits mindreading systems paves the way for a model of communication independent from truth which, as we shall see in the next chapter, has important implications. The second consideration is that these indications, without undermining its importance, yet imply a rethinking of the role of cooperation in human communication (Benítez-Burraco et al. 2021; Ferretti and Adornetti 2021). I will deal deeply with this issue in the last chapter; here I just refer to Dessalles’ (2007) critique of cooperation as the primary selective pressure that fostered human communication. In his view, providing others with detailed information about external events can be maladaptive. Rather, the adaptive significance of communication lies in the asymmetrical nature of communication: while the theory of cooperation is based on reciprocity and parity between sender and receiver, Dessalles (2007) views

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communicative processes as founded on an “asymmetrical exchange” between interlocutors in which the advantage is political. Cooperation, in fact, is closely bound to the recognition of social prestige: assigning a central status to the speaker favors the formation of coalitions based on the social role of the leader. However, emphasizing the asymmetrical character of communication does not mean assigning listeners a secondary role, quite the contrary. According to Dessalles (2007, p. 339), in fact, hearers have ways of resisting overstatement and falsehood. Their role in conversation can now be seen for what it is: comparing situations presented as salient with familiar situations and testing the logic of speakers’ statements for inconsistencies. (. . .) This inversion of the roles played in cooperative relations now makes sense, for here it is the speaker who plays the supplicant’s part (...) and it is hearers who, by having to guard against the risk of cheating, play the judge’s part.

In this perspective, the getting of social status can be achieved by the speaker (with a great effort) by displaying abilities that are relevant according to the interlocutor’s judgment. From this point of view, the reference to cooperation and honest information deserves further consideration than that reserved within the framework provided by the informative model. I will address these issues in the following chapters. Here, it is sufficient to point out that a sharp opposition between the informative and manipulative nature of communication does not seem reasonable. To account for the persuasive origins of human communication, we need a synthetic perspective capable of theorizing the interrelated ideas of communication as form of influence and as sharing of information for the purpose of influencing others.

3.1

Co-evolution

In spite of the strong opposition between the manipulative model and the informative model characterizing the early stages of the debate, there are now many attempts to combine these models in a synthetic perspective. As Owren et al. (2010) argue, such a perspective allows to study different types of signals taking into account both their variety and the different contextual situations in which they occur. In a synthetic perspective, in fact, information transmission is part of a communicative process in which the sender aims to influence the receiver’s behavior. This is an important conceptual point: the retrieval of the notion of information in manipulative models is a way of restating the role of informative content, which I will describe as central in a framework focused on the origin and functioning of human communication. On the basis of what has been said so far, that the synthesis between information and manipulation is closely related to the role of the receiver in communication should not be surprising. Carazo and Font (2010) consider the adaptive role of the receiver a question that must drive research in manipulative animal communication. They also take an important step forward with respect to Maynard Smith and Harper’s (2003) adaptationist approach by showing that the reconsideration of the adaptive role of the

3

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receiver has more general implications for the debate involving manipulative and informative models of animal communication. According to Carazo and Font (2010), in fact, a model that focuses exclusively on manipulation without considering the informative content of signals cannot address some of the most interesting issues in the study of animal communication (among others, deception, referential aspects and message-meaning analysis). Since humans use language for persuasive purposes by exploiting the informative character of communication, the synthetic perspective of the two scholars is particularly relevant for the aims of this book. But, in my perspective, the most interesting aspect of their proposal is related to the distinction between the functional roles of sender and receiver: From a sender’s point of view, the key factor that drives the evolution of a signal is the effect that such a signal will have on receivers (i.e., the response); any increase in the biological fitness of a sender will be attributed to the effect or effects a given signal has on the behavior and/or physiology of the sender. However, from a receiver’s point of view, the key factor is not the effect but the information (in a functional sense) that is being extracted; any increase in receiver fitness will be predicated on such information (...). This difference is crucial to understanding the selective pressures shaping the evolution and design of animal signals. The fact that the same functional outcome (...) can in principle be achieved by signals with different information content is in itself proof that effects and information can be dissociated. Senders will not be selected to provide information, but to trigger an effect, whereas receivers will only respond (and thus provide the effect that makes signaling adaptive for the sender) if they can extract enough information so as to make adaptive decisions (...). The essence of animal communication may be the influence of senders on receivers, but such an effect is achieved by releasing information to receivers. The fitness currency of senders is different from that of receivers (Carazo and Font 2010, p. 663).

The idea that manipulation and information are not mutually exclusive appears to be the most promising way to frame (both animal and human) communication in a synthetic perspective. Scott-Phillips and Kirby (2013), while acknowledging that communication should be understood in terms of effects, also support the central role of information content in the communication process. In their hypothesis, the correlation between some properties of the signal and some properties of the world represents a necessary corollary to the relationship between a signal and the behavioral effects of that signal. By this correlation, it is “possible to identify something we may wish to term information” (ibid., p. 433). The point stressed by ScottPhillips and Kirby deserves attention because it is a way to acknowledge the validity of the notion of information content. However, this is not enough to challenge the order of priorities of a communicative process largely understood in terms of effects. The representation of information content is both temporally and logically subsequent: the primary selective pressure towards communication is related to the behavioral effects of manipulative signals. Scott-Phillips and Kirby’s perspective is clear in this regard: Functional effects are what lie at the heart of communication, by which we mean: it may be possible to observe and/or quantify information transfer, but we can only do this in a posthoc way, after we have specified what the effects of a signal are (Scott-Phillips 2008). Indeed, this is a general point about communication, be it animal communication or human

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Two Models of Communication language. First and foremost, signals do things. Only once we know what they do can we identify information, conventional meaning, and other associated phenomena - since these things simply do not exist until there is functional symbiosis between signals and responses. Effects are methodologically prior (Scott-Phillips and Kirby 2013, p. 433).

The thesis of the evolutionary priority of communication in terms of its effects over information will have important consequences for the purposes of my argumentation: the priority of pragmatics over grammar, which I have already discussed and will return to extensively in the following pages, is closely connected to this thesis. Before proceeding further, I have a more general consideration. The focus on the persuasive foundation of communication adopted so far requires more accurate distinctions at the terminological level. For the reasons pointed out by Owren et al. (2010), it is useful to replace “manipulation” with “influence” when referring to human communication. In fact, influence is accomplished in both cooperative and competitive contexts: while manipulation implies only a disadvantageous effect on receivers, senders influencing receivers entail that communicative effects can be both disadvantageous and beneficial. Henceforth, I will move towards a shift from manipulation (marred by the implicit reference to the receiver passivity) to an interpretation of animal communication based on influencing. In the case of human communication, a further step will be required, since such communication entails the concept of persuasion, a type of influence that involves convincing. As Sperber et al. (2010) argue, in fact, in human communicative exchanges, in addition to understanding a message, the listener must also accept it. For reasons related to the acknowledgment of the active role of the listener, I will employ the term “persuasion” exclusively for human communication. It is in persuasive communication that the active character of the receiver emerges as a characteristic feature of interaction between individuals of our species: we would not need to persuade someone if communication functioned according to the code model. By definition, a persuasive model of communication emphasizes the recipient’s active resistance to the speaker’s attempts to persuade. Persuasive communication exalts the idea of conversation as the place where cooperative and competitive dynamics converge: the place where the listener often disagrees with both what the speaker says and what she asks her to do (Benítez-Burraco et al. 2021; Ferretti and Adornetti 2021). In this perspective, the idea is that not only language has evolved for persuasive purposes but, most importantly, that language, to enhance persuasion, had from the beginning a specific expressive form. In line with the considerations made in the previous chapter, my thesis is that language had a narrative form because its functional role is persuasion and narrative is the most effective tool invented by humans to convince others to act in a certain way.

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4 Towards a Rhetorical-Pragmatic Model of Language As already pointed out, one of the strongest criticisms addressed to the informative model of animal communication concerns its anthropomorphic character, an undue projection of the conception of human communication onto the animal one (Owings and Morton 1998; Rendall et al. 2009). I see this model as vitiated by an underlying prejudice: the idea that human language can be interpreted according to the code model which, indeed, is deeply grounded on our basic intuitions about communication. Therefore, it is not surprising that the code model has always served as a term of comparison to establish continuities and differences between animal and human communication. My proposal is to overturn the anthropocentric viewpoint: the comparison between humans and other animals, rather than serving to evaluate to what extent animal communication is different from language, is useful to investigate the nature of human communication. More specifically, before taking a position on the issue of continuity or discontinuity, it is necessary to clarify what should be meant by language. The first step in this direction is understanding whether the standard model of communication (the code model) is the most appropriate way to describe human communication.

4.1

Cognitive Effort in Comprehension

From Chomsky’s Universal Grammar theory (UG), in the classical models of cognitive science the prevailing idea is that communication can be interpreted with reference to the code model (Fodor 1983; Jackendoff 1992; Pinker 1994). It is no coincidence that many scholars who maintain the code model also refer to the fast, mandatory, and automatic character of language processing in a modular perspective of the mind (Fodor 1983). Pinker (1994, p. 21) highlights: The workings of language are as far from our awareness as the rationale for egg-laying is from the fly’s. Our thoughts come out of our mouths so effortlessly that they often embarrass us, having eluded our mental censors. When we are comprehending sentences, the stream of words is transparent: we see through to the meaning so automatically that we can forget that a movie is in a foreign language and subtitled.

The implication of such an automatic conception of comprehension is that the listener (if the device is working properly) cannot fail to understand what the speaker has said, which means that comprehension is a passive mechanical process that translates the sound of strings of words into meaning. In the dedication of the book on the modularity of the mind, Fodor (1983) quotes Garrett to argue that language is a reflex, i.e. comprehension occurs automatically and without any effort on the listener’s side. The criticism towards the code model and the automatic and mechanical character of language processing implies a rethinking of the effort factor. The effort to understand and the effort to make the message as easy as possible to be understood

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underlie communication, which is based on a precarious balance existing between the interlocutors: the characteristic feature of this balance is the risk of misunderstanding, which sometimes results in a real misunderstanding (cf. Chiera 2015; Ferretti 2010). The re-evaluation of the communicative effort marks a clear distinction between code models and pragmatic models of communication: coded communication seems to be error-free while in pragmatic models the risk of error is an integral part of the communicative process. Along with Reddy (1979), also Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) insist in arguing that, in the code model, communicative failure is an enigma that can be explained only by reference to background noise or a malfunctioning of the processing system. When abandoning the idea of communication as governed by a perfect heuristic, failures are largely predicted by the model, since “what is mysterious and requires explanation is not failure but success” in communication (ibid., p. 45). Moreover, and more interestingly, acknowledging that communication implies an interpretative effort entails reference to the central distinctive character of a conception of communication that is alternative to the code model: the idea that the processing of meaning in communication cannot be considered in terms of encoding-decoding processes since it is related to entities whose nature is highly indeterminate. As we will see in the next chapter, that communication is based on what the speaker intends to say, more than what she actually says, implicates the precarious and indeterminate nature of the communicative process. A tradition of scholars, who finds in Grice (1957, 1968) a reference point, connects the meaning of an expression to the speaker’s intentions (e.g., Clark 2013; Cummings 2015; Penco and Domaneschi 2013; Scott-Phillips 2015). According to Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995, 2002), each communicative expression is merely a clue to the speaker’s intention, used by the hearer’s inferential process to reconstruct that intention. The ostensive-inferential model proposed by the two authors is founded on the distinction between what the speaker says (the sentence meaning) and what the speaker intends to say (the speaker’s meaning). Starting from this distinction, “communication is successful not when hearers recognize the linguistic meaning of the utterance, but when they infer the speaker’s meaning from it” (1986/1995, p. 23). As Scott-Phillips (2015) points out, an immediate implication of this distinction is that a communicative utterance can be interpreted differently in different contexts. This phenomenon is termed underdeterminacy: literal meanings of expressions underdetermine the speaker’s meaning (Atlas 2005; Carston 2002). Assigning a key role to underdeterminacy means recognizing that “linguistic communication is never just literal meaning. Literal meaning helps us understand speaker meaning, but it is not the same thing” (Scott-Phillips 2015, p. 2). The transition from the clues provided by the speaker to the inferential reconstruction of her communicative intentions is a process anything but automatic, involving processing effort and implying, by its nature, failure as an essential factor of the communicative process, even in the early stages of human language. In this regard, Scott-Phillips (2015, p. 2) claims that.

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the origin of language was the consequence of the creation of an evolutionary novel form of communication, in which underdeterminacy is an inherent and inevitable feature. Underdeterminacy is often seen as a defective quality for a communication system, one that creates ambiguity and misunderstanding. It is true that such vagaries do follow in its wake, but these characteristics are also assets, since they allow communication to be used in incredibly flexible, creative and indeed funny ways.

As we shall see more clearly in the next chapter, two aspects of the ostensiveinferential model are of particular interest. The first concerns the idea, central to a pragmatic perspective, of communication as a form of action; the second is related to the idea that linguistic production and comprehension processes, founded on inferences for interpreting clues, require a specific cognitive architecture (the mindreading at the heart of the social brain) capable of processing the speaker’s communicative intentions. I will address the issue of the cognitive architecture underlying ostensive-inferential communication in the next chapter. Here, I just emphasize the role of the pragmatic turn in challenging the automatic and effortless model of communication. Describing communication in conversational contexts as governed by the effort to understand and to be understood marks a sharp distinction with the classical models of language processing (Ferretti 2010). The speculative hypotheses on idealized speakers and listeners are replaced by the reference to real interlocutors: conversation is characterized by the attempt to maintain a balance in a context in which the intention to be understood (by the speaker) is undermined by the difficulty (for the listener) to fully understand what the speaker intends to say. Moreover, and importantly, in actual communicative contexts it becomes clear the primacy of the discourse plan over sentence elaboration. If communication is driven by persuasive intents, and if stories are the tool invented by humans to persuade, then human communication entails the processing of discourse—of narrative as a specific form of discourse. On this point the notion of effort becomes central: the attempt to maintain the line of discourse cannot be explained by reference to mechanical, automatic, and effortless processes. In a model of language founded on the capacity for storytelling, processing effort is the result of complex cognitive systems working together.

4.2

Communication is a Form of Action

When abandoning the idealized speaker-listener to observe the actual communicators behavior, communication turns out to be a form of action (Austin 1962; Grice 1989; Searle 1969; for a discussion, see Sbisà and Turner 2013). How to do things with words is the title of the famous book by Austin (1962), one of the fathers of linguistic pragmatics. In my view, action must be intended in a stronger sense than the theory of linguistic acts proposes: not only every utterance (every linguistic act) is an action in itself but, above all, every communicative act, affecting the hearer’s belief system, pushes the interlocutor to act in a certain way. That’s why the idea of

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communication as a form of persuasion becomes central: the link between pragmatics and rhetoric, that I discussed in chapter “Narrative and Persuasion”, is grounded in the speaker’s effort to convince the interlocutor to act. In this regard, an important consideration that I will discuss more extensively in the final part of the book is that the privileged context of analysis for the persuasive model of communication is conversation. In conversation, human communication realizes its real nature, which pertains to the principle of persuasive reciprocity characterizing the mutual exchange and defense of different points of view. In conversational exchanges, the speaker tends to convince the interlocutor who, in turn, tries to make the other party to accept her opinion (Benítez-Burraco et al. 2021; Ferretti and Adornetti 2021). The alternation of roles typical of conversation definitively questions the idea that persuasive communication is based on the passive role of the listener: in conversation, there is no passive subject distinct from an active one because there is no receiver distinct from the sender. Consistently, also Chafe (2008, p. 686) considers conversation as the characteristic feature of human communication, in terms of a uniquely human and extraordinarily important way by which separate minds are able to influence and be influenced by each other, managing to some extent, and always imperfectly, to bridge the gap between them, by constructing any kind of lasting object but through a constant interplay of constantly changing ideas.

That said, further evidence of the importance of interlocutors in conversational exchanges is related to the role of persuasive communication in social cooperation and, in particular, a specific form of cooperation.

4.3

Language and Sexual Selection

Explaining why language is the way it is means reflecting on its adaptive nature. Much of the debate about language origin revolves around the issue of what selective pressures led humans to invent a more beneficial system of communication. Answers to this issue depend on how language is defined. Even restricting the field to those authors who have proposed models of language consistent with the narrative account advanced in this book, the way of intending the nature of the selective pressures that promoted language is variable, ranging from cooperation in hunting (McBride 2014; Shaw-Williams 2017) to courtship for reproductive success (Miller 2000), from the attempt to avoid physical aggression (Kennedy 1992; Parrish 2014) to the ability of representing holistic simulations of experience (Scalise Sugiyama 2005) through the construction of fictional worlds (Corballis 2017). I hold that all of these functional roles are involved in the narrative foundation of language. However, these different functional roles can be traced back to a common and more general selective pressure: the persuasive function of language. Considering the enhancement of persuasive abilities as the selective pressure which fostered the origin of language is a way to support an interpretative hypothesis

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that is specific on the conceptual level and general on the application level. The advantage of referring to a general functional role is the possibility to avoid ad hoc explanations that just confirm the specific feature of language we are interested in: persuasion is a general ability able to account for a variety of application cases (e.g., cooperation in hunting or courtship) without entailing adaptive pressures that explain certain aspects of language but, at the same time, leave out other equally important aspects. That said, the reference to persuasion as selective pressure toward language origin is at odds with one of the most compelling hypotheses regarding its functional role: the idea that language originated for the purpose of social cooperation (cf. Wacewicz and Żywiczyński 2018). Proponents of this hypothesis consider language mainly as a tool for sharing information between group members. According to Tomasello (2008), humans differ from other animals in their altruistic predisposition on the informational level, i.e., in sharing information which is useful to solve problems (on this topic, see also the human self-domestication hypothesis; Benítez-Burraco 2020; Benítez-Burraco and Progovac 2020). In this perspective, the informative character of communication underlies social cooperation. As already shown, the persuasive model is widely considered as a selfish account of communication. How to integrate cooperation in such a model? Dessalles (2007) offers an answer to this question, by connecting the origin of language with the political (in the Aristotelian sense), rather than generically social, nature of the human animal. It is an important thesis which adds the role of sexual selection, beyond that of natural selection, to the evolution of language form and structure. Along with the theory of social prestige (Zahavi and Zahavi 1997), central to Dessalles’ hypothesis is the idea that language evolved as a means to form large coalitions: Language is closely associated with the granting of status, in that relevant speakers are granted it by hearers, unlike those who little of interest to say. (...) My idea is that the granting of status is the very process whereby the choice of coalition partners is made. In other words, individuals try to ally themselves with others to whom they grant status. In particular, they try to ally themselves with the individuals who are most relevant. (...) Some members exert more influence than others on collective actions. The fact is that, in human groupings, the preponderant ones are those who have had status conferred upon them by the estimation of the others. (...) The positions occupied by members of such coalitions are leadership positions, with influence over collective decision making (Dessalles 2007, pp. 348–349).

Forming coalitions makes it possible to overcome the evolutionary paradox concerning the sharing of information (evolutionarily disadvantageous): the advantage of giving useful information to others is the earning of social prestige. In nonhuman animals, social prestige largely relies on physical supremacy. Because of the reduction of physical strength characterizing human nature, humans invented a means for assessing which individuals are best equipped to form and maintain coalitions. What are the criteria for selecting the best individuals? The argument (...) is that the ability to be relevant in conversation is (...) a “good” criterion of selection among members of coalitions. What relevant speakers contrive to show is that they

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Two Models of Communication are able to get information, or find out where it is, sooner than others. (...) By drawing the attention of their fellows to salient situations, our ancestors were able to show that they were better than others at observing their environment, including their social environment (...). It makes sense to assume that these individuals had more chance than others to influence the well-being of the coalitions they belonged to. If this was the case, a profitable strategy for all individuals was to join up with those who were able to show through language their ability to get relevant information from their physical and social environment (ibid., p. 350).

For my purposes, particularly interesting is the idea that a more effective speech for the granting of social status should contain storytelling characteristics: the persuasive power of stories, in fact, makes a leader able to convince others that she/he is speaking for the group’s benefit (Burling 1986). This idea can be applied to communication even before the advent of verbal language: as we shall see in the final part of this book, the ability to tell stories through pantomimic forms of storytelling was the tool used by our ancestors for the granting of social status. As Shaw-Williams (2017, p. 206) points out, “new ethnographic evidence has shown good storytellers have higher reproductive success, even more than expert hunters. In addition, bands with more skilled storytellers remain more cooperative and egalitarian during times of stress (Smith et al. 2017, cited in Boyd 2018)”. As is clear from this quote, stories (because of their persuasive power) can be an effective tool for cooperation and social equality. The ability to tell stories is the tool by which humans assume the status of political animals which, according to Dessalles (2007), is characterized by the ability to form coalitions. The link between the ability for storytelling and the granting of social status is also associated with a second important aspect in an evolutionary perspective, which connects the origin of language to sexual selection, in addition to natural selection (Foolen 2002; Szeto 2010). For the great influence that the UG model has had in contemporary thinking, the implicit, if not completely explicit, reference when talking of language is the Chomskyan perspective (for a discussion, see Ferretti 2015). In such a perspective, classical adaptationist models, based on the central role of natural selection, have framed the problem of language origin in terms of the origin of syntax—the authors who refer to this paradigm consider syntax as a divide between language and animal communication (Bickerton 1990; Jackendoff 1999; Pinker and Bloom 1990; Pinker 1994). Rethinking the role of sexual selection implies a change in the way of intending the nature of language. Sexual selection can indeed account for the reasons that prompted human language to take on from the very beginning a narrative form, which I claimed to be the specific feature distinguishing language from animal communication. Miller (2000) argues that some of the defining characteristics of human beings, such as art, music, and culture, are the product of both sexual selection (competition for reproduction) and natural selection (competition for survival). In his view, it is no accident that after writing The descent of man, Darwin (1871) behaved more like an evolutionary psychologist than an evolutionary biologist. Miller (2000, p. 12) writes: The human mind is clearly socially oriented, and it seems likely that it evolved through some sort of social selection. But what kind of social selection, exactly? Sexual selection is the best understood, most powerful, most creative, most direct, and most fundamental form of

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social selection. From an evolutionary perspective, social competition centers around reproduction. Animals compete socially to acquire the food, territory, alliances, and status that lead to reproduction. Sexual selection is the most direct form of social selection because mate choice directly favors some traits over others, and immediately produces offspring that are likely to inherit the desired traits. (. . .). Sexual selection is the premier example of social selection, and courtship is the premier example of social behavior.

Miller questions the classical hypotheses of language centered on the primacy of grammar: morphology, syntax and semantics represent, from a Darwinian point of view, only details of an adaptation grounded on social functions. When focusing on the selective pressures that gave rise to language, the possible sexual functions are largely ignored. This is a serious mistake since “much of human courtship is verbal courtship. (...) Verbal courtship is the heart of human sexual selection” (ibid., p. 351). Following the line of thought traced by Burling (1986) and Dessalles (2007) who, as we have seen, explain the origin of language in terms of social status, Miller (2000, p. 355) argues that in verbal courtship “sexual selection probably shaped human language in both ways: directly, through mate choice, and indirectly, through social status”. The theory of verbal courtship opens the way to a specific interpretative hypothesis on the nature of language, in which its seductive origin rests on stories: to seduce someone, beyond speaking, we need to tell stories. Miller’s hypothesis is convincing: although not all aspects of language can be interpreted in terms of sexual selection, it would be a serious mistake to reduce the adaptive role of language to the role of natural selection in the evolution of grammar. If storytelling is a fundamental tool of persuasion, then understanding how the narrative dimension can be regarded as the ratchet effect on which to found language is the objective to pursue in the following chapters.

5 Conclusions The claim of this book is that the narrative origin of language can be supported by considering language evolution as driven by the purpose of persuading others to act in a certain way, with stories representing the best tool to realize this purpose. Against this background, I take a specific stance both on the nature of the selective pressures in favor of language and the functional role assumed by language to overcome the challenges posed by selective pressures. Scholars have put forward various proposals regarding the evolutionary reasons and the functional nature of language. To mention a few examples, some maintain that language served to overcome the difficulties of physical encounters, others associate language emergence with the granting of social status for the purpose of cooperation, and still others use sexual selection to describe language as the main instrument of courtship strategies. There are good reasons to support all these convincing interpretative hypotheses. However, from my point of view, most of these proposals make reference to functions of language that can be interpreted with reference to a

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common selective pressure, namely the enhancement of persuasive abilities, which are shown to be present in many forms of animal communication. If language is the tool invented by humans to enhance persuasion, then it is possible to hypothesize that language have taken a narrative form from its earliest stages. After analyzing the nature of the selective pressures that led our ancestors to invent language (the questions related to the why of language origin), the remaining parts of this book will focus on the analysis of how humans began to tell stories. This compels us to address the issues of both the structural and material constraints that allowed our predecessors to communicate through stories, thus determining a difference with other forms of animal communication.

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Sbisà M, Turner K (eds) (2013) Pragmatics of speech actions. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/Boston Scalise Sugiyama M (2005) Reverse-engineering narrative: evidence of special design. In: Gottshall J, Wilson DS (eds) The literary animal: evolution and the nature of narrative. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, pp 177–196 Scott-Phillips TC (2008) Defining biological communication. J Evol Biol 21(2):387–395 Scott-Phillips T (2015) Speaking our minds: why human communication is different, and how language evolved to make it special. Palgrave Macmillan, London Scott-Phillips T, Kirby S (2013) Information, influence and inference in language evolution. In: Stegmann U (ed) Animal communication theory: information and influence. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 421–438 Searcy WA, Nowicki S (2005) The evolution of animal communication: reliability and deception in signaling systems. Princeton University Press, Princeton Searle JR (1969) Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Seyfarth RM, Cheney DL, Marler P (1980) Monkey responses to three different alarm calls: evidence of predator classification and semantic communication. Science 210(4471):801–803 Seyfarth RM, Cheney DL, Bergman T, Fischer J, Zuberbühler K, Hammerschmidt K (2010) The central importance of information in studies of animal communication. Anim Behav 80(1):3–8 Shannon CE, Weaver W (1949) The mathematical theory of communication. University Illinois Press, Urbana Shaw-Williams K (2017) The social trackways theory of the evolution of language. Biol Theory 12(4):195–210 Slocombe KE, Zuberbühler K (2005) Functionally referential communication in a chimpanzee. Curr Biol 15(19):1779–1784 Slocombe KE, Zuberbühler K (2006) Food-associated calls in chimpanzees: responses to food types or food preferences? Anim Behav 72(5):989–999 Smith D, Schlaepfer P, Major K, Dyble M, Page AE, Thompson J, Chaudhary N, Salali GD, Mace R, Astete L, Ngales M, Vinicius L, Migliano AB (2017) Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling. Nat Commun 8(1):1–9 Sperber D, Wilson D (1986/1995) Relevance. Communication and cognition. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Sperber D, Wilson D (2002) Pragmatics, modularity and mind-reading. Mind Lang 17(1–2):3–23 Sperber D, Clément F, Heintz C, Mascaro O, Mercier H, Origgi G, Wilson D (2010) Epistemic vigilance. Mind Lang 25(4):359–393 Stegmann U (ed) (2013) Animal communication theory: information and influence. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Struhsaker TT (1967) Auditory communication among vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops). In: Altmann SA (ed) Social communication among primates. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp 281–324 Szeto PY (2010) Origins of language in relation to sexual selection. MSc thesis, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Tomasello M (2008) Origins of human communication. MIT Press, Cambridge Wacewicz S, Żywiczyński P (2018) Language origins: fitness consequences, platform of trust, cooperation, and turn-taking. Interact Stud 19(1/2):167–182 Wheeler BC, Fischer J (2012) Functionally referential signals: a promising paradigm whose time has passed. Evol Anthropol Issues News Rev 21(5):195–205 Whiten A, Byrne RW (1988) Tactical deception in primates. Behav Brain Sci 11(2):233–244 Zahavi A, Zahavi A (1997) The handicap principle: a missing piece of Darwin’s puzzle. Oxford University Press, New York Zuberbühler K, Cheney DL, Seyfarth RM (1999) Conceptual semantics in a nonhuman primate. J Comp Psychol 113(1):33–42

Beyond the Social Brain

Abstract This chapter examines the issue of “how” our predecessors began to tell stories by inventing a new expressive system. A first step in this direction concerns considering, in addition to the role of the functional conditions, the role of the structural conditions underlying communication. To this aim, a cognitive approach to the origin of language is adopted, by investigating the cognitive systems which our ancestors may have employed to process the narrative plan, i.e., the cognitive systems comprising a narrative brain. The specific focus of this chapter is on the social brain which, in a pragmatic perspective, is often considered as the unique prerequisite for language functioning and evolution. Although of great relevance, it is claimed that referring solely to the social brain does not allow to account for narrative skills in a comprehensive way. Keywords Mindreading · Social brain · Language-first hypothesis · Narrative-first hypothesis · Global coherence The considerations made in the previous chapters have shown that many animals can employ different persuasive communication strategies. Arguing that persuasion responds to adaptive principles that humans are no exception to, I considered the reference to persuasive models as a way to frame human communication in continuity with animal communication. Beyond emphasizing continuity, I discussed the distinctive feature of human language in connection with the ability to narrate, since the best way invented by humans to persuade others to act in a certain way is to tell them stories. In exploring the aspects of continuity and distinction between animals and humans, I have so far focused on the evolutionary reasons related to why language has a narrative foundation. I will now examine the question of how our ancestors began to tell stories by inventing a new communication system. The first step in this direction concerns the study of the brain and cognitive systems that our predecessors may have exploited to give shape to language. Dealing with language origin from such a perspective means emphasizing the role of structural conditions underlying communication, in addition to its functional role. This book offers a cognitive © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Ferretti, Narrative Persuasion. A Cognitive Perspective on Language Evolution, Interdisciplinary Evolution Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09206-0_3

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approach to the study of language origin: if storytelling is the specific trait of human communication, then the origin of language required a brain capable of processing the narrative dimension. Starting from these considerations, the main topic of the present and next chapter concerns the cognitive systems underlying the narrative brain.

1 Thought as a Social Practice Investigating the origin of language from a cognitive perspective means supporting the primacy of cognition over language. Before analyzing the structure of the narrative brain, it is worth discussing an important alternative hypothesis to that proposed in this book: the idea that language is the product of culture and social practices, rather than the result of biological brain functions. Such a hypothesis, which has been adopted by influential scholars, deserves attention for its important implications on how to intend the relationship between thought and language. In contrast to the arguments of this book, many scholars inspired by Bruner’s (1986, 1991) culturalist constructivism argue for the Language First Hypothesis: the idea that narrative, rather than a precondition for the origin of language, is the product of language (Collins 2013; Scalise Sugiyama 2001; for a more general perspective on the relationship between language and narrative, see Dennett 1991; Hutto 2007, 2008). Before examining its critical aspects, it is worth considering the reasons for the great success of this hypothesis. A privileged way to understand the reasons behind the proponents of the Language First Hypothesis is referring to their definition of intentional strategy (the attribution of mental states in order to interpret one’s own or other people’s behavior), a definition that strongly criticizes the modular models of the mind characterizing much of contemporary cognitive science. In the standard version of cognitive science, the intentional stance is guided by the activity of processing systems implemented in specific brain structures. These processing systems have been variously interpreted in terms of Theory of Theory (including the Theory of Mind module) or in simulationist terms (for a review, see Goldman 2012; Meini 2007; Westra and Carruthers 2018). For my purposes, it is not necessary to deepen the nature of these systems, therefore I will use the neutral expression of mindreading or mindreading systems, except in specific cases. According to culturalist psychologists, mindreading is a capacity of great importance in the study of behavior and communication, that cannot be considered as the exclusive result of the activity of a cognitive brain component. In their view, the ability to attribute mental states to others always fits into a broader context of interpretation: the attribution of mental states is characterized as a real intentional strategy only through the telling of stories (Gallagher and Hutto 2008; Herman 2013; Hutto 2007, 2008). In fact, rather than the attribution of a single mental state, behavior’s interpretation involves the understanding of the reasons behind people’s actions.

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Hutto (2007, 2008) takes the idea of the narrative foundation of the intentional attitude to its extreme consequences. In his view, this attitude is governed by the Narrative Practice Hypothesis (NPH): in a constructivist view, narrative practice constitutes every single act of intentional attribution. As Hutto (2009, p. 13) states explicitly, indeed, the NPH must be distinguished from the softer claim that narrative engagements merely add finishing touches and refinement to pre-existing mindreading capacities that are best explained by these familiar theories (...). The NPH is interesting precisely because it makes a stronger claim that the one cited above. It says that appropriate engagement in narrative practices is what normally engenders FP competence [folk psychology]. Consequently, we don’t just refine our pre-existing FP understanding by means of narrative engagements - on the contrary, we don’t begin to exhibit FP skills proper until we’ve had the right sorts of encounters with the right sorts of narratives. Children are not FP competent until they have mastered certain narrative skills. Engaging in narrative practice is the source of our FP understanding.

From these remarks, Hutto considers the exclusive reference to mindreading to explain the comprehension and prediction of other’s actions as a partial explanation of intentional strategy. Hutto’s reflections (see also Paolucci 2019) on the role of the NPH in intentional strategies deserve serious consideration. I find convincing his criticisms of the idea that the interpretation of human action can be reduced to the exclusive activity of a brain device. It is also convincing the idea that the intentional attitude should hinge on a contextual background through which individuals enter into a coherent framework of relationships governed by narrative. That said, it is time for synthetic perspectives to keep together elements depending on cognitive architectures and elements depending on shared social practices. Culturalist constructivism seems weak exactly in its ability to promote a synthetic perspective. The crucial point concerns the value to be ascribed to the notion of narrative when claiming that narrative representation establishes the broader background of relations in which mindreading finds its best realization. On this point, the unidirectional attitude of cultural constructivism needs to be challenged. Supporting the constructivist explanation of how humans attribute intentional states to others means arguing “that narratives are a distinctive and characteristic feature of human cultural niches, just as dams are for beavers” (Hutto 2009, p. 27). Reference to narrative practices and the processes of acquiring them during ontogenesis is the primary condition for explaining how individuals can interpret other’s behavior. Hutto is part of a well-established tradition led by Bruner, who considers stories allowing to interpret the other’s actions as the result of a tradition stored in the socio-cultural practices of the community: When we enter human life, it is as if we walk on stage into a play whose enactment is already in progress - a play whose somewhat open plot determines what parts we may play and toward what denouements we may be heading. Others on stage already have a sense of what the play is about, enough of a sense to make negotiations with the newcomer possible. (...) I am proposing (...) that it is culture, not biology, that shapes human life and the human mind, that gives meaning to action by situating its underlying intentional states in an interpretative system (Bruner 1990, pp. 34–35).

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The idea that we are born with an established narrative context leaves open an important issue. Imaging us as injected into a play that has already begun makes sense only if we admit that narrative competence results from an internalization of processes of the individual surroundings, present from the beginning (Vygotskij 1978). A perspective exclusively centered on the study of the process of apprenticeship (internalization) of narrative practices can be justified only by presupposing narrative. However, claiming that narrative is already present at the birth of each individual is different from claiming that narrative has always been there before individuals. In other words, constructivism works (at most) for those interested in the ontogenesis of the individual, but cannot account for human phylogenesis. My concerns about Hutto’s perspective regard two aspects that deserve attention: the primacy of the factors external to the individual; the primacy of language over narrative.

1.1

The Primacy of Factors External to the Individual

Culturalist constructivism posits that the mind results from processes of internalization of the experiences acquired through the relationship with the external world. Considering the mind as constituted by a process proceeding from the outside to the inside means assigning a crucial importance to processes external (inherent the social community) to the individual’s mind. In such a perspective, narrative practices internalized through social apprenticeship respond to a process of cultural, rather than biological, selection. Stressing the cultural character, the role of ontogenetic development, and the social apprenticeship required by narrative entails a weakening of the internal factors of the mind. Although Hutto does not deny that cognitive systems (such as mindreading) play a role in intentional strategy, yet he encompasses a theoretical model which undermines the role of those cognitive systems. The risk of separating storytelling from cognitive architectures and biology is to exclude the possibility of considering the phylogenetic origin of narrative. Hutto argues that storytelling is not the product of biological evolution, with its universal character not providing evidence that the ability to tell stories is a biological adaptation due to natural selection. From my point of view, instead, assigning an adaptive role to the ability to tell stories means claiming that narrative representation creates evolutionary advantages that other representational forms fail to create. The study of the selective pressures toward the adaptive character of storytelling, extensively discussed in the previous pages, provides a grounded basis for investigating the cognitive systems underlying storytelling. However, before addressing this issue, a fundamental question is still open: how could such an effective adaptive tool as storytelling originate? The answer to this question relates to the functioning of a narrative brain, capable of constructing narrative representations of reality. Before focusing on the pars construens of my argument, however, I will consider the culturalist proposal to the issue of narrative origin. In this regard, a crucial point emerges: cultural

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constructivism considers the origin of narrative skills as largely depending on language. The primacy of factors external to the mind views language as the external scaffolding (Clark 1997) through which cognition can cope with the lack of internal processes. The idea that language can be considered a necessary and sufficient condition for storytelling deserves great attention.

2 Language and Narrative The thesis that the narrative foundation of reality representation is the product of social practices has important consequences on how to consider the relationship between thought and language. Put schematically, the constructivist tradition conceives of narrative in terms of the Language First Hypothesis, which establishes the primacy of language over thought and considers narrative as the product of language. Scalise Sugiyama (2001, 2005) strongly supports the idea that language is the necessary condition for storytelling. In her view, humans “could not have used stories as a means of exchanging information prior to the emergence of language” (Scalise Sugiyama 2001, p. 225). To begin telling stories, humans should have been already endowed with language; in addition to being a necessary condition for storytelling, verbal language is what distinguishes storytelling from other forms of expression. The ability to tell stories, in fact, “involves communication: fundamentally verbal (and, for the majority of its existence, oral)” (Scalise Sugiyama 2005, p. 180). The identification of verbal language and oral tradition as the basic conditions of storytelling is an important aspect of her proposal with important implications that I will discuss in the final part of this book. The priority ascribed to verbal language is primarily linked to the inadequacy of other representational systems to account for the emergence of narrative capacities. Take the case of images. The old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” is misleading if compared to the narrative power of verbal language: the vagueness of pictures cannot guarantee the correct interpretation of a story. Scalise Sugiyama (2005) suggests imagining Genghis Khan looking at a painting of The Ascension of Christ. Would he be able to understand the story? He wouldn’t because, without being familiar with the story, Genghis Khan would just experience the painting as a picture. The reference to familiarity implicitly relies on the tradition of knowledge (transmitted through language) necessary to interpret the painting as a story. Interestingly, pantomime is treated similarly: Without language, it is extremely difficult to accurately represent characters, objects, goals, or obstacles with particularity or precision. The identity of the persona being simulated is indeterminate, as are the time and place of the action. In sum, no other art form does all the things that narrative does. (...) Narrative is uniquely well-suited to the task of simulating human experience, which in turn suggests that art behavior is not a homogeneous cognitive phenomenon (ibid., p. 191).

In the light of these considerations, Scalise Sugiyama’s arguments on the intrinsic verbal nature of narrative coincide with those used by constructivists to support the

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primacy of language over any other form of representation. Arguments of this kind, in fact, are usually employed to consider language (its propositional structure) as the representational medium on which all the other forms of representation should depend. The risk of such a position is to consider any strength of narrative merely as the surface of what language enables. How to prevent narrative from being reduced to language? How to ascribe a representational specificity to narrative if narrative is so closely dependent on language? According to Pinker (1994), narrative is equivalent to language since, ultimately, the latter serves to construct messages organized into utterances in order to provide information about human actions, objects, and events. Scalise Sugiyama challenges this equivalence by arguing that language is a necessary but not sufficient condition to explain narrative competence. Contrary to Pinker, in fact, she argues that rules for constructing sentences are different from those used to construct stories, and that “although cognitive psychologists have had only limited success in their efforts to delineate story grammar, it is clear that such a grammar must exist, since stories are not simply random conglomerations of sentences” (Scalise Sugiyama 2005, p. 183). The arguments on the distinction between grammar of sentences and story grammar are convincing, as is the idea that an account of the representational specificity of narrative involves the specificity of story grammar. To defend her thesis, Scalise Sugiyama refers to Mandler and Johnson (1977; Mandler 1978); however, this would turn out to be an unwise strategy because it collides with the thesis of the primacy of language over narrative, which represents a cornerstone of her proposal. To highlight the difference between narrative and language, Scalise Sugiyama (2005) refers to the distinction between the plane of words and sentences and that of story structure (story schema) proposed by Mandler and Johnson (1977). While the former is the surface level of storytelling, the latter is the deep structure of stories. The problem concerns the nature to ascribe to this latter plane. According to Mandler and Johnson (1977, p. 111), the story schema is “an idealized internal representation of the parts of a typical story and the relationships among those parts”. The important point to make on this is that the story schema is an internal representation; Mandler and Johnson’s primary interest, in fact, is to investigate the cognitive underpinnings of story schemas, specifically the constraints imposed on such schemas by the processes of comprehension and memorization: The recurring themes of traditional stories are presumably a reflection of commonalities in human experience. While these are likely to be of considerable interest to anthropologists or social psychologists, our primary concern, as cognitive psychologists, is the analysis of the recurring structures or formats through which the content of such tales is expressed. We believe that these structures are due at least in part to general limitations in processing and memorial capacity. Many complex human productions, including stories from the oral tradition, are transitory in nature; and if they are to be understood and remembered as they are presented, they must be structured in familiar ways. This general psychological need is the same, regardless of whether the particular type of production is a story, a dance, or a piece of music: when people listen to a new form of music and cry cacophony or discord, they are at heart decrying what appears to them to be a lack of structure. No matter how

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elegantly shaped to the author or composer, a given production will be unacceptable until it has been heard (or seen) often enough for the mind to characterize its form (Johnson and Mandler 1980, p. 52).

That said, the two psychologists argue that the story schema has two origins: beyond the constraints imposed by internal thought processes, the construction of schemas also depends on repeated experience with listening to other stories. Inclination for the priority of one or other of these factors determines different interpretative scenarios on the relationship between language and narrative. Considering familiar verbal stories as the building blocks of narrative entails believing that the causal relationship between narrated events depends largely on language; conversely, grounding schema construction primarily in cognitive processing allows to widely weaken the role of language. Recognizing a constitutive role for language in narrative is stressing the surface aspects of stories, whereas emphasizing the constitutive role of the deep story structure (story schemas) means taking seriously the idea that it is language that depends on narrative. In line with the Language First Hypothesis, Scalise Sugiyama assigns to the surface story structure a constitutive role in narrative, since language is the basic condition on which narrative capacities are founded. In the light of these considerations, referring to Mandler and Johnson’s model to respond to Pinker’s critique is not particularly useful for her purposes. In my opinion, adhering to Mandler and Johnson’s proposal means reevaluating a perspective in which the pivotal role of the deep story structure can be identified in the psychological processing and structures that allow individuals to represent the causal and temporal links between events. As we will see in the next chapter, this perspective is closely related to the priority of thought over language. While the Language First Hypothesis posits language as the prerequisite from which everything else derives, the thesis of the deep story structure opens the way to the possibility of considering language as the product of human cognitive abilities. My hypothesis is that language is indebted to narrative much more than narrative is indebted to language (Ferretti 2021). This implies abandoning the Language First Hypothesis in favor of the Narrative First Hypothesis. Before proceeding further, there is still one last issue to consider. A second interpretive hypothesis, consistent with Pinker’s (1994) thesis, is that referring to narrative is equivalent to referring to language. Indeed, scholars who attribute a constitutive role to language in narrative argue that narrative is necessarily and sufficiently dependent on language. Appealing to a division of scientific labor, these authors might consider the study of language origin prerogative of other researchers. Indeed, arguing that narrative could not exist without language is independent of the issue of how language originated and evolved. However plausible this argument may appear, it is not completely persuasive. Although language might have evolved independently and, after its advent, enabled humans to tell stories, this scenario leaves unexplained the ability for storytelling however. Either language has inherent narrative properties or, if it does not, it is unclear why and how being equipped with language should make humans capable of storytelling. The prevailing model of language in cognitive science is Chomsky’s UG, which is

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strongly centered on the constituent structure of sentences. As we shall see, constructing sentences is not enough to construct stories (since a story is not just a sequence of sentences), therefore considering language as the unique equipment to tell stories is an unconvincing assumption. Scalise Sugiyama (2005) argues that story grammar is different from the grammar of sentences; then, if narrative depends on language, how does story grammar develop from the grammar of sentences? Claiming that narrative presupposes without coinciding with language is an awkward attempt to avoid this difficulty without resolving it. If language has no narrative foundation, why should it strongly impact on the narrative representation of reality? Where do the properties making narrative a specific way of representation come from, if language is not equipped with? In my perspective, the way out of these difficulties could be sought in acknowledging intrinsically narrative properties to language, which is the only way to argue for the dependence of storytelling on language. Such an acknowledgment, however, deeply undermines the thesis that language has priority over stories. Considering a certain property as dependent on another is to account for how the latter can be a condition of possibility for the former. The thesis of the dependence of narrative on language is nonsense because it assumes that language already has narrative capabilities. These considerations are crucial: the attempt to combine the thesis of the narrative representation of experience with the topic of language origin entails a hypothesis that is symmetrical to the thesis of the primacy of language over narrative. Since language has an inherently narrative nature more than narrative has an inherently verbal structure, then the Language First Hypothesis should make room for the Narrative First Hypothesis. This overturning of perspective has important consequences on the issue of the relationship between thought and language: the primacy of language over thought is replaced with the primacy of thought over language. Both methodologically and conceptually, the idea that “some of the attributes of language are indeed dependent on the nature of our thoughts and experiences” (Corballis 2017, p. 55) is realized into the study of the bio-cognitive systems capable of processing the narrative structure of language. It is time to focus on the functional and structural components underlying the narrative brain. Given the mainly social character of communication, the first step in this direction concerns examining the role of a fundamental component, i.e., the social brain, in language processing. In the final part of this chapter, I will address whether exclusive reference to the social brain can account for the narrative origin of language.

3 The Social Origin of Language: the Cognitive Perspective As shown in the previous paragraph, supporting the Language First Hypothesis entails considering language as a scaffolding, which is internalized through processes of social apprenticeship. This idea is challenged by those who, emphasizing the role of psychological processing, ground social relationships between

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individuals in the brain and cognitive systems that orient them. According to Fitch et al. (2010, p. 795), social cognition and language are mutually connected by a co-evolutionary relationship, since “together, social cognition and language probably formed an evolutionary cycle wherein advances in one fed advances in the other, and it is unclear what human cognition (social or otherwise) would be like without the powerful cultural augmentation that language provides”. The idea that the origin and functioning of language strongly relate to the cognitive systems guiding social behavior, especially the mindreading system, is widely accepted (Corballis 2017; Dunbar 1998; Origgi and Sperber 2000; Scott-Phillips 2015a; Sperber 2000; Sperber and Origgi 2010). The social brain hypothesis characterizes the ostensive-inferential model of human communication (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995, 2002). As ScottPhillips (2015a, p. 68) points out, without mindreading “there could be no ostensive communication, and hence no linguistic communication, and no languages”. Before considering the role of mindreading in language, a first issue concerns the nature of social knowledge and the specific devices involved in social intelligence.

3.1

The Social Brain Hypothesis

In a paper representing a milestone in the investigation of the social nature from a cognitive perspective, Humphrey (1976) argued that the ecological challenges which primates face do not explain the evolution of their brains. He proposed that the driving force behind the cognitive abilities of primates primarily relates to social problems, to the extent that “the chief role of creative intellect is to hold society together” (ibid., p. 307). Indeed, if on the one hand being part of a group provides individuals with solutions not achievable by any member alone, on the other hand social life is a cause of tensions: the evolution of the social brain depends largely on the need to handle such tensions. In a similar vein, Dunbar (2009) emphasizes that neocortex size is a constraint on group size. Byrne and Whiten (1988) identify in Machiavellian intelligence a strong selective pressure for primates: it is the ability to predict and control to one’s own ends the other’s behavior. The arguments of these authors underlie the social intelligence hypothesis, which aims to “explain the evolution of intelligence, in general, as the result of selection for social intelligence in particular” (Fitch et al. 2010, p. 796). I will not address in detail the relationship between the evolution of the social brain and the kinds of social relationships it made possible. My aim is to identify the relationship between the social brain and language, because this relationship can provide a first step in the direction of a model of human communication to be used as an indicator for the topic of the origin. The reference to the social brain may be relevant to support very different models of language. Within Chomsky’s UG paradigm, Bickerton (2009), for example, argues that the origin of language is closely linked to scavenging problems. On the contrary, Tomasello (2008) stresses the cooperative foundation of language to support a model centered on altruistic information sharing as the hallmark of human communication. These are just two examples (from a long list) of interpretive

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models that are useful to investigate the origin and evolution of language from a perspective based on the primacy of social relations. That said, when it comes to the relationship between the social brain and language, the pragmatic perspective of Relevance Theory (RT; Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995, 2002) is a leading model with great complexity and explanatory power. I will now focus on this interpretive proposal.

3.2

The Ostensive-Inferential Model

The strength of RT lies in its reference to a single explanatory principle. As Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995, p. 46) firmly argue in the first pages of the book, their work “is essentially an exploration of the idea that there is a single property—relevance— which makes information worth processing for a human being”. The idea that any important aspect of human communication can be referred to the principle of relevance makes the model both elegant and convincing. In addition to explanatory elegance, RT has the advantage of involving an extremely simple cognitive architecture. The reference to a single explanatory principle, in fact, also affects the level of processing systems. If the characteristic feature of human communication hinges on a single principle, then it is likely that it relies on the functioning of a single cognitive system: mindreading, and specifically Theory of Mind (ToM; Sperber and Wilson 2002). A good starting point for investigating the role of the social brain in language is Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995, 2002) critique of the code model, a model of communication based on the primacy of literal meaning of linguistic expressions that has been extensively examined in chapter “Two Models of Communication”. The critique is developed starting from Grice’s (1957, 1968, 1989) idea that, unlike animal communication, human communication is driven by the speaker’s intention, rather than by what she actually says. The attention paid to the speaker’s intentions entails the mindreading system. Indeed, the interpretation of what the speaker says is “ultimately an exercise in metapsychology in which the hearer infers the speaker’s intended meaning from evidence she has provided for this purpose” (Sperber and Wilson 2002, p. 2). However, the reference both to the speaker’s intentions and the mindreading system are too general to account for the ostensive nature of human communication. To understand Sperber and Wilson’s perspective, further specification is needed. On the side of the speaker’s intentions, Sperber and Wilson (2002, p. 255) consider a basic distinction underlying ostensive-inferential communication: Informative intention: The intention to inform the audience of something; Communicative intention: The intention to inform the audience of one’s informative intention. Discussing the distinction between these two forms of intentions, Scott-Phillips (2015a, p. 9) points out that the informative intention relates to what the speaker is

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trying to communicate, whereas the communicative intention relates to whether the audience recognizes that the speaker is trying to communicate and, therefore, has an informative intention. In RT, communicative intention plays an equally important role as informative intention: it is because communicative intention makes informative intention apparent, in fact, that the listener accepts to engage in the effort necessary to understand what the speaker intends to say—ultimately, the “ostensive” nature of the ostensive-inferential model of communication depends on the apparent character of informative intention. Sperber and Wilson (2002, p. 21) claim: By being open about their intention to inform each other of something – that is, by drawing attention to their behavior in a manifestly intentional way - each elicits the other’s cooperation, in the form of increased attention and a greater willingness to make necessary effort to discover the intended conclusion.

The fact that every human communicative act implies the joint contribution of both intentions opens the way to two orders of considerations. The first concerns the issue of the cognitive architectures underlying the communicative process. Identifying the specific trait of human communication in the understanding of communicative intentions (as well as informative intentions) is a way to argue that a general mindreading system is not sufficient to explain the functioning of ostensive communication. Given the specific processing difficulties involved in this dual level of intentions, Sperber and Wilson (2002, p. 28) posit that the human tendency to seek relevance in communication provides justification for “an evolved sub-module of the human mind-reading ability”. The need to take into consideration a dedicated metacommunicative module is supported by the fact that communication, unlike other forms of behavior, involves multilevel (higher than first-level) representational capacities. Scott-Phillips (2015a) considers the type of mindreading involved in ostensive communication as a system of Recursive Theory of Mind. The second consideration concerns the transition from animal to human communication. The premise to be made is that considering animal communication by reference to the code model, as Sperber and Wilson (2002) do, is a too restrictive way to address the topic, since many recent studies highlight the intentional character of animal communication (for a discussion, see Adornetti 2016). While acknowledging such a character, Scott-Phillips (2015a, b) argues that, since a signal can be intentional without being ostensive, some animals can convey forms of communication based on informative intentions but they are prevented from engaging in ostensive communication, which he considers not only intentional but overtly intentional. Indeed, in such a form of communication, “not only signal used in a voluntary (i.e. intentional) way, but this fact is made explicit (overt) to the audience, and this explicitness contributes to successful comprehension” (Scott-Phillips 2015b, p. 804). In this extent, acknowledging the intentional character of some forms of animal communication is not sufficient to mark continuity with human communication. Moreover, a general reference to mindreading (which some animals seem to exhibit: cf. Krupenye 2021) is not sufficient to account for the processing systems involved

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in ostensive communication, which “depends upon sophisticated forms of social cognition that are unique to humans, and which evolved in our species as a result of our über-social nature” (Scott-Phillips 2015a, p. xiii). The topic of uniqueness of human communication and that of the dedicated cognitive systems at its basis have been used to outline a specific theoretical hypothesis about the origin of language.

3.2.1

Ostensive Origins of Language

The considerations made so far suggest that the origin of ostensive communication is marked by the exclusively human equipment of specific processing systems. I will discuss later whether the cognitive devices characterizing the social brain can be considered a sufficient condition to explain the transition from animal to human communication; here, I just point out that the reference to the role of mindreading in language allows to abandon the old code-based model of communication and to tell a new story about the origin of human communicative capabilities. Sperber (1995, p. 199) writes: The new story (...) is that human communication is a by-product of human metarepresentational capacities. The ability to perform sophisticated inferences about each other’s states of mind evolved in our ancestors as a means of understanding and predicting each other’s behavior. This in turn gave rise to the possibility of acting openly so as to reveal one’s thoughts to others. As a consequence, the conditions were created for the evolution of language. Language made inferential communication immensely more effective. It did not change its character. All human communication, linguistic or non-linguistic, is essentially inferential. Whether we give evidence of our thoughts by picking berries, by mimicry, by speaking, or by writing (...), we rely first and foremost on our audience’s ability to infer our meaning.

Origgi and Sperber (2000, p. 165) stress the same point: Language as we know it developed as an adaptation in a species already involved in inferential communication, and therefore already capable of some serious degree of mindreading. In other terms, from a relevance theory point of view, the existence of mindreading in our ancestors was a precondition for the emergence and evolution of language.

Similarly, Scott-Phillips (2015a) links the origin of human communication to the idea that mindreading should precede language. In fact, he considers mindreading as a necessary cognitive prerequisite, not only for ostensive communication to function, but also for its origin, since without it there could be no ostensive communication (cf. Scott-Phillips 2015a, p. 68). I have insisted on this point because it is a key argument for analyzing the origin of language within the social brain hypothesis. That said, arguing in favor of the ostensive character of human communication leads to consider it as a novelty with no antecedent forms in animal communication. Although Scott-Phillips (2015a, b, 2017) marks a weaker distinction compared to Sperber and Wilson, yet he holds human communication to be qualitatively different from animal communication. In his view, in fact, “nothing that looks even remotely like language can emerge prior to

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the evolution of ostensive-inferential communication” (Scott-Phillips 2015a, p. 46). Is ostensive communication uniquely human? Do only humans have the cognitive features that enable ostensive communication?

3.2.2

Is Mindreading Only Human?

A first order of considerations concerns the question of whether ostensive communication can be considered the hallmark of human communication. Scott-Phillips considers nonhuman animals as incapable of ostensive communication because they lack the appropriate cognitive systems. These considerations open the way to two closely related questions: the first concerning the kind of cognitive devices available to great apes; the second concerning the kind of systems necessary for ostensive communication. An exploration of nonhuman mindreading abilities cannot omit the pioneering paper of Premack and Woodruf (1978) on the presence of Theory of Mind in great apes. Their initial thesis considering these animals as able to attribute intentional states today appears less certain: 10 years after the article written with Woodruff, Premack (1988) addressed again the topic with less enthusiastic attitude towards the mentalizing capacity of great apes. In his new research, he is willing to attribute to chimpanzees a theory of mind weaker than that of humans: chimpanzees would be capable of attributing perceptual mental states (seeing, wanting, expecting), but not of attributing epistemic states (believing). Similarly, Call and Tomasello (2008) ascribe a ToM in a broad sense to chimpanzees, but they exclude that chimpanzees have a ToM in a narrow sense, since they lack the ability to attribute epistemic states to others. The distinction between a broad and a narrow sense of mindreading is an important first step in properly addressing the question of whether apes can attribute intentional states: it allows to interpret the problem in terms of a continuum that does not admit answers in terms of absolute yes or no. That said, how can arguments about nonhuman mindreading abilities inform us on the origin of language? According to proponents of RT, not so much. Since ostensive communication involves epistemic states and, as Tomasello (2008, p. 190) argues, “there is currently no experimental evidence that (chimpanzees) understand false beliefs by, for example, predicting what another will do based on what others know (when the subject knows something else to be the case)”, then chimpanzees do not have the cognitive prerequisites to develop ostensive communication. Scott-Phillips (2015a, p. 97) is peremptory in this regard: Even if chimpanzees were shown to have such abilities, this would still not be sufficient to demonstrate the required levels of mental metarepresentations. This is because the sorts of mental metarepresentations involved in ostensive communication seem to be precisely those that involve intentions and beliefs (. . .) and not simply knowledge states. If great apes really do not have this, as the above conclusion indicates, then that would place ostensive communication out of reach.

As can be seen from these considerations, the strongest criticisms of the possibility to ascribe ostensive communication to great apes rest on their inability to

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attribute epistemic states. Responses to such criticisms rely on two different argumentative strategies. The first aims at dismantling the idea that ostensive communication requires highlevel processing systems that are uniquely human. It is possible to consider ostensive communication from a bottom-up perspective, trying to identify the minimal conditions required for such communication. A promising avenue in this direction is to study how the audience understands that the speaker intends to communicate something to her, and how the speaker displays the intention to communicate something to her. According to Moore (2016), since eye contact is one of the minimal conditions required to convey information of this kind, a possible way to address the issue of ostensive communication in great apes might be exploring whether they use eye contact. The issue is controversial. Scott-Phillips (2015a) is skeptical, whereas Moore (2016) brings evidence in favor of chimpanzees’ engagement in eye contact before producing communicative gestures. Following Csibra (2010), Moore’s (2016, pp. 25–26) argument is that “if we accept that eye contact alone is sufficient for human gestures to be ostensive, then by parity of reasoning it should also suffice to make ape gestures ostensive”. However, this behavioral criterion is not unanimously considered a sufficient condition for animal communication to be ostensive. A more convincing criterion takes into consideration the cognitive level. Moore criticizes a prevailing assumption, which posits that supporting a Gricean perspective entails referring to sophisticated mindreading systems. He justifies the ostensive model through forms of social cognition that are less complex than those hypothesized by Scott-Phillips and other authors. According to Moore (2016, p. 226), in fact, Gricean communication implies that one produces “a sign, in order to elicit some behavioral response or action r from an interlocutor, and an act of address, with which one directs one’s performance of that sign to the attention of one’s interlocutor”. Therefore, if chimpanzees are shown to solicit the attention of others before communicating through gestures, it is possible to argue that they act with Gricean intent, regardless of the simplicity of their messages. Moreover, what makes communication ostensive depends neither on the type of mental state nor on the complexity of the representational level. By clearing the field from the need to refer to an interpretive apparatus which involves the recursive mindreading, the capacity for ostensive communication can be claimed to be not exclusive of the individuals of our species. That said, this claim can be also made through an interpretative strategy that is symmetrical to the deflationary proposal defended by Moore. Recent experimental studies on the false belief test (typically used to assess the attribution of epistemic states to an agent) in great apes seem to challenge the idea that these animals are incapable of attributing epistemic mental states (such as beliefs) (e.g., Kano et al. 2017; Krupenye et al. 2016; for a review, see Krupenye 2021). Such experimental findings permit to question the assumption underlying the thesis of the qualitative difference of ostensive communication, that is, the idea that this type of communication has unique features because it relies on only human processing systems. If

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some great apes can attribute epistemic intentional states, then, in principle, human communication can be seen in continuity with animal communication. The above two lines of argumentation undermine the idea that investigations of language origin should be concerned with a property able to sharply distinguish animal from human communication. This has important consequences for the nature of language and its origin. From a general point of view, it challenges the hypothesis that human communication emerged without any precursor forms. The reference to qualitative leaps promotes interpretations that view language as the result of some miracle (Corballis 2017). Studying the origins of language with reference to its specific features does not implicate a discontinuist perspective. In the light of these considerations, my theoretical proposal is linked to two argumentative steps. The first one concerns the analysis of those aspects of the ostensive model that operate in the direction of a continuity perspective, in spite of its proponents’ claims; the second one involves a reflection on the difficulties of this model to account for the feature which I consider distinctive of human language, namely its narrative character. The first step in my argument is related to an aspect of ostensive communication that makes it possible to draw a line of continuity with animal communication. Starting from the idea that “at the most basic level, communication is fundamentally a matter of influence” (Scott-Phillips and Kirby 2013, p. 435), the distinctive feature of human communication can be considered in a different light. As Scott-Phillips and Kirby (2013, p. 433) argue, in fact, what we do wish to emphasize is that our insistence that effects are a general, fundamental property of communication aligns with the point made by discipline of pragmatics that linguistic communication is about more than conventional meaning. Utterances are behavior that cause others to do things; conventional meanings are simply part of the story of how these effects are achieved.

In this perspective, the ostensive model appears to be much closer to animal communication than its proponents are willing to acknowledge. But, once the commonalities have been emphasized, the most important step is to clarify whether the ostensive model can account for the specificity of human language. Although the reference to the ostensive model is a necessary step to address the origin of language (the distinction between what is said and what is meant is crucial in human communication), my idea is that it is not sufficient to account for the specific feature of human communication: the ability to tell stories. As widely pointed out, my claim is that language has a narrative origin because storytelling is the tool invented by humans to make persuasive communication more effective. The ostensive model and RT lack the conceptual and empirical resources to account for narrative with reference both to the level of properties and the level of cognitive architectures. More specifically, the principle of relevance cannot explain the property underlying any form of narrative discourse (the plot, governed by global coherence) and, in cognitive terms, mindreading cannot account for the processing of this property. Narrative competence requires additional properties and involves cognitive systems different from those traditionally pertaining to the social brain.

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4 Global Coherence and Narrative In chapter “Narrative and Persuasion”, I referred to the structure of narrative with reference to properties inherited from the narratological tradition. Since my work is guided by the investigation of the cognitive resources that allowed our ancestors to invent language, addressing the issue of the narrative form of human communication means exploring the cognitive and brain systems capable of processing the narrative dimension. As the study of cognitive architectures is strictly intertwined with the study of the properties that are processed, the first step is identifying and analyze the right properties. Setting aside the general issues, it is time to go into detail of the nature of the properties characterizing human narrative competence.

4.1

Global Coherence

Given the importance of the story plot, the first property to be considered is global (or discourse) coherence. Although variable definitions of global coherence exist, they are all unified by the reference to the causal connection between the narrated events and the temporal factor as constitutive elements of the plot. The definition given by Herman (2013, p. 237) is illustrative in this regard: From a structural standpoint, one of the hallmarks of narrative is this linking of phenomenon into causal-chronological wholes; stories provide a resource for connecting otherwise isolated occurrences onto elements of episodes or “scenes”, whose components can then be represented as systematically interrelated via causal networks.

Furthermore, stressing the causal connections between the narrated events (as shown in chapter “Narrative and Persuasion” about Ricoeur’s proposal) means exalting at the same time the temporal dimension of narrative, which cannot be reduced to the simple sequence of events. Time and plot are the constitutive elements of global coherence. Considering global coherence as the evolutionary constraint that allowed human communication to take a narrative structure is a way to support the idea that such a property has an autonomous status among the distinctive features of human communication.

4.1.1

Coherence Cannot Be Reduced to Cohesion

In cognitive science, the idea that cognitive systems for processing the syntactic structure of sentences are at the heart of language is still widespread. For the relevance of Chomsky’s UG, in fact, the thesis that processing the constituent structure of sentences is enough to process language in its entirety continues to prevail. This position is well expressed in the statement of intent made by De Vincenzi and Di Matteo (2004, p. 3) at the opening of their book:

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In this book, we will attempt to answer the question of what architectures and mechanisms underlie sentence comprehension. We believe that answering this question can clarify the general nature of human language processing in the context of cognition as a whole.

Since the essence of language is sentence structure, processing language means processing sentence structure (Pickering et al. 2001). This point of view is deeply rooted in contemporary research, as shown by the fact that the priority of sentence and the related primacy of the propositional nature of thought underlie not only the UG’s perspective on language, but also the ostensive-inferential conception of human communication. Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995, p. 57) state: There is a very good reason for anyone concerned with the role of inference in communication to assume that what is communicated is propositional: it is relatively easy to say what propositions are, and how inference might operate over propositions. No one has any clear idea how inference might operate over non propositional objects: say, over images, impressions, or emotions. Propositional content and attitudes thus seem to provide the only relatively solid ground on which to base a partly or wholly inferential approach to communication.

The reference to propositional content and the constituent structure of sentence is a way to consider language (along with the nature of thought) strongly rooted in the philosophical tradition, beyond the theoretical reflection in cognitive science. Why questioning such a consolidated model of language? In other words, what are the reasons behind the attempt to consider the essential properties of language as not reducible to the primacy of sentence? Ultimately, why should microanalysis (the analysis of the relations between the internal constituents of the sentence) be abandoned for a more complex enterprise involving macroanalysis (the analysis of the relations between sentences at the discourse level)? First, for empirical reasons. Experimental research has, indeed, dismantled the idea that processing sentence structure is enough to successfully communicate. Studies of language impairments show that processing the constituent structure of sentence—microanalysis—is not a sufficient condition to account for the production-comprehension of narrative discourse—macroanalysis. Starting from the case of derailment in schizophrenia (Andreasen 1979; Marini et al. 2008), experimental studies on several neuropsychological populations (Coelho et al. 2012; Glosser and Deser 1991; Marini et al. 2010) have highlighted that subjects who can process sentence structure may be unable to successfully communicate if they have difficulty in constructing-following the line of discourse in a narrative context (cf. Adornetti 2018). A famous letter written by a schizophrenic patient and reported by Bleuler (1911/1950, p. 17) is illustrative in this regard: I am writing on paper. The pen which I am using is from a factory called ‘Perry & Co’. This factory is in England. I assume this. Behind the name of Perry Co. the city of London is inscribed; but not the city. The city of London is in England. I know this from my schooldays. Then, I always liked geography. My last teacher in that subject was Professor August A. He was a man with black eyes. I also like black eyes. There are also blue and gray and other sorts, too. I have heard it said that snakes have green eyes. All people have eyes. There are some, too, who are blind.

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The evidence that processing sentences is not sufficient to process discourse make clear the need to distinguish discourse impairments (governed by global coherence) from deficits in the production-comprehension of sentences. Moreover, empirical issues refer to conceptual problems. The fact that processing sentences is not a sufficient condition for processing narrative ultimately depends on the autonomy of global coherence from cohesion, which pertains to the content relations between adjacent sentences (Giora 1985). This issue appears to be of central importance for the purposes of the present book because it is connected with the question of whether coherence is a property that thought inherits from language or, conversely, that language inherits from thought. The point is crucial since highlights the difference between a conception of coherence as result of the grammar of languages (by which a text or a discourse is coherent on the basis of specific grammatical operators, such as pronouns, used to construct sequences of interconnected sentences) and a conception that sees coherence primarily as a property of thought (by which global coherence governs the mental representation of causal and temporal chains of events) (cf. Adornetti 2013). Therefore, the idea that coherence can be reduced to cohesion (e.g., Daneš 1974; Halliday and Hasan 1976) is closely related to the Language First Hypothesis. In contrast to this hypothesis, De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) argue that cohesion is a surface phenomenon of language (pertaining to the grammar of languages), whereas global coherence concerns the deep structure of thought. As Givón (1995, p. vii) states, indeed, coherence is not an internal property of a written or spoken text, (but) a property of what emerges during speech production and comprehension - the mentally represented text, and in particular the mental processes that partake in constructing that mental representation.

Furthermore, Giora (1985) considers cohesion as neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for constructing coherent discourses. That said, coherence and cohesion are not mutually excluding: it is an indisputable fact that the relation between sentences at the discourse level is governed by cohesive mechanisms (grammatical and lexical). The point under discussion is to understand whether these mechanisms depend on the functional need to express thought contents connected by discursive coherence or whether they are the condition for constructing coherent narrative discourses. I take the first interpretation to be the right one. Specifically, my claim is that the representation of causal and temporal sequences of events governed by the principle of coherence is the foundation of human representation of reality, long before of narrative communication. Representing experience in a narrative form affects the construction of the belief system, prior to the communication of beliefs. In particular, it has a twofold effect. Even during the simple act of acquiring the belief system (well before any form of communication), representing reality in a narrative form permits to consolidate beliefs in the system— telling oneself about one’s own experience in story form helps to be persuaded of those stories. In this perspective, global coherence is a property that governs the acquisition of beliefs, before their transmission to others in communication. As a consequence, the grammatical operators underlying the cohesion of a text, discourse or story are merely expressive expedients invented by humans to convey their mental

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stories. As we will see in the final part of this book, grammar (specifically, syntax) is the late product of a long evolutionary process that has global coherence as its starting point.

4.1.2

Coherence Cannot Be Reduced to Relevance

As already highlighted, Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995, p. 289) ground their model in a single explanatory principle—relevance—capable of explaining any aspect of human communication. If this is the case, then global coherence should also be interpreted with reference to that principle. The argument used by Wilson (1998) in favor of the dependence of coherence from relevance is that narrative processing is no exception to the processing of any other form of expression: even for understanding stories, regardless of how the speaker organizes the discourse segments in the communicative flow, the reference to the speaker’s intentions applies. Then, if Wilson is right, the mindreading system is sufficient to account for human communication regardless of whether individuals communicate in words, sentences, or discourses. In sharp contrast with Wilson’s thesis, Giora (1997, 1998) argues that, beyond not being reducible to cohesion, coherence cannot be reduced to relevance. In her view, when moving from the sentence level to the discourse level, relevance is not able to explain global coherence. Evidence of this are several examples of expressions that comply with the principle of relevance but are not coherent, along with expressions that are coherent but violate the principle of relevance. Giora believes that narrative coherence involves the construction of the ordered sequence of discourse segments; only by respecting this sequence, in fact, it is possible to represent the causal and temporal order of events at the basis of the narrative plan—the organization of the sequence of events in the narrative flow has a leading role in the construction of a globally coherent discourse. On the contrary, Wilson (1998) suggests interpreting the sense of incoherence experienced by listeners as related to the effort they are undertaking in looking for relevance: The resulting interpretations will be inconsistent with the principle of relevance, whether or not the discourse segments are related. By the same token, what makes a discourse (...) acceptable is an interpretation that is consistent with the principle of relevance, whether or not the discourse segments are related (Wilson 1998, p. 67; emphasis added).

Differently from Giora, Wilson’s claim is that coherence can be reduced to relevance since the way discourse segments are related plays no role in comprehension. In my view, such a claim is unjustified, thus Giora’s perspective is more convincing on a conceptual level. That said, her interpretative model appears weaker in terms of cognitive plausibility than that proposed by Wilson, since the thesis of the independence of coherence from relevance is not sufficiently supported by empirical evidence. As the point of contention between Wilson and Giora is discourse comprehension, the settling issue to be tackled concerns the cognitive processes and architectures involved in the processing of narrative coherence. Although less

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convincing on the conceptual level, Wilson’s argument has the strength to make reference to a plausible cognitive architecture, centered on mindreading, which underlies language processing. Since I consider global coherence as an independent property (that cannot be reduced to relevance), showing the cognitive plausibility of Giora’s argument is a fundamental step in my argument. My claim is that, if coherence cannot be reduced to relevance, then it should rely on cognitive systems other than mindreading (Ferretti 2016, 2021; Ferretti and Adornetti 2020). As we will show in the next chapter through the analysis of the role of the ecological brain in narrative competence, the thesis of the independence of global coherence can be supported by referring to mechanisms devoted to spatio-temporal projection, which can process the extended dimension of narrative.

5 Mindreading and Storytelling Before going into detail of the processing systems underlying the ecological brain, we need to address the proposal to consider mindreading as a system capable of accounting (on its own) for narrative competence. In such a proposal, the brain structures devoted to process discourse largely coincide with the structures underlying the social brain. Indeed, at the foundation of this proposal is the idea that narrative processing mainly involves the interpretation of mental states (motivations, intentions, and desires) guiding the character’s actions. This perspective is grounded in narratological models which, in sharp contrast with the Aristotelian model, exalt the role of the character over the plot. Fludernik (1996b, pp. 9–10), a leading scholar of this theoretical perspective, claims: In my model there can therefore be narratives without plot, but there cannot be narratives without a human experience of some sort at some narrative level. This radical elimination of plot from my definition of narrativity is based on the results of research into oral narrative, where (...) the emotional involvement with the experience and its evaluation provide cognitive anchor points for the constitution of narrativity. Merely plot-oriented narratives are therefore here argued to represent a zero degree of narrativity.

The idea that story comprehension entails character evaluation has been widely addressed in theoretical reflection (Culpeper 2001; Palmer 2004; Schneider 2001) and has important consequences for how to frame the cognitive processes underlying narrative. Again, as Fludernik (1996a, pp. 99–100) highlights, the mere sentence “The dragon is dreaming” constitutes narrative in nuce, although more context would have to be provided to flesh this out into a story about the dragon, a story about somebody encountering the dragon, or a story about the dragon’s dreams. To the extent that we encounter a setting and an anthropomorphic character, we already project a fictional world in which consciousness and action are implicitly suggested to be “in the wings”. Fictions are therefore constituted from projections of a world, not from the delineation of one, two or three events in succession. In my model, narrativity is maintained to be not an essential quality of some texts, but the end process of an interpretive engagement with the text on the reader’s/audience’s part. Narrativity therefore becomes the product of narrativization, the process by means of which readers cognize the text as narrative material.

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From this perspective, comprehending a story means understanding the motivations, intentions, and desires that lead characters to act in a certain way. This perspective seems justified by the fact that understanding characters and their actions involves “attributing dispositions and motivation to them (and) forming expectations about what they will do next and why, and (...) reacting emotionally to them” (Margolin 2007, pp. 78–79). Clearly, reference to the role of character in story comprehension emphasizes the role of mindreading in narrative processing (Brown et al. 2019). Both psychological and neurological empirical studies support this hypothesis. On a psychological level, numerous experimental studies show that the human mind treats fictional characters as if they were real people (Eder et al. 2010; Gerrig 2010; Oatley 1999). These studies have been corroborated by research with individuals with ASD, showing that mindreading difficulties affect narrative processing (Happé et al. 1996; Mason et al. 2008). A final important aspect related to the character concerns the emotional dimension of narrative. In a fMRI study, Mano et al. (2009) showed that reading narratives with strong emotional impact leads individuals to understand the story by taking on the protagonist’s perspective. The connection between story comprehension and character perspective taking, even at the emotional level, suggests that at least part of narrative processing relies on simulation processes (which highlights the role of the mirror system, as we shall see in the next chapter). At the neurological level, fMRI studies have shown that several brain areas are activated in ToM tasks, including the bilateral temporo-parietal junction (bTPJ), posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTP), medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), posterior cingulate cortex (pCC), precuneus, and temporal poles (for a review, see Mar 2011). The important point is that, as we will see in the next chapter, the brain system underlying mindreading overlaps in several areas with the network underlying the narrative brain (Ferstl et al. 2008; Lin et al. 2018; Mar 2004). Mason and Just (2009) showed the role of two cortical structures that are particularly important for processing the actions of characters within a narrative: the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC: it functions as a monitoring system that tracks information about the character) and the right temporo-parietal junction (rightTPJ: a protagonist simulator, whose role is to generate expectations about future events based on an understanding of the character’s intentions). Fludernik’s proposal about the role of character in narrative processing thus appears to be well founded. However, I find too radical the idea that an understanding of the character is enough to comprehend a story. In my opinion, emphasizing the role of the character does not necessarily entail a refusal of the role of the plot, as Fludernik’s thesis would suggest (Ferretti and Adornetti 2020; Ferretti et al. 2022). In general, the emphasis on the role of the character can be thematized in an integrated perspective that puts the character within an interpretive structure governed by the plot. An example of such a perspective is represented by models that hold together the focus on character and story grammar (Mandler 1984; Schank and Abelson 2013). Such models highlight that stories are characterized by causal sequences of events driven by the purposes and motivations of agents. According to Bietti et al. (2019, p. 720), in fact, the ability to tell stories “entails placing events

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into a coherent sequence or animating them by invoking protagonists’ motives”. Similarly, Chiera et al. (2022) argue that “the narrative plot can be conceived as temporally connected sequences of events (. . .), with a character (or more characters) who must achieve a goal through the overcoming of obstacles”. In the light of these considerations, narrative competence turns out to be a complex ability that cannot be analyzed with reference to a single factor to the exclusion of others. As Dahlstrom (2014, p. 13614) argues, narratives follow a particular structure that describes the cause and effect relationships between events that take place over a particular time period that impact particular characters. Although there exist more nuanced factors that scholars can use to further determine the narrativity of a message, the triumvirate of causality, temporality, and character represents a fairly standard definition of narrative communication.

Therefore, narrative competence involves different systems capable of processing different properties. In such a perspective, as important as it is, the social brain is only one of the systems involved in narrative competence. Probably, the narrative brain is a macrosystem composed of multiple cognitive systems (Ferretti 2016, 2021; Ferretti and Adornetti 2020).

5.1

The Extended Nature of the Narrative Dimension: Why the Social Brain Is Not Enough

As discussed in the previous section, the role of mindreading in story processing is a well-known and uncontroversial fact. To be controversial is the question of whether the ability to understand the purposes and motivations driving character’s actions is enough to process stories. Mindreading has a major role in narrative processing not only because it processes the story characters, but also because it plays a function in the plot. Because of its ability to process information which has a character of immediacy, mindreading turns out to be an excellent device for synthesizing in narrative. Interpreting the speaker’s intentions saves considerable energy in discourse processing by allowing to grasp at once what the speaker intends to communicate, sometimes using a great turn of phrase (Ferretti 2016; Ferretti and Adornetti 2016). The ability to get the gist of the message (to the point of experiencing a sense of impatience when someone insists on a point already clear) is of great help in linguistic understanding within conversational exchanges. That said, identifying the speaker’s communicative intention is often not enough to understand the events narrated in a story. Sometimes the speaker’s intention is hidden in the plot and the listener is required to follow the line of speech before achieving comprehension. When the listener has to go back to what the speaker has already said or project forward to anticipate what she is going to say, mindreading is not the right device to refer to. In these cases, processing the extended dimension of narrative is required, otherwise it would be impossible to assess the coherence of the speaker’s message. Referring again to the debate between

6

Conclusions

75

Giora (1997, 1998) and Wilson (1998), following the plot becomes crucial for comprehension in that it relies on the ability to grasp how the discourse segments are related. In the light of these considerations, story processing seems to involve a continuous balancing between systems that control the immediate dimension (with less demands) and those that mediate the extended dimension of narrative. The effort engaged in narrative processing proves that story comprehension involves the elaboration of both the character and the plot. These indications open the way to the idea that, in spite of conceptual motivations, the main reason why global coherence cannot be reduced to relevance is that the cognitive system underlying the ostensive-inferential model does not have the computational resources to process the extended dimension of narrative. This dimension entails cognitive mechanisms able to process, in Augustine’s terms, the “unfolding” nature of the narrative dimension. Given the inadequacy of the social brain, what other processing systems can be taken into account to explain these aspects? In the next chapter, I will answer this question by considering its impact on the issue of the nature and origins of language.

6 Conclusions The main idea of this book is that the distinctive feature of language is the ability to tell stories. Consequently, the central issue of the narrative origin of language appears to be closely related to the question of how our ancestors could have started to tell stories for communicative purposes. The main argument to be analyzed in this respect concerns the processing systems they might have used to invent an effective system of communication. My hypothesis is that the ability to tell stories presupposes a narrative brain. In an evolutionary perspective, such a hypothesis fits with the idea that our ancestors had to be equipped with a brain capable of representing (thinking about) reality in a narrative form prior to the emergence of a means to share their narrative representations of reality. A similar idea should address at least two fundamental questions. The first is to understand how it is possible to represent reality in the form of stories before and in the absence of language; the second is to understand how it is possible to justify the idea that our ancestors had a narrative brain before they began to tell stories. In this chapter, I have explored the social brain hypothesis by arguing that, although of great importance for the origin of language, the exclusive reference to mindreading is not sufficient to account for the production-comprehension of stories—the social brain is a necessary but not sufficient component of narrative competence. What is needed further is a cognitive macrosystem capable of processing the story plot, that is, the extended dimension of stories. At the heart of such a macrosystem are spatio-temporal devices that govern the relationship between humans and the surrounding physical environment. The study of this macrosystem enables to give structural and functional substance to the narrative

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brain hypothesis, thus, giving explanatory power to the issue of the existence of both a narrative thought and a narrative brain in the absence of language.

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The Narrative Brain

Abstract After having shown that the cognitive mechanisms involved in the social brain are not enough to account for narrative skills, the focus of this chapter is on a cognitive macrosystem able to process the plot of stories, namely their extended dimension. At the heart of such macrosystem are spatio-temporal devices which govern the interaction between humans and their surroundings. The investigation of this macrosystem allows to explain how it is possible to think in a narrative way in the absence of language and, thus, to hypothesize how our ancestors could exploit a narrative brain before communicating through verbal language. Keywords Spatial navigation · Temporal cognition · Causal connections · Default mode network · Scene construction Persuasion is an art that can be mastered and enhanced through specific rhetorical techniques. Notwithstanding, the invention of narrative communication by our ancestors mainly depended on their natural way of representing reality. The persuasive character of narrative is strictly linked to our brains, which are wired to represent reality in the form of stories. In the previous chapters, I considered the narrative properties that, on the basis of their epistemological status and evolutionary plausibility, distinguish storytelling from other forms of representation. Here, I will deal with the specific analysis of the cognitive architectures underlying narrative competence. Above, I mentioned some of the processing systems our ancestors had to display to invent language and argued that mindreading alone is not sufficient for that purpose. In order to understand how humans could begin to tell stories, it is necessary to take into account the narrative brain, which can account for both why humans are so inclined to be persuaded by stories, and why humans invented stories in order to communicate, that is, to persuade others. Hence, the aim of this chapter is to identify the functional devices underlying the narrative brain. The considerations of the previous chapter are a good starting point for this investigation: given the independence of global coherence from both cohesion and relevance, the functioning of the narrative brain cannot be reduced either to the operation of a syntactic mechanism or © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Ferretti, Narrative Persuasion. A Cognitive Perspective on Language Evolution, Interdisciplinary Evolution Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09206-0_4

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a system for processing social relations—however necessary these cognitive systems may be, they are not sufficient to account for the narrative foundation of language. Let’s start considering the role of the cognitive systems underlying the ecological brain.

1 The Oldowan Niche According to Gärdenfors and Osvath (2010; Gärdenfors 2003; Osvath and Gärdenfors 2005), language rests on the ability to detach from the here and now and project into places and times other than the current ones. In their opinion, “prospection” is an adaptation of humans (starting from Homo ergaster/erectus) to the Oldowan ecological niche. The specific features of Oldowan culture—the complex lithic technology of lower Palaeolithic—presume specific cognitive abilities. According to Osvath and Gärdenfors (2005, p. 1), the manufacturing and use of stone tools, the transport of artefacts, the use of accumulation spots along with the transport of carcasses “has led to a selection for anticipatory cognition and in particular anticipatory planning”. The most interesting issue in this regard concerns the evolution of the cognitive systems that allowed our ancestors to project themselves in time and space, permitting, for example, to adjust the time between the acquisition and the use of a tool or to estimate the distance between the sources of tool materials and the sites where that tool would be used to kill an animal. The point of greatest interest for my purposes concerns the relationship between these cognitive systems and language. The most widely accepted view is that prospection is directly associated with the emergence of symbolic abilities (Gärdenfors and Osvath 2010; Osvath and Gärdenfors 2005). Gärdenfors (2003), for example, argues that adaptations to the Oldowan niche are largely related to the use of symbolic language. In his view, in fact, the evolutionary gain of being able to communicate about referents that are not yet present is that collaborative forms of long-term planning become possible. Symbolic communication is an efficient way of solving problems concerning cooperation about future goals - more efficient than iconic miming (Gärdenfors and Osvath 2010, p. 104).

The ability to use symbols is closely connected with prospection (Brinck and Gärdenfors 2003; Gärdenfors 2003, 2004; Osvath and Gärdenfors 2005). Specifically, Gärdenfors and Osvath claim that anticipatory cognition promotes the transition from a mimetic and iconic form of communication to a communication based on the use of abstract symbols: detachment from the here and now, in fact, allows to construct representations of objects that are neither present in the current scenario nor triggered by some recent situation. In this interpretative framework, the advent of symbolic thought adds important elements to the idea of language as a tool for social cooperation, which is claimed to be linked to anticipatory cognition, since “symbolic

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The Oldowan Niche

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language makes it possible to efficiently cooperate about the future goals” (Gärdenfors and Osvath 2010, p. 111). These indications imply a precise hypothesis about the origin of language: the idea that the transition from animal to human communication is related to the transition from signals to symbols. The argument made by Gärdenfors and Osvath stresses the symbolic status of human communication as the distinctive feature of language (cf. Deacon 1997). Here, I will not address the issue of whether the symbolic character of communication is uniquely human (namely, whether only humans can use symbols as symbols; for an analysis, see Ferretti and Adornetti 2012). The point to be highlighted here is that considering the role of prospection only in reference to the advent of symbolic abilities undermines the real explanatory power of this type of cognition for the origin of language. In the previous chapter, I identified in its extended dimension in space and time the characteristic feature of narrative, arguing that this dimension is the greatest obstacle to the hypothesis of mindreading as the only processing system underlying language. As we shall see, the reference to the ability to detach from the here and now so as to project into a spacetime different from the current one opens the way to the possibility of empirically supporting the narrative foundation of language. The role of projective systems in the processing of the extended dimension of stories governed by global coherence can be, indeed, emphasized in reference to capabilities of this kind. The focus on the cognitive systems enabling navigation in space and time as mechanisms for processing the story plot is the conceptual tenet of this chapter. Starting from the recognition of the role played by such systems in human communication, it will be possible to consider the role of the ecological brain, just as important as the social brain (Ferretti 2016; Ferretti and Adornetti 2020), in the origin and functioning of language. According to Polletta and Lee (2006, p. 11), in understanding a story “we move back and forth between the events narrated and the gradually revealed plot, with each making sense of the other”. Considerations of this kind can be used to hypothesize— through the anticipation of what is about to happen and the continuous monitoring of what happens in relation to what has already happened—the role of projection systems in space and time in the processing of the story plot. This hypothesis seems intuitively plausible, but requires to be validated both on a conceptual and empirical basis. The assumption underlying my hypothesis is that the extended dimension of stories is governed by cognitive devices devoted to navigation in space and time, in line with a metaphor of narrative as a form of navigation (Ferretti 2014, 2016; Ferretti et al. 2013). What theoretical arguments and empirical evidence can support the idea that systems for navigation in space and time underpin the ability to represent experience in the form of stories and to tell stories to others?

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2 Navigation in Space Let’s start from definitional issues. According to Lewis (1994, p. 82), navigating “is to enable the voyager to take his departure and continue towards his objective in the right direction”. Gallistel (1990, p. 35) describes navigation as “the process of determining and maintaining a course or trajectory from one place to another”. Both these definitions stress that navigating space so as to reach the destination requires identifying and maintaining a course towards the right direction. Narrative processing works similarly: both the storyteller and the audience need to orient themselves towards a direction, to follow a path and to reach a destination (as discussed in chapter “Narrative and Persuasion”, story ending is the center of attraction in storytelling). In narrative terms, following the course and maintaining the right direction towards the goal is equivalent to constructing and following the line of a narrative, that is, to process global coherence. How to justify such an interpretative model? A way would be proving that cognitive systems and brain structures underlying navigation in space and time are involved in the production and comprehension of stories, as part of narrative competence. The starting point for testing this hypothesis concerns the analysis of the structures involved in navigation in space and time.

2.1

The Sense of Direction

A first aspect to explore in the study of systems for navigation in space concerns the “sense of direction”. When moving towards a destination, even in the case of a road never yet taken, we are constantly oriented towards the place to be reached: if a detour forces a change in the path, we rely on our sense of direction to accommodate changes and re-formulate the route plan. Jonsson (2002, p. 19) considers this sense to be unconscious: Our minds have a directional reference frame that we rely on to orient ourselves. It is the mainstay of our spatial system. We know in which direction to go, but if we are asked how we know, we would have no answer. It is automatic. When something goes wrong (...), it becomes a terrible nuisance; when it works right, it is a tremendous asset. And it does works right most of the time – astonishingly so.

Only when realizing that a path is wrong, our sense of direction turns out to be important for space orientation. Darwin (1873, pp. 417–418) had already connected the function of direction to a form of instinct with a dedicated brain basis: The manner in which the sense of direction is sometimes suddenly disarranged in very old and feeble persons, and the feeling of strong distress which, as I known, has been experienced by persons when they have suddenly found out that they have been proceeding in a wholly unexpected and wrong direction, leads to the suspicion that some part of the brain is specialized for the function of direction.

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Navigation in Space

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Rats are among the most studied animals in relation to orientation and spatial navigation. Their sense of direction has been highlighted in the pioneering studies of Tolman (1948), who discovered the existence of a sort of mental compass in rats. As Darwin hypothesized, the neurons underlying the sense of direction were identified in the postsubiculum (a structure of the hippocampus): Taube et al. (1990) found that 25% of the neurons in this structure are head-direction cells (see also Dudchenko 2010). The identification of direction is undoubtedly a necessary condition of space navigation. However, it is not a sufficient condition. Spatial navigation is a complex capacity that relies on multiple brain areas, among which hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, caudate nucleus, and the parietal and retrosplenial cortex (Aguirre et al. 1996; Burgess 2008; Ekstrom et al. 2003; Gron et al. 2000; Shelton and Gabrieli 2002). An important distinction to be made concerns the processing systems involved in planning the route through the construction of mental maps (inner navigation) and the processing systems responsible for making those maps executive when navigating on the real environment (route navigation). This distinction intersects with another important distinction, that is, between the egocentric representation (encoding the individual’s point of view) and the allocentric representation of space (independent of the individual’s point of view). We will see that these distinctions have important implications for investigating the relations between spatial navigation and narrative processing.

2.2

Hippocampus and Cognitive Maps

The discovery of a class of hippocampal neurons that are activated when a rat is situated in a particular place in the environment has been of great importance for the study of spatial navigation. The identification of place cells in rats led O’Keefe and Nadel (1978) to argue that hippocampus is the system that processes the spatiotemporal structure of any form of knowledge. According to Spiers and Maguire (2006), the hippocampus is devoted to the construction of mental maps and is involved in planning the pathway, more than in its actual execution. In fact, as Dudchenko (2010, p. 182) also argues, “the hippocampus may not show increased activity through navigation, but only at the beginning of the trip when one plans the route to desired goal”. Studies on mental maps have been confirmed by the identification of two distinct processing systems: the allocentric system, implicated in the use of maps, and the egocentric system, involved in the processes enabling to effectively follow the route. The construction of a map is an abstract operation that is realized in allocentric spatial representations. Before heading towards the destination, individuals identify their position and construct a mental representation of the right sequence of places to cover. The execution is a subsequent step, mainly guided by egocentric forms of representation. Through an elegant experiment, Burgess et al. (2001) provided evidence of the role of hippocampus in allocentric spatial representation. The experiment also confirmed the existence of convergence zones between

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allocentric and egocentric representations: while egocentric representations are mediated by medial parietal areas, translation of information between egocentric and allocentric representations is supported by the posterior parietal cortex. That said, the transition to route navigation is not unidirectional (we do not only move from map construction to actual navigation, but also the other way round). Both the transition from inner navigation to route navigation and the transition from allocentric to egocentric representations is mediated by the retrosplenial cortex (Brodmann areas 29 and 30; Iaria et al. 2007; Vann et al. 2009), which in my view is important for two further reasons. First, it encodes episodic memory during the imagination of future events and the construction of scenarios (Vann et al. 2009). Second, it is involved in the encoding of landmarks for the purpose of navigation and orientation (Mitchell et al. 2018), as proved by lesions of the retrosplenial cortex which entail difficulties in the use of landmarks in spatial navigation (Iaria et al. 2007). Reference to landmarks implies important issues related to spatial navigation which, as we shall see, have interesting implications for narrative processing.

2.3

Landmarks

Spatial navigation exploits not only internal mental constructs, but also external elements: landmarks are relevant to adjust the course or even just to maintain the route (as when we expect to find a church to turn right and finally catch sight of the bell tower in the distance). The importance of landmarks for spatial navigation is confirmed by several animal studies (cf. studies on foraging bees; Collett and Collett 2002). Furthermore, the absence of recognizable landmarks on the territory is among the recurring causes of loss of orientation (think of the difficulties of orientation on mountains in bad weather). What makes landmarks so important is their “magnetic power” (Jonsson 2002): Nemmi et al. (2013) argue that landmarks can be seen as “beacons” able to attract wayfinders towards the right direction. It is no coincidence that a classic symptom of “topographic disorientation” (Aguirre and D’Esposito 1999) is landmark agnosia. Individuals suffering from this disorder can draw maps and describe environments, but are unable to recognize landmarks on the territory (for a history of the literature on disorientation, see Barrash 1998). The case of patient F.G. (unable to recognize landmarks but able to maintain a sense of direction and estimate distances) described by Rainville et al. (2005) also “suggests that the brain systems underlying landmark agnosia and heading disorientation may be separable” (Dudchenko 2010, p. 246). The idea of landmarks as beacons capable of facilitating wayfinding exemplifies the function of anchoring to the context enabled by these important elements. As we shall see shortly, such an idea paves the way for a first level of commonality between spatial navigation and narrative processing: interlocutors coping with the constant realignments and readjustments necessary to follow the line of narrative discourse make, by analogy with what happens in route navigation, constant use of landmarks characterized by a strong magnetic power (Ferretti et al. 2013). However, before

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going into detail of the relationship between spatial navigation and narrative, the other determining factor of narrative should be introduced: the time factor. The metaphor of space navigation applies well to narrative because navigating space is also a way of navigating time.

3 Navigating Space-Time Space navigation is more than a good metaphor for thinking about the cognitive processes involved in narrative because navigating space is closely related to navigating time. Recovering the time factor is of great importance for the present proposal, as it is widely considered a distinctive feature of the narrative dimension, as shown in chapter “Narrative and Persuasion”. Navigating space is always also experiencing time. As Gould and Gould (2012, pp. 36–37) state: Despite every navigator’s preoccupation with distances and angles, latitudes and longitudes, and headings and compasses, nearly all human navigation rests on a basis of understanding and measuring time. We need to know when to start, what direction to choose relative to the sun or stars, how long we’ve been moving if we wish to compute distance travelled, when to stop, or the most challenging task of all, how to determine relative time so we can deduce longitude.

The connection between space and time is firmly embodied in linguistic practices. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) extensively studied this connection in the case of metaphor: TIME IS SPACE is an effective way to conceptualize abstract information (such as that related to time) using more concrete knowledge domains (such as that inherent in space). In the same vein, Casasanto and Boroditsky (2008) claim that humans both talk and think about time in spatial terms. Here, I am not interested in the specific relationship between thought and language and the related issue of how language affects human representation of space and time. Rather, it is important to emphasize that, beyond cultural differences which yet remain relevant (Levinson and Levinson 2003; for a specific discussion on metaphors, see Athanasopoulos et al. 2017), the relationship between space and time in human mental representation has a universal character that can be ascribed to the functioning of brain structures shared by all individuals of the species (Ferretti 2015). This leads to hypothesize dedicated processing mechanisms with a strong adaptive function. As Corballis (2014, p. 50) suggests, “in creatures that move freely over the surface of the earth—and beyond—a mechanism for mental as well as physical exploration in time and space may have been very early requisites for successful adaptation”. Important evidence in this regard come from analysis of the brain structures and cognitive architectures underlying navigation in space and time.

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3.1

The Spatiotemporal Brain

The processing systems underlying space navigation share important features with systems dedicated to time navigation. A first important point concerns the structural and functional convergence between Mental Space Travel (MST) and Mental Time Travel (MTT; Michaelian 2016; Suddendorf and Corballis 1997, 2007). MTT is a cognitive system governed by two intertwined functions: the ability to project oneself into the past, termed episodic memory (Tulving 1985b, 2005), and the ability to imagine future experiences, known as prospective cognition or episodic future cognition (Atance and O’Neill 2001). Not surprisingly, a brain region shared by MST and MTT is hippocampus, which is involved in recording where we are in space as well as in time, since mental time travel takes place in a space-time manifold. It is (...) the Grand Central Station for our mental excursions, recording our mental comings and goings (Corballis 2015, p. 58).

The close relationship between navigation in space and time is corroborated by brain impairments. Damage to hippocampus and adjacent areas affects episodic memory, as well as the ability to construct mental maps (on Korsakoff’s syndrome, see Talland 1965). Moreover, Vann and colleagues (2009) suggest that damage to retrosplenial cortex, whose importance in spatial navigation has already been mentioned, has repercussions on the patients’ ability to project themselves into the past and future, with negative effects on their episodic and autobiographical memory. This concerns the structural and neurological issues. I will now explore the functional implications of these brain structures and, above all, the role of spatiotemporal navigation in narrative processing.

3.2

Time and Memory

Neuroscience and cognitive psychology have significantly contributed to the empirical analysis of subjective time, giving reason to Augustine’s intuitions (see chapter “Narrative and Persuasion”). The reference to the notion of subjective time used to overcome the metaphysical paradoxes of time is currently at the center of a debate, involving scholars who attempt to combine the physical notion with the subjective notion of time characterizing the sciences of the mind (for the analysis of the relationship between physical time and subjective experience of time, see Dorato 2013; Dorato and Wittmann 2015, 2020). To investigate the role of time in narrative competence, this book focuses on the ability of individuals to project themselves into the past and future. Referring to time—the human time, specifically—means entailing two important functional structures: episodic memory and prospective cognition. Prospective cognition has been already addressed. Here, the specific focus is on the role of episodic memory, since analyzing time is analyzing the memory of time (Dalla Barba 2000; Klein et al. 2002). Klein and colleagues (2002, p. 354) claim:

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Memory and time have a special relationship. On the one hand, the act of remembering logically presupposes a sense of time (...). On the other hand, our subjective experience of time is held to be a construction of memory (...). The concept of memory and time are thus interdependent, neither completely separable from the other.

In this view, the best way to understand the relationships between time and memory is investigating the relationship between kinds of memory and types of temporal experience. In this regard, episodic memory takes a leading role, since the key distinction between episodic and semantic memory “is the nature of subjective temporal experience that accompanies their retrieval” (Klein et al. 2002, p. 355). From these words, it is clear the conceptual debt to Tulving’s thought, who states: Episodic memory is oriented to the past in a way in which no other kind of memory, or memory system, is. It is the only memory system that allows people to consciously re-experience past experiences. Its special and unique relationship to time, surprisingly, is not widely known. Nor is it, I think, adequately appreciated. Most people naturally associate all memory with the past and are astonished to learn that this is not so (Tulving 2002a, p. 6).

Since the first formulation of his model, Tulving (1972) maintains that episodic memory is characterized by its diversity from semantic memory. While semantic memory refers to knowledge of general facts (knowing, for example, that Ferrari is red), episodic memory concerns the recollection of single events experienced personally (for example, the memory of our first day of school). Moreover, if semantic memory is related to the “what” (the content of what is remembered), episodic memory contains information also on “when” and “where”, that is, the specific temporal and spatial context in which a certain personal experience took place. One of the distinctive features of episodic memory is the reference to subjective time, termed chronesthesia by Tulving (2002b). Subjective time is related both to the ability of humans to travel in time and to autonoetic consciousness. Finally, from an evolutionary point of view, Tulving (1999, 2002b) considers episodic memory to be specific to our species, a late product of semantic memory. Taken together, all these features converge in a definition of episodic memory that is particularly interesting for my purposes: Episodic memory is a recently evolved, late developing, and early-deteriorating past-oriented memory system, more vulnerable than other memory systems to neural dysfunction, and probably unique to humans. It makes possible mental time travel through subjective time, from the present to the past, thus allowing one to re-experience, through autonoetic awareness, one’s own previous experiences. (...) The essence of episodic memory lies in the conjunction of three concepts – self, autonoetic awareness, and subjective sensed time (Tulving 2002a, p. 5).

Clinical cases corroborate Tulving’s thesis, showing a dissociation between semantic and episodic memory and providing insights on the relationships between projection into the past and future (for a philosophical, as well as empirical, analysis of the relationships between past and future, see Michaelian 2016; Perrin and Michaelian 2017).

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3.2.1

Clinical Cases

The most famous case is that of H.M. (Henry Molaison), the patient who lived a form of “eternal present” after a bilateral medial temporal lobectomy (to cure his epilepsy). As Corkin (2013, p. xii) tells, after the surgery, he lived in a permanent present tense: he could no longer remember the faces of people he met, places he visited, or moments he lived through. His experiences slipped out of his consciousness seconds after they happened. My conversation with Henry vanished from his mind immediately.

The removal of brain structures had affected declarative memory (including episodic and semantic), leaving intact nondeclarative memory. An important aspect is that the patient’s memorization difficulties had a counterpart in difficulties to imagine the future: Constructing the future, like resurrecting the past, requires establishing functional connections between the hippocampus and areas in the frontal, cingulate and parietal cortices. Without this network, Henry had no database to consult when asked what he would do the next day, week, or in the years to come. He could not imagine the future any more than he could remember the past (ibid., p. 236).

This case proves that projections into the past and future respond to the same functional structures, supporting the idea that MTT is a unique system of mental projection (Suddendorf and Corballis 2007). That said, the case of H.M. does not allow for a distinction between semantic and episodic memory. According to Tulving (2002a), in fact, the celebrity of H.M. (who had deficits in declarative memory, not in episodic memory) functioned as an obstacle to the idea that semantic and episodic memory were distinct functional systems. In his view, the most interesting case in this regard is that of K.C. (a patient with multiple cortical and subcortical lesions, including the medial temporal lobes, due to a motorcycle accident when he was 30 years old). As is often the case of amnesiacs, many of his cognitive abilities were entirely preserved—he knew several facts about his life, such as his date of birth and his address. In spite of this knowledge, however, he had deep anterograde amnesia for both personal experiences and semantic information. However, his retrograde amnesia (was) highly asymmetrical: he (could not) recollect any personally experienced events, whether one-time or repeated happenings, whereas his semantic knowledge acquired before the critical accident (was) still reasonably intact. His knowledge of mathematics, history, geography, and other ‘school subjects’, as well as his general knowledge of the world (was) not greatly different from others at his educational level (Tulving 2002a, pp. 13–4).

The asymmetry between semantic and episodic memory, although not always as evident as in K.C., has been found in many other subjects (for a review, see Kapur 1999; Wheeler and McMillan 2001). But the case of K.C. is interesting not only in relation to the dissociation between semantic and episodic memory, but also with respect to the functional similarities between projection into the past and the future. As shown by the experimental reports, although K.C. knew what time was (he was familiar with calendars and clocks), he had difficulty with his own subjective

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temporal experience (Tulving 1985b). Moreover, this difficulty involved both the experience of the past and the future—K.C. was unable to imagine what he would do the next day or in the near and distant future. These data not only indicate that episodic and semantic memory are dissociated and, therefore, that past and future are closely connected, but also that episodic memory, unlike semantic memory, is linked to the temporal experience of autonoetic consciousness (for a discussion, see Cosentino 2008). On the basis of these considerations, Klein et al. (2002) distinguish two kinds of memories related to temporal experience: those pertaining to episodic memory, characterized by autonoetic consciousness, and those associated with semantic memory (referring to a generic knowledge of a past event, without the individual being aware of having personally experienced that event). This would lead to hypothesize two distinct ways of experiencing time: the first, related to semantic memory, is the known time; the second, made possible by episodic memory, is the lived time. At the basis of these two different forms of experience “is the distinction between thinking about time as an objective chronology and thinking about time as an unfolding of personal happenings centered about the self” (Klein et al. 2002, p. 357). Personal time is characterized by the role, equally distributed in mental travel into the past and future, of autonoetic consciousness. In support of their hypothesis, Klein and colleagues (ibid.) refer to an empirical study on D.B.—a 78-years-old man with brain damage following cardiac arrest during a basketball game—who suffered profound temporal disorientation, rendering him incapable of placing himself in time, in spite of intact notions of time, day and year. The case of D.B. confirms the distinction between known time and lived time: although the former was largely preserved, D.B. had difficulties in the recollection of personal past events. These difficulties also concerned personal projections into the future, thus confirming the close relationship between past and future. The dissociation between lived time and known time entails an important issue, that is, whether the ability to travel in time, which is essential for processing the extended dimension of narrative, should necessarily involve forms of temporal consciousness—in other terms, whether autonoetic consciousness should be considered a constitutive component of MTT. As shown, Tulving (1985a) establishes the difference between episodic memory and other kinds of memory precisely on the involvement of autonoetic consciousness in temporal projections. In the same vein, Corballis (2015), beyond considering the hippocampus (Fig. 1) as responsible for “temporal consciousness”, argues that mental time travelling presupposes chronesthesia. In sharp contrast to these considerations, Klein et al. (2002) suggest that autonoetic consciousness is not a necessary component of the ability to travel in time. Indeed, semantic memory also makes possible a form of mental time travel, albeit one that does not entail awareness of the temporal dimension of one’s own experience. Specifically, individuals who possess semantic memory are capable of knowing about, but not reexperiencing previous states of the world and drawing on that generic knowledge to construct possible scenarios of the future. It thus would seem that the ability to mentally travel back and forth in

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Fig. 1 Forms of self-projection: (a) recollection of the past—episodic memory; (b) anticipation of a future scenario—episodic future thinking; (c) simulation of another person’s perspective—theory of mind; (d) simulation of a mental map of the environment—mental space travel. (Figure taken from Buckner and Carroll 2007, p. 51)

time is not wedded to a particular form of memorial experience; rather, there appear to be qualitatively different types of temporal experience associated with different forms of memory (ibid., pp. 369–370).

These considerations pave the way for understanding whether in narrative processing it is the known time or the lived time that plays a major role. At first sight, narrative processing would seem to exclude the involvement of autonoetic consciousness, since narrative implies mostly the comprehension of events

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concerning characters other than the reader/listener. In this way, a cornerstone of narrative temporality, as framed by Ricoeur and other following scholars, would be undermined, that is, the idea that the key to narrative understanding is strictly connected to subjective time. Understanding whether lived time is the key to the elaboration of narrative or whether, instead, comprehending narrative involves only reference to a form of known time is the issue to be solved. The study of the cognitive architectures underlying narrative provides indications to see these topics in a new light. The focus on the narrative brain is thus our next step.

4 The Narrative Brain By emphasizing the character’s dimension in stories, in the previous chapter I analyzed the role of mindreading in narrative processing. In the light of the considerations made there, mindreading systems have been claimed to be an integral part of narrative processing but a not sufficient component: since stories are characterized by a plot, in addition to a character, narrative should involve processing systems capable of elaborating the extended character of narrative discourse. As already mentioned, my idea is that in order to process global coherence, the narrative brain must be equipped with functional structures that allow individuals to navigate in space-time. A likely hypothesis is that narrative competence relies on a macrosystem characterized by the joint work of systems for projection in space, time, and the other’s mind. More specifically, I consider narrative competence as governed by the Triadic System of Grounding and Projection (TSGP), a functional macrosystem composed of mindreading, Mental Time Travel and Mental Space Travel (Ferretti 2010, 2015). Having examined the specific functioning of each cognitive device, it is important to explore how these systems of projection work together in a single macrosystem. Two steps need to be taken in this regard: the first is to analyze the empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis of a functional commonality between these cognitive devices in the brain; the second step is to test whether the TSGP can be placed at the basis of the narrative brain, that is, whether reference to this system is useful in explaining the production and comprehension of stories.

4.1

The Default Mode Network

The existence of the TSGP is confirmed by neuroscience. In a famous article entitled Self-projection and the brain, Buckner and Carroll (2007) suggest the idea of a functional macrosystem comprising a set of distinct processing systems: the Default Mode Network (DMN). It would account for human flexibility with reference to a process of change perspective, shifting from the current situation to alternative possible scenarios. For reasons that will be shortly explained, I consider the DMN

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as the necessary brain underpinning of story processing, since it supports an extended representation of experience, which is the basis of any narrative representation of reality. Because of its relevance for my hypothesis, it is then worth exploring the structure and functioning of this macrosystem.

4.1.1

Self-Projection

Buckner and Carroll (2007, p. 49) argue that the cognitive devices underlying the DMN are unified by a shared function: self-projection. In using the term “self-projection”, the claim is made that prospection requires a shift of perception from the immediate environment to the alternative, imagined future environment, and that the imagined event is referred to oneself. (...) For lack of a more suitable term, we refer to the mental construction of an imagined alternative perspective as a “simulation”. Four well-studied cognitive abilities are candidate for using related forms of simulation: episodic memory, prospection, theory of mind, and navigation. All four forms rely on autobiographical information and are constructed as a perception of an alternative perspective or, in the case of theory of mind, as a simulation that considers another individual perspective.

Figure 1 clearly shows how self-projection can be considered the unifying functional principle of the various forms of projection (into the past, future, space, and other’s mind), which allow to interpret the perception of a scene by extending its boundaries otherwise restricted to the here and now. In fact, even the simple perception of an event always implies a spatio-temporal-social extension—namely, even the simple act of perceiving an event is a way to represent reality in a narrative form. The idea underlying Buckner and Carroll’s proposal is that the different forms of self-projection rely on a common brain network. The role of the posterior areas of the brain in spatiotemporal navigation tasks has already been mentioned; here, the role of the anterior areas deserves mention: the frontal lobes (regulating planning tasks often associated with executive functions) and the medial temporal and parietal lobes (associated with memory functions). The different processing systems of the DMN converge into a single structural system because they respond to the common functional requirement of self-projection.

4.1.2

Scenario Construction

Hassabis and Maguire (2007) strongly criticized the thesis of the DMN as a macrosystem unified by reliance on self-projection. In their view, in fact, rather than projection, the DMN sustains the mental generation of “complex and coherent scene or event” (ibid., p. 299). The case of episodic memory is illustrative in this regard. In Tulving’s (1972) original hypothesis, the three constituent factors of episodic memory—what, when, and where—are all necessary and of equal importance. According to Hassabis and Maguire (2007, p. 300), however, “the timeline against which the events in our lives play out, the conscious awareness of which has

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been dubbed chronesthesia” is not necessary. The critique of the primacy of selfprojection aims to free episodic memory from chronesthesia. As we shall see, it is the spatial dimension that benefits from this, since scenario construction, in addition to remembering the past and anticipating the future, involves the generation of a coherent spatial context. In support of their hypothesis, Hassabis and Maguire (2007; Hassabis et al. 2007) argue that it is possible to imagine entirely new fictional experiences that are neither explicitly temporal nor referable to one’s self. What matters in constructing such scenarios is spatial, rather than temporal, coherence. As evidence of their thesis, the two authors make the case of amnesic patients with hippocampal damage: although capable of elaborating rich details, these subjects describe their imagined scenarios as consisting of fragmented images lacking spatial coherence (Hassabis and Maguire 2007, p. 300). The resulting interpretation is that the hippocampus plays an important role in the holistic representation of the environmental context, making “a critical contribution to the creation of new experiences by providing the spatial context into which the disparate elements of an experience can be bound” (Hassabis et al. 2007, p. 1726). In this perspective, the hippocampus supports scene construction, “crucial for imagining new experiences (and we would argue for recollecting the past, imagining the future and navigation) either through its ability to process spatial information or bind together disparate elements of the imagined scene” (Hassabis and Maguire 2007, p. 300). Although it plays a crucial role in scene construction, the hippocampus does not work alone: the parahippocampus, retrosplenial cortex, posterior parietal cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and medial temporal cortex are also involved in such construction. Since these structures are all involved in both spatial navigation and episodic memory tasks, Hassabis and Maguire conclude that, rather than self-projection, the common feature of the systems comprising the DMN is scene construction. Establishing which cognitive architectures can process scene construction is of great importance for the study of narrative competence, since, as shown in chapter “Narrative and Persuasion”, events are the basic elements of a story and scenes are the most effective way of representing events. That said, since scenario construction is deeply connected with spatial and temporal representation, understanding the mutual relationships between the elements underlying such construction has effects on the way language is framed. In line with Hassabis and Maguire’s perspective, some scholars argue that it is the notion of event that has priority over other elements. According to Sinha and Gärdenfors (2014; see Chap. 1), in order to understand how human beings conceptualize time, it is necessary to explore how they represent it from a cognitive and linguistic point of view. In this perspective, the priority of events over space and time is evident. Indeed, from a cognitive point of view, the two authors consider event as more basic than the categories of space, time and object. In other terms, the representation of events is a sufficient condition for representing such categories; in their view, in fact,

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This proposal has consequences on the level of cognitive architectures: if representing events is the condition to represent also space and time, there is no need to hypothesize dedicated devices for space-time processing. Moreover, and more importantly, this proposal affects the level of narrative processing. The centrality assigned to events, in fact, risks undermining the extended dimension of narrative, which is deeply connected to spatio-temporal projections. The issue deserves attention because my idea is that the two functions (self-projection and scenario construction), though independent, are not mutually exclusive. More specifically, in the case of narrative processing the independence of the two functions can be used in favor of their joint use—when it comes to narrative competence, both functions appear relevant. How to overcome the thesis of mutual exclusion? In view of Hassabis and Maguire’s (2007) polemical goal, the question to be clarified is whether and to what extent scene construction is at odds with selfprojection. A first move in this direction is to show that, although unnecessary, chronesthesia still cannot be excluded from mental time travel. Nyberg et al. (2010) have provided experimental evidence to support that mental time travel involves forms of self-projection accompanied by autonoetic consciousness. In this perspective, the construction of past and future scenarios is enabled by chronesthesia, defined by Nyberg et al. (2010, p. 22357)—referring to Tulving (2002b)—as “a form of consciousness that allows individuals to think about the subjective time in which they live and that makes it possible for them to mentally travel in such time”. The situation appears to be overturned with respect to the proposal by Sinha and Gärdenfors (2014); according to Nyberg et al. (2010, p. 22356), in fact, subjective time is the condition of possibility for mental time travel: One issue that has arisen in the context of thinking about mental time travel has to do with the nature of the time in which the metaphorical “travel” occurs. What is this nonpresent “time” in which remembering of past events and imagining of future events takes place in the physical present? It cannot be the same “clock and calendar” time that figures prominently in physical sciences and governs many practical affairs of everyday life, because “past” and “future”, necessarily defined with respect to a sentient observer, do not exist in the physical reality but are products of the human mind. For this reason, the time of which past and future moments are parts has been referred to as “subjective time”.

In their fMRI experiment, Nyberg et al. (2010) investigated the brain correlates of MTT through trials of “imagining”, which required participants to imagine themselves performing a known walk to mentally move from point A to point B, and trials of “remembering”, in which participants had to recollect the same walk to mentally retrace the path from A to B that actually occurred in the past (an episodic memory task). Results showed a different brain activation in the two trials, with episodic memory tasks involving a more extensive brain system than imaginative tasks (Nyberg et al. 2010, p. 22358). These findings have a twofold significance: first,

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they provide support for the neurological consistency of chronesthesia; second, they show that chronesthesia, while not being a feature of fictitious mental time travel (not really experienced by the subject), is a functional trait characteristic of temporal projections related to the subjects’ first-person experience. These results are in line with the findings obtained by Bertossi et al. (2016) who, studying the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in MTT, found that self-projection phenomena— although not necessary for scene construction—cannot be excluded in this process. What are the general implications of this framework? A first useful result is that, since understanding stories is largely concerned with fictitious events (or at least events of which the reader had not direct experience), showing that scene construction does not necessarily involve forms of chronesthesia is particularly relevant for the purpose of analyzing narrative processing. Indeed, showing that the reader’s temporal experience does not affect scene construction is a way of accounting for how it is possible to understand stories that tell about another individual’s happenings: the subjective time of the person who understands the story (or interprets a narrative discourse) is not a necessary aspect for comprehension. And it is well that it is so, in many cases. That said, there is a second way of framing story comprehension, which recovers the role of subjective time. What has been said so far on scene construction in story comprehension derives from the implicit assumption that narrative understanding occurs mainly in the third person: if the story tells events that the interpreter has not directly experienced, then she interprets the story—assuming an allocentric perspective—as a series of events that happened to someone else. Notwithstanding, story comprehension cannot always be framed in terms of third-person experience, especially when the character has a leading role. Understanding a story entails very often a continuous shifting in “perspective taking”, that is, between a third-person attitude (the allocentric point of view, from which to observe the protagonist’s events) and a first-person perspective (the egocentric point of view, in which whoever reads or listens to a story enters into the protagonist’s experience living the story in his place). The vicarious experience through identification with the character, as shown in chapter “Narrative and Persuasion” through the discussion of the persuasive power of stories, is one of the mechanisms underlying transportation and engagement, which characterize narrative processing. When the interpreter puts herself in the character’s shoes through simulative processes, her individual experience becomes an integral part of the processes underlying the understanding of character’s experience. As Oatley (2012, pp. 177–178) highlights, in fact, when reading a story or watching a film, the reader puts aside her or his own goals and concerns, inserts the goals and plan of the character into her or his own planning processor, and mentally enacts the plot. The emotions that then occur are empathetic emotions in relation to the plot’s plans, actions, and outcomes, not the character’s but the reader’s own.

Although perspective-taking constantly changes depending on the unfolding of story and the transportation in the narrated events, the personal engagement of the interpreter appears to be proved by emotional involvement. In this direction, studies

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by Gerace et al. (2015) have shown that sharing personal past experiences makes it easier to take the perspective of another person. Much of the emotional involvement that we experience with stories depends on (empathic) mechanisms of simulation, and Buckner and Carroll (2007) explicitly refer to simulation to account for the selfprojection phenomena underlying DMN. In the light of these indications, the selfrelevant character initially considered as an essential feature of scene construction might be revised, but nonetheless, this revision does not necessarily entail the exclusion of self-projection from the main properties of mental time travel. As already mentioned, self-projection and scene construction, though distinct functions of MTT, are not mutually exclusive. The case of story processing is a clear example of their close cooperation: scene construction does not rule out the possibility of selfprojection involvement since in some cases it is precisely the self-projective character that facilitates the understanding of the events narrated. In the light of these considerations, a second general remark is required to conclude this chapter. Here, I addressed the issue of the construction and understanding of events in a story and the role of the characters represented in those events. But the simulation mechanisms at work in the interpretation of events and characters are also crucial for processing the extended dimension of narrative: the simulation of the narrated experience applies especially when considering the causal and temporal sequence of story events. Projections into the future (anticipations of what is going to happen) and into the past (monitoring what is happening with respect to what has already happened) allow the processing of concatenations of causally connected events in time—the flow of memories and anticipations connected to each other in the story’s plot. The idea that the DMN involves systems of projection in space and time (as well as in the other’s mind) is important in giving shape to the extended nature of the narrative dimension: global coherence implies spatio-temporal extension that scene construction alone fails to explain. At the conclusion of this chapter, the reference to global coherence needs to be addressed again.

5 Narrating Means Navigating To account for global coherence, an explanation of the mechanisms that process the causal and temporal sequence of events at the basis of the story’s plot is required. Since this sequence characterizes the extended dimension of narrative, it is exactly on this point that projective systems may have a leading role. Arguing that the extended dimension of narrative hinges on spatio-temporal navigation systems amounts to argue that these systems underlie the elaboration of the plot and, therefore, of global coherence. How to validate this claim?

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5.1

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The Narrative Space

The metaphor of storytelling as a form of spatial navigation is highly intuitive. When we tell someone about something, in constructing the story we are guided by the goal and the path to follow to achieve that goal. As in spatial navigation, maintaining the line of discourse is crucial to maintain the right trajectory towards the story end. Thus, the ability to keep a course in the right direction is a central skill for reaching a given destination in both space navigation and storytelling. In narrative terms, this ability fits with the construction of global coherence. Are there any evidence in favor of this hypothesis? A good starting point for answering this question is the study of clinical cases, in which narrative deficits can be ascribed to difficulties in spatial navigation. A first interesting indication in this regard comes from the role of landmarks in spatial orientation. The magnetic power of landmarks for use in navigation is confirmed by a study by Ciaramelli (2008), in which she describes the case of L. G., an individual with ventromedial prefrontal damage who has difficulty in using correctly landmarks on the territory and, as a consequence, in way-finding. An interesting relationship between spatial disorientation and linguistic disorientation has been found in this patient: his impairment in managing information for a correct use in spatial navigation is related to difficulty in narrative. The discourses told by L.G. have a confabulatory character, that can be defined in terms of a lack of congruency (to the situation) to reality (the patient reports events that never occurred: false memories) (on confabulation, cf. Kopelman 1987). The difficulty in using landmarks on the territory has strong similarities with the difficulty in interpreting some crucial turning points in the story’s plot (for example, a turning point in the story that implies a sudden shift in perspective for the interpreter). My hypothesis is that the use of landmarks affects the construction of scenarios underlying the representation of story events. If landmarks on the territory function as supporting points (external scaffolding) to verify the route’s compliance with the actual territory, scenarios function as supporting points (internal scaffolding) to follow the line of discourse at critical moments of the story. The episodic character shared by both landmarks and scenarios is significant in this regard: in the same way that the use of landmarks is sporadic (Yoder et al. 2011), scene construction also governs narrative processing only at certain (key) points in the story’s plot. In spite of their episodic character, landmarks are of great importance for navigation; similarly, scene construction provides cues at critical points, without which narrative would lose congruency with reality leading to confabulation. From these considerations follows that scene construction plays a crucial role in the processing of story’s plot. But, as already claimed, the construction of the plot cannot be explained through the exclusive reference to scenarios: global coherence requires cognitive systems capable of processing the extended dimension of narrative.

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5.2

The Narrative Brain

Building the Plot

Investigating global coherence implies exploring the structure of causal and temporal connections between events in the plot. How to support the role of spatiotemporal navigation systems in the elaboration of global coherence? A good starting point is looking at the ability of orientation which links narrative to navigation. This topic entails the question of planning the path to be followed in order to reach the goal. In this regard, studies on the role of prefrontal regions in planning and monitoring the route during actual navigation (Ciaramelli 2008; Hartley et al. 2003; Maguire et al. 1998; Spiers and Maguire 2006) are particularly relevant. In a famous experiment involving London taxi drivers, Maguire et al. (2006) showed that, in addition to the classical areas of spatial navigation, the activation of the ventromedial and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex regulates the planning and control of navigation towards destination, governing the changes of route required to adapt to variations in the environment. Hartley et al. (2003) found that prefrontal cortex is active in tasks that require planning new routes to follow. Reference to prefrontal cortex in space navigation entails assigning an important role to executive functions (Ferretti and Adornetti 2011), which are mainly underpinned by this cortex (Baddeley 1986; Fuster 2008; Stuss and Benson 1986). “Executive functions” is an umbrella term for a wide set of cognitive abilities related to the temporal organization of goal-directed behavior, language, and reasoning (Fuster 2008). Executive functions play a central role in monitoring and controlling future-oriented plans and the development of appropriate responses (Gilbert and Burgess 2008). There is general agreement that these functions include processes such as planning, control, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility (Adornetti 2013; Chan et al. 2008). Furthermore, they play an important role in the maintenance of equilibrium between organism and environment because they allow to formulate and execute action plans, as well as to maintain attention and control during their implementation. Finally, planning and monitoring are also deeply involved in space navigation. If spatial navigation is a good metaphor for the generation of goaloriented discourse, then executive functions should also play a role in narrative processing (Ferretti and Adornetti 2011). The role of executive functions in discourse processing is corroborated by patients with prefrontal cortex damage. The case of traumatic brain injury (TBI), which entails planning and monitoring difficulties resulting in the inability to organize a purposeful behavior through a series of simple actions (Zalla et al. 2001), is particularly interesting in this regard (Adornetti 2013). Patients with TBI are reported to have difficulties in different aspects of narrative: although they have no difficulty in establishing local coherence, the ability to organize and maintain global coherence is impaired (Adornetti 2013). In fact, these patients. connect sentences correctly by using cohesive ties (grammatical devices), but they are unable to construct and maintain the global coherence of their verbal productions (they cannot relate the individual sentences to a plan or to a more general purpose) and often introduce material that is irrelevant to the current context in their verbal production (...).

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Fig. 2 Graphical representation of causal links (arrows) between the events (numbers) comprising a story. (Figure taken from Sah and Torng 2015)

Because of their inability to formulate and to pursue a communicative goal, their discourses appear pragmatically inappropriate (Ferretti and Adornetti 2011, p. 4).

The idea that the line of narrative discourse can be interpreted in terms of a succession of steps required to reach the goal frames global coherence as defined by events and causal relations between events. A model consistent with this perspective is the Causal Network Model (CNM) proposed by Trabasso and colleagues (Trabasso and Sperry 1985; Trabasso and van den Broek 1985; Trabasso et al. 1984). Claiming that global coherence governs narrative means arguing that the gist of a story is closely related to the network of causal connections that bind events together and allow the story’s plot to develop towards a clear direction and ending. Even graphically (Fig. 2), the CNM displays the idea that storytelling is analogous to following a path towards a destination.

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The CNM has been empirically verified. In this regard, particularly relevant are studies on the narrative abilities of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (King et al. 2014; Losh and Capps 2003; Sah and Torng 2015). ASD is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in communication and social interaction, as well as repetitive and restricted interests and behaviors (APA 2013). Diehl et al. (2006), as well as Sah and Torng (2015), applied the CNM to the investigation of narrative abilities in individuals with ASD. The results showed significant qualitative differences (global coherence organization) in the narrative performance of these individuals compared to typically developing people. These studies confirm the validity of investigating global coherence by explaining the concatenation of events in terms of causal connections. This provides important indications for understanding the relationship between narrative and spatial navigation. That said, characterizing narrative with exclusive reference to causal connections between events leaves completely unexplored another pivotal factor, considered by narratology as foundational to storytelling: the temporal dimension. The next step is focusing on this topic.

5.3

Space/Time and Coherence

A good starting point for my argument is offered by Corballis (2011, p. 111), who states that “the same constructive process that allows us to reconstruct the past and construct possible futures also allows us to invent stories”. Considering temporal navigation as closely connected to spatial navigation, he links the narrative dimension to spatio-temporal navigation: Several of the critical properties of language (...) probably evolved from the relaying of events, whether past, present, future, or fictional, most of them located at times other than the present, including imaginary time. Other times also means other places, since we are peripatetic creatures, restlessly moving around the planet - and occasionally off it (Corballis 2011, p. 114).

The retrieval of a certain event is connected to the reconstruction of the spatial context in which that event took place. Following this order of considerations, Burgess et al. (2001, p. 1493) have proposed a theoretical model capable of holding together the content of episodic memory and its spatial context. In their view, encoding or recalling an event means retrieving the rich spatio-temporal context of the occurred events. The emphasis on the role of spatial representation in episodic memory strengthens the idea of a close relationship between space and time in the encoding and remembering of events, the basic constituents of the narrative dimension. In support of the role of temporal projection systems in narrative processing, through a research conducted with University of Udine and the Bambino Gesù Hospital in Rome, we showed that children with ASD who have difficulties in projecting themselves in time have greater impairments in storytelling than children

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with ASD who exhibit intact abilities of temporal projection (Ferretti et al. 2018; Marini et al. 2019). These findings provide empirical evidence in favor of the idea that the ability to evaluate causal links between the events narrated, along with the ability to project in time, are constitutive factors of narrative competence, giving shape to the extended nature of the narrative dimension. One study that is very relevant to close this section on the cognitive architectures underlying narrative processing has been developed by Race et al. (2015) on hippocampal amnesic patients (with medial temporal lobe damage), a clinical population that has been reported to have intact many aspects of language production (Kensinger et al. 2001; Race et al. 2011). The aim of Race et al. (2015) was to assess the role of the hippocampus in the construction of global coherence in discourses relating to the past and future. Their investigation follows a line of research marked by MacKay et al.’s (1998) pioneering study on H.M.’s discourses, showing that narratives relating to his childhood were less coherent and less focused than narratives produced by control groups. Race et al. (2015) interpreted these findings by arguing that the hippocampus supports the integration of individual elements into a whole story. Starting from the role of the hippocampus in temporal projection, Race et al.’s (2015) hypothesized that, if hippocampal binding processes play a role in discourse integration, then hippocampal amnesic patients should exhibit deficits in both global coherence and cohesion. Results supported this hypothesis, providing evidence that the hippocampus is necessary for organizing linguistically coherent and cohesive discourse. In other terms, “binding mechanisms supported by the hippocampus may be critical not only for integrating features of an event in support of episodic memory, but also for integrating linguistic features during ongoing discourse” (ibid., p. 278). More specifically, “the hippocampus supports the creation of narrative context by structuring linguistic elements around spatiotemporallyspecific details” (ibid., p. 279). These considerations lead to a redefinition of global coherence, that is perfectly in line with the hypothesis underlying the present book, under which discourse coherence reflects the development of a unified, spatiotemporally-specific context, and chronologically ordered narrative. As it should be clear, these results are of particular relevance for my purposes: they both corroborate the existence of brain structures dedicated to narrative analysis and show that storytelling is governed by some processing systems pertaining to the ecological brain (Ferretti 2016, 2021). But the most important result of Race et al.’s (2015) research is the experimental confirmation that cohesion (a linguistic property) depends on global coherence (a cognitive feature), thus showing that discourse coherence is primarily a property of the cognitive plane, more than a linguistic feature. Therefore, these kinds of studies provide empirical support to one of the conceptual assumptions of this book—the thesis of the primacy of thought over language—which is crucial for investigations on the origins of human communication. Corballis (2017, p. 55) argues for a clear distinction between language and thought: One aspect of thought that shaped language as a communication system is the ability to travel mentally in time and place. (...) the capacity to travel mentally in time is not unique to humans but evolved incrementally throughout the evolution of animals that inhabit and

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move around in spatial environments. What does seem to be distinctive to humans is not mental time travel itself but the capacity to share our travels.

These considerations are particularly important for the study of language origin. Indeed, as Corballis points out, MTT is not unique to our species, but is also present (at various degree) in other animals, including birds (Clayton and Dickinson 1998), rats (Lu et al. 2012), and great apes (Kano and Hirata 2015; Mulcahy and Call 2006). For example, a study by Kano and Hirata (2015) on six chimpanzees and six bonobos showed that these primates encode single events into memory in a detailed way. The ability to anticipate the future in nonhuman primates was also attested by Mulcahy and Call (2006) through a study on bonobos and orangutans. The fact that the ability to mentally travel in time is not unique to humans, but is also present in animals that cannot speak, suggests that it might have represented an important structural platform for the emergence of language. Moreover, the above considerations made by Corballis are also relevant for the analysis of the relationship between language and narrative. It is certainly true that storytelling allows humans to travel in space and time by detaching themselves from the here and now, but it is equally true that without the ability to navigate the spacetime humans would have had no chance to tell stories, thus differentiating our communication from that of other animals. The impact of spatial and temporal navigation on storytelling is prior to the impact of storytelling on the extension of space and time. This entails an overturning of the thesis of the primacy of language over narrative: narrative is the precondition of language, rather than a product of it. This is enough for the cognitive architectures underlying narrative competence. I will now explore how such architectures allowed our ancestors to enhance their persuasive abilities, favoring the emergence of a new kind of communication.

6 Conclusions In the first two chapters of this book, by analyzing the selective pressures that led our ancestors to invent language, I showed that human communication has an inherently persuasive character, as other forms of animal communication. Moreover, by emphasizing the specific traits of human communication, I analyzed the functional reasons behind the enhancement of our ancestors’ persuasive abilities through the invention of a narrative form of communication. In chapters “Beyond the Social Brain” and “The Narrative Brain”, I examined the processing systems and brain structures necessary for generating narrative representations of reality, that are the prerequisite for the human ability to tell stories. In particular, I showed that the mindreading system underlying the social brain as well as the spatiotemporal navigation devices underlying the ecological brain play a major role in the construction of the extended form of reality representation characterizing the specific trait of human cognition. But to account for the origin of language, a last important step

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should be taken, that is, analyzing the expressive system used by our ancestors to tell stories. Two remarks to make before going into detail of this topic. First, if storytelling is the strategy invented by humans to enhance their persuasive abilities, then the narrative brain should be the structural prerequisite to possess before telling stories. A first indication in this direction is that the cognitive components underlying the narrative brain are also present in some nonhuman animals much older than us on the phylogenetic scale. Moreover, the processing systems involved in narrative competence are cognitive components originally devoted to primary functions (navigating the physical and social space) that are completely independent of communication. Arguing that our ancestors had to be equipped with such a brain is a way of stating that, at least in the early stages, language-specific biological adaptations before the advent of language were not necessary. This is a noteworthy consideration in the context of language origins, that allows to avoid reference to ad hoc systems or arguments based on preformism. The second remark concerns the issue of the primacy of thought over language. That humans had to be equipped with a narrative brain translates into the fact that the ability to represent the world in the form of stories predates the ability to communicate through storytelling. Beyond having a temporal priority, narrative thought is the constitutive condition (the evolutionary prerequisite) of narrative communication: understanding the transition from narrative representation of reality to actual communication is the final issue to be addressed in this book. After the analysis of selective pressures and structural conditions, the issue of the material constraints is the third factor to be introduced to account for the origin of language. The expressive systems which realize communication are an essential element of human communication, and their study is an integral part of the topic of language origins. What kind of expressive system is best suited to express the mental stories that inhabit (and have long inhabited) human thoughts? My hypothesis is that, if thoughts have a narrative form, the best way to communicate thoughts is the use of narrative forms of expression. More specifically, from an evolutionary perspective the hypothesis is that pantomime was the first ideal expressive means to convey narrative for persuasive purposes. In the next chapter, I will analyze the nature of this expressive means and its revolutionary effect in reshaping our way of thinking and communicating.

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Stories Without Language

Abstract The chapter addresses the issue of the expressive systems by which actual communication takes shape, with a twofold aim: showing that it is possible to tell stories without language and claiming that narrative communication is the evolutionary precondition of language emergence. This aim entails understanding what kind of expressive system was better suited for conveying the mental stories inhabiting human thoughts. The hypothesis is that pantomime was such a system since it embodied the narrative features capable of setting the stage for a narrative form of communication. If pantomime allowed archaic hominins to persuade by telling stories without language, then modern humans employed complex grammatical systems to enhance their persuasive aims through argumentation. The transition between these two forms of communication is framed within a continuity perspective, in which modern language is a reconstruction of old communicative forms. Keywords Pantomime · Conversation · Argumentation · Gesture-first hypothesis · Grammaticalization On the basis of the considerations made in the previous chapters, the persuasion of others to act in a certain way is the main functional feature of communication at every level. Human communication is no exception to this: the origin and evolution of language primarily depend on the same selective pressures that influence the evolution of many forms of animal communication, that is, giving shape to expressive systems suitable to convince others. However, in our species the selective pressure in favor of persuasion is complicated by the active character of humans, who react to persuasive attempts: in conversation, humans use strategies of epistemic vigilance that make the task of every communicator difficult. Besides, the specificity of language largely relies on the possibility to cope with resistance to persuasion on the interlocutor’s side. It takes a surplus of persuasion to convince humans compared to other animals: storytelling is the rhetorical tool invented by our ancestors to make their persuasive strategies more effective. These considerations are particularly relevant when it comes to identifying the characteristic features of language from its early stages. Since storytelling is a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Ferretti, Narrative Persuasion. A Cognitive Perspective on Language Evolution, Interdisciplinary Evolution Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09206-0_5

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powerful means of persuasion, then language should have taken on a narrative character since its emergence. From this point of view, rather than the product of language, storytelling is the defining feature of human communication from the very beginning (the ability to tell stories predates verbal language). In chapters “Beyond the Social Brain” and “The Narrative Brain”, I analyzed the structural conditions fostering the origin of language (the processing systems underlying narrative competence). Central to this chapter is the analysis of the expressive system that enabled our ancestors to begin telling stories before and independently of language. Specifically, the chapter has a twofold aim: showing the plausibility of the existence of stories without language; showing that narrative communication is the evolutionary precondition for the emergence of language. After analyzing why (the evolutionary and functional reasons) humans invented language, the last step concerns how they could do so.

1 How to Invent Language? In the previous pages, the expression “invention of language” has been used several times to describe the transition from animal to human communication. The expression requires a more concrete meaning. If human communication mainly depends on the ability to tell stories, then the transition from narrative representation to narrative communication could only be established through an appropriate expressive system. What is the most suitable means for storytelling before the advent of language? Answering this question is the central operation of this chapter. My hypothesis is that pantomimic storytelling is the evolutionary precondition of language—a form of protolanguage that enabled the transition from thinking in the form of stories to telling actual stories to others.

1.1

Stories Without Language

The common intuition is that narrative is the result of a developmental process founded on verbal language (the Language First Hypothesis discussed in chapter “Beyond the Social Brain”). The idea that narrative may represent the evolutionary precondition of language is strongly counterintuitive. How can such an idea be justified? The first, and less complex, move is showing that it is possible to tell stories without language. Stories can be told in several ways. For example, through a sequence of pictures (as in silent comics). According to Boyd (2009, pp. 130–131), “narrative does not depend on language. It can be expressed through mime, dance, wordless picture book, or movies (...). Even without language humans share an ability to understand and represent events in complex ways”. McBride (2014) is of the same opinion; importantly, his hypothesis refers to the possibility of

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telling stories through bodily mimesis, an expressive means which I will describe as crucial for the origin of language. McBride (2014, p. 3) holds: Mimes are not language. The proposal is that mimes come into being as a way of telling stories long before any possibility of language existed or was even anticipated. Mime was a complete storytelling process well within the talents of the hominins in whose bands it occurred. These individuals had zero concept of language, but they could manage mimed stories and understand them. Mimes and their understanding required nothing that every hominin did not already have.

Referring to bodily mimesis is a way of relying on a long tradition of thought that leads to Aristotle. The reference to mimesis implies a very important feature related to the functional role of stories: the invention of fictional worlds and, thus, of spatiotemporal scenarios totally detached from the here and now of the current situation. Two remarks deserve to be made about McBride’s claims. First, the reference to gesture is not enough to explain the narrative origin of language; if we take as an example the tribal chief who, after killing a prey during hunting, directs his mates to listen to the details of the hunt story, it is clear that “what had been transmitted was something gestures alone could never do, present a whole story, a metaphor for an event” (McBride 2014, p. 3). As McBride argues, in this case a broader perspective than gesture should be taken into account. Such a perspective is currently defined as the “bodily mimesis hypothesis” (Zlatev 2014a, b) and is in line with the idea that our ancestors used pantomime to tell stories in the absence of language. The second consideration about McBride’s (2014) proposal is that our ancestors had to possess the brain and cognitive resources necessary to understand pantomimed stories. He states that these resources were already available to our ancient ancestors, consistently with the idea that the narrative brain (composed of processing systems originally devoted to functions independent of communication) is older than language. In the light of these considerations, it is plausible that the production-comprehension of stories may occur in the absence of language. But a thorny issue remains open: showing that the ability to tell stories without language is an evolutionary precondition of language—in other words, showing that without a prior capacity for pantomimic storytelling humans would not have had language as it is. Combining the brain structural constraints with the selective pressures towards a narrative form of communication, pantomime appears to be an effective candidate for investigating the origins of language. I claim that pantomime represents the expressive system used by our ancestors to tell stories for persuasive purposes in the absence of language. More precisely, pantomime is the expressive system that gave rise to language because pantomimic storytelling is the link between narrative thought and narrative language. Furthermore, pantomime can be seen as the structural scaffolding that allowed the transition from an early, typically human form of communication—belonging to Homo ergaster (that lived between about two and one million years ago)—to the modern language of Homo sapiens (who appeared as a species about 200,000 years ago), the most sophisticated expressive system for persuasion. Before exploring the specific role of pantomime in the origin of language, the more general topic of bodily mimesis should be addressed: this capacity

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does not originate for communicative purposes but its complete realization occurs in communication. In this regard, Donald’s (1991, 2001) studies are crucial for reflecting on the topic.

2 Bodily Mimesis Donald (1991, 2001) defines bodily mimesis (the mimetic representation of reality) as one of the evolutionary stages fostering the emergence of symbolic culture in the process of hominization. Zlatev (2008, 2014a, b) discussed Donald’s proposal, by further distinguishing and specifying the distinctive features of mimesis. More than the details of the debate, the general issue of the role of this capacity in the origin of language is at the center of my interests. Although it has no intrinsic communicative features, bodily mimesis represents the essential precondition for the advent of language. Indeed, in Donald’s definition, mimesis “may simply represent the event to oneself, for the purpose of rehearsing and refining skill: the act itself may be analyzed, re-enacted and reanalyzed, that is, represented to oneself” (Donald 1991, p. 169). That said, although logically and temporally preceding language, “mimetic representation has characteristics that are considered essential to language and would thus have set the stage for the later emergence of speech” (ibid. p. 171). In fact, although mimesis may not have originated as a means of communication and might have originated in a different use of reproductive memory, such as toolmaking, mimetic acts by their nature are usually public and inherently possess the potential to communicate (ibid., p. 172).

The dual character of bodily mimesis is an important issue for the topic of language origin: the transition from something that is not inherently communicative to something that has the potential for the advent of human communication is certainly a major step for the study of language emergence. Particularly interesting in this regard are the characteristics ascribed by Donald to bodily mimesis: intentionality, generativity, communicativity, reference, autocueing, and the ability to model unlimited number of objects. Arguing that mimesis is a constitutive condition of language is a way to consider its essential features as the evolutionary precondition for the advent of specifically human communication. Since pantomime perfectly embodies the duality of mimetic acts, the focus should be put on the expressive possibilities of pantomime.

2.1

Pantomime

What is pantomime? According to Arbib (2012, p. 217), it is “a performance that resembles an action of some kind and can thus evoke ideas of the action itself, an associated action, object, or event, or a combination thereof”. Here, pantomime is

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distinct from imitation downwardly, while upwardly, due to the lack of conventionality, it is distinct from proto-sign. On the interlocutor’s side, pantomime is easy to understand (the iconic character makes it transparent) and, importantly, on the level of cognitive architectures it does not require anything new. In line with Stokoe (2001), Arbib underlines that pantomime has the advantage of making effective forms of communication possible without any prior convention or apprenticeship. Within the context of language origins, some scholars rely on pantomime to explain the transition from iconic forms of expression to abstract symbols (Arbib 2012; Corballis 2015, 2017; Shaw-Williams 2017). The role of pantomime in the emergence of symbols is related to an aspect that represents both the strength and weakness of pantomime. Since, as Arbib (2012, p. 219) argues, “it’s hard to pantomime blue”, several authors have insisted on the difficulties of this expressive means to represent events or objects in a precise way. Indeed, it is difficult to distinguish a cat from a dachshund in a pantomime narrative. Corballis (2015, p. 91) claims: In the early stages, perhaps, stories were told as pantomimes (...). But pantomime is inefficient and often ambiguous and needed to be developed into a system of symbols whose meanings were clear and understood by members of the community.

Therefore, pantomime is open to interpretative ambiguities that a fast and effortless communication cannot admit. A communication mainly based on bodily mimesis has both the advantage and the difficulty of resting on iconicity and resemblance. The selective pressure underlying the shift from pantomime (more generally, from mimesis) to symbolic language responds primarily to the need of minimizing the communicative ambiguities of the iconic-gestural code. Recently, Corballis (2017, pp. 160–161) has emphasized the importance of the transition to verbalization by highlighting in detail the expressive difficulties of pantomime: I suggested earlier that early communication may have been pantomimic but was probably punctuated by grunts. Modern humans can get by well enough simply through the sound of the voice, but in normal conversation we also gesticulate, point, raise fingers to signify quotation, nod, raise eyebrows – a son et lumière performance. Still, speech itself has become the dominant mode. The gestures that go with it can certainly help get a message across and can sometimes substitute for words, as when we point rather than give verbal directions or shrug when we don’t know the answer to a question. But take away the visual accompaniment and speech can carry the message, as on radio or the ubiquitous cell phone. Take away the vocal component, though, and most of the message is lost.

Corballis (who argues in favor of the priority of gestures over words) considers the expressive difficulties of pantomime as the selective pressure towards an abstract code. Consistent with Arbib (2012), pantomime is an evolutionary turning point for the origin of language especially because of its deficiencies: the limits of iconicity serve as selective pressures in favor of abstract and arbitrary codes characterizing the symbolic dimension. In this regard, although stressing the shortcomings of pantomime offers an interesting adaptive key to ascribing bodily mimesis an important role in the origin of language, I hold that it also entails the risk of considering the arbitrary and abstract character of symbols as the proper of human language. Without omitting the role of pantomime in the process that led to symbolic thought,

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I frame its contribution to the origin of language with respect to a positive characteristic (to what pantomime possesses, rather than what it lacks): the possibility to tell stories in the absence of verbal language. This implies a reinterpretation of the limitations of pantomime compared to verbal symbols. In this regard, a first consideration is that the transition from iconicity to arbitrariness does not necessarily entail a sharp rift between the old and the new expressive means. Zlatev (2008, 2014a, b), for example, acknowledges the presence of residual iconicity (forms of sound symbolism) even in the most abstract forms of expressive codes. The path he outlines is that of a “multimodal nature of linguistic communication, with differential roles for speech and gesture, but with a considerable degree of sound symbolism” (Zlatev 2014b, p. 166; see also Ahlner and Zlatev 2010). Zlatev (2014b, p. 166) suggests renouncing a sharp distinction between the “purely” symbolic and the “purely” gestural, to consider “the possible transition from a predominantly mimetic form of communication to a predominantly symbolic one”. If iconicity is a key feature not only of uncoded gestures but also of codified ones (Poggi 2008), then the transition from the iconic to the abstract character may occur through intermediate forms of expression in which it is difficult to identify pure aspects in one sense or the other. Supporting this gradualist approach is a way of arguing that new forms of expression incorporate and readapt earlier forms without replacing them altogether. Looking at new systems of expression by considering the properties they inherit from earlier systems is a complementary—but equally correct—way of considering the evolution and development of new forms of communication. The case of pantomime as a precursor to verbal language fits neatly into this interpretive framework. In line with this hypothesis, Żywiczyński et al. (2018, p. 315) emphasize multimodality and propose a definition of pantomime as a non-verbal, mimetic, and non-conventionalized means of communication, which is executed primarily in the visual channel by coordinated movements of the whole body, but which may incorporate other semiotic resources, most importantly non-linguistic vocalizations. Pantomimes are acts of improvised communication that holistically refer to a potentially unlimited repertoire of events, or sequences of events, displaced from the here and now.

As we shall see at the end of this chapter, such a definition has the strength of respecting the dual requirement of a criterion of generality and specificity, able to account for the characteristic and essential features of pantomime. That said, I have a further, and more important, consideration about the difficulties of pantomime. Indeed, the question of whether pantomime is an effective means of representing objects or states of affairs is not the only aspect to be considered. An equally important issue concerns an aspect of the representational properties of pantomime that is usually little considered in the debate. To understand the role of pantomime in the origin of language, I suggest considering its positive features, rather than its deficiencies; specifically, what of pantomimic protolanguage remains in modern language. My theoretical hypothesis is that narrative pantomime is the constitutive scaffolding of language inherited by verbalization, and then incorporated and reconstructed, but never completely replaced. In other terms, pantomime is

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the narrative structure that symbolic language modifies and enhances, because upon pantomime verbalization can reconstruct, at a different level of abstraction, a new expressive form. Just as sound symbolism is the remains of iconicity that endures in abstract symbolic codes, verbal stories we use to communicate are the remains of pantomimic storytelling that verbalization has reconstructed and enhanced, without creating ex novo. At the basis of pantomimic storytelling, as of any other form of storytelling, is global coherence, the property that governs the construction of temporal and causal relations connecting the events narrated—a property not included in the list of features characterizing pantomime in Donald’s perspective. In favor of the idea that pantomime is the expressive tool through which our ancestors could tell stories is the definition proposed by McNeill (2005, p. 5), who describes pantomime as “dumb show, a gesture or a sequence of gestures conveying a narrative line, with a story to tell, produced without speech”. In his interpretive model (which considers gesture and word as intertwined from the beginning, although with distinct and complementary functional roles), gesture plays a prominent role in storytelling. In general, as Cassell and McNeill (1991, p. 375) write, the argument is that “when we add gesture to speech, we shed light on many of the same questions that have been the focus of attention by narratologists”. In a sense, it is paradoxical that the definition of pantomime that best fits with the idea that it has a role in storytelling comes from an author who considers pantomime to be a communicative capacity entirely detached from language. In his view, indeed, its “silent” character (gesture without speech) makes it impossible for pantomime to be a precursor of language because he considers language as an integrated system of gesture and speech (for pantomime as an evolutionary dead-end, see McNeill 2012). I will return on this topic in Sect. 5.3.2. On the contrary, my reason for considering pantomime as an evolutionary precursor to language is that pantomime (characterized in multimodal terms and not as a silent gesture) is the ideal expressive system for conveying human thoughts. If humans represent experience in the form of stories, then pantomime should be the most appropriate means for communicating. Moreover, in this perspective pantomime becomes the ideal protolanguage guiding the transition to verbal language because it is an effective means of narrating the flow of events governed by global coherence. As we will see at the end of this chapter, global coherence underlying storytelling is a precondition for the evolution of verbal grammar, the hallmark of modern language (Ferretti and Adornetti 2021; Ferretti et al. 2022). The idea that pantomime is a sophisticated form of communication independent of verbalization is a crucial step towards the idea of pantomime as a precursor of language. Before drawing the conclusions of this book by exploring the role of pantomime in the construction of modern language, some further considerations on the idea that pantomimic storytelling embodies the distinctive features of human communication are needed. This requires considering again the relationship with animal communication.

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Animal Pantomime

In the previous paragraph, I discussed the reasons behind the hypothesis of pantomime as the form of protolanguage used by our ancestors to tell stories in the absence of language. If the trait distinguishing human from animal communication is narrative, and if pantomime is the first expressive means used by humans to tell stories, then pantomime should be a uniquely human capacity. Therefore, the idea that pantomime was the material scaffolding upon which language could emerge should be explored with reference to studies on animal communication (Ferretti 2016, 2021). The issue is whether storytelling confers on language a uniqueness character or whether the ability to tell stories may also be included within a framework of continuity. The prevailing view is that only humans are capable of communicating through pantomime (Arbib 2012; Perlman et al. 2014; Zuberbühler 2013; Żywiczyński et al. 2018). But some research on the pantomimic abilities of nonhuman animals has tried to challenge this idea. A very important study in this regard has been conducted on the gorilla Koko by Perlman and Gibbs (2013). Starting from the strictly iconic character of pantomimic communication and the representational character of iconic gestures, the intent was to evaluate whether Koko was able to use iconic gestures to communicate. This controversial topic is of great importance in assessing the communicative abilities of these animals. Tomasello (2008), for example, considers great apes gestures as the exclusive product of ontogenetic ritualization: instead of having a representational character, these gestures can be explained in terms of associative behavioral sequences. This is the case when “an individual performs only the first step of a normal behavioral sequence, often in abbreviated form, and this first step is already enough to elicit a response from a recipient” (ibid., p. 22). An example given by Tomasello (2008, p. 23) is that of arm-raise to initiate play: 1.Initially one youngster approaches another with rough-and-tumble play in mind, raises his arm in preparation to play-hit the other, and then actually hits, jumps on, and begins playing; 2. over repeated instances, the recipient learns to anticipate this sequence on the basis of the initial arm-raise alone, and so begins to play upon perceiving this initial step; and 3. the communicator eventually learns to anticipate this anticipation, and so raises his arm, monitors the recipient, and waits for her to react – expecting this arm-raise to initiate the play.

According to Tomassello and Call (2007), all intentional movements of great apes can be reduced to ritualizations of this type. The study on Koko’s gesture fits into this conceptual framework. Perlman and Gibbs’s (2013) aim was to show that she could communicate through gestures that were representational, rather than associative, in nature. One of the examples includes Koko who, with the intention of leaving the room, takes the key and enacts the gesture of turning it in the lock. Similar gestures are interpreted by Perlman and Gibbs (ibid., p. 91–92) as pantomime of transitive actions because Koko formed the communicative gestures by engaging her body in imaginative instantiations – or simulations – of the actions, performing them in ways that were not

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instrumentally effective but, instead, functioned socially to communicate. Thus, Koko’s gestures reflect embodied simulation processes whereby she imagines a desired action and enacts relevant hand and body movements to request others to act in certain ways that are related to that action.

That said, Perlman and Gibb also point out the limitations of Koko’s pantomimic gestures, the most important of which is that such gestures are closely dependent on the here-and-now of the context in which they occur. In their opinion, in fact, the possibility of simulating actions without having an immediate perceptual experience of the objects involved is strongly restricted for Koko. These considerations are even more valid in the case of simulations of objects, events or abstract entities whose representation is precluded to these animals. Even de Waal (“champion of gradualism”, as named by Boyd 2018) acknowledges this limitation: stressing the symbolic character of human language as the main instrument of displacement from the here and now, he argues that humans are the only linguistic species. The communication of nonhuman animals, instead, is inexorably linked to the here and now of the immediate context, to the extent that a chimpanzee “may detect another’s emotions in reaction to a particular ongoing situation, but cannot communicate even the simplest information about events displaced in space and time” (de Waal 2016, p. 106). These are important considerations for the general arguments of this chapter. Given the relevance of displacement and projection abilities in characterizing narrative competence, the remarks made by Perlman and Gibbs (2013) seem to exclude any possibility of pantomimic storytelling in nonhuman animals. The results of these studies show that great apes are capable of complex iconic gestures representing events as long as those events are related to the immediate perception in the current situation. While admitting that these cases can be considered pantomimes, it is a pantomime that cannot serve as a precursor of language, given the characteristics of detachment required by language, and given that the iconic gestures of these apes can represent only events but not sequences of events. The findings of Perlman and Gibbs did not close the debate on the topic; rather, analyses of great apes’ pantomimes have intensified and extended to the investigation of orangutans. According to Russon and Andrews (2011a), these animals, along with other great apes (Russon and Andrews 2011b), can generate spontaneous pantomimic gestures and, more importantly, pantomimic gestures referring to past events (not constrained to the here-and-now of the current context). The reference to events detached from the immediate context seems to limit the case of Koko’s difficulties as well as de Waal’s idea. That said, two considerations should be made about the hypothesis that orangutans can use pantomimic communication. The first relates to the fact that their gestures can be considered pantomimic since “orangutans can communicate content with propositional structure and have the kind of cognitive capacities with constituent structure typically associated with linguistic capacities” (Russon and Andrews 2011a, p. 629). In arguing that gestural expressions used by orangutans are pantomimic, in fact, Russon and Andrews (ibid., p. 630) state that “complex pantomime may enable in gesture some of the communicative complexities that sentences enable in language”. As it should be clear, the

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pantomimic character of orangutans’ gestures is related to a specific theoretical conception on the nature of language: claiming that pantomime has the typical constituent structure of sentences is consistent with the language of thought hypothesis (Fodor 1975) and, more generally, with the idea of the primacy of sentence underlying Chomskyan models of language. If these are the outcomes of research on orangutans, then their pantomime is not only different from human pantomime but, most importantly, it cannot be the material scaffolding that enabled the transition to human language since I posited that processing sentences is not a sufficient condition for processing the articulated discourses underlying stories (see chapter “Beyond the Social Brain”). The second more general consideration concerns the definition of pantomime used by Russon and Andrews (2011a, p. 627), who describe pantomime “as gestural communication that involves physically acting out a message and focused on gesturing that achieve its communicative goals non-mechanically and is addressed to a partner and goal-directed”. Such a wide-ranging definition has the advantage of paving the way for a continuity view, in which nonhuman animals can possess capabilities usually considered exclusively human. But, like any general definition, it has the shortcoming of weakening the specificities of pantomime. In the light of the considerations made in this book, one of the key features of this system of expression is to make storytelling possible. Thus, the point at issue in evaluating whether apes can use pantomimic gestures is to understand whether their communication includes narrative features. What do investigations of nonhuman animals indicate about the ability to tell stories? Russon and Andrews (2011b) take an important step in this direction, addressing the issue of the relationship between pantomime and storytelling in apes. Defining storytelling as “the representation of an event or series of events”, the authors consider the gestures used by the orangutan Kikan to re-enact a past event as a form of pantomimic storytelling. Kikan’s narrative concerns the description of distant events: the week before, a caregiver had used a pencil to remove a sliver from Kikan’s foot and then daubed latex from a fig leaf stem on the wound to dry it. A week later, after gaining the caregiver’s attention, Kikan picked a leaf and used the stem to spread it on his (now healed) foot. Can we take this anecdote as evidence of pantomimic gestures in some nonhuman animals, as well as evidence that they have a (simplified) form of the kind of pantomime necessary to shape the narrative capabilities of language? Yes and no. Kikan’s case shows that some apes can describe past events, and Russon and Andrews rightly link this ability to their possession of a form of episodic memory (see chapter “The Narrative Brain”). However, while drawing on the definition of narrative offered by the two authors, what Kikan enacts is the description of a past event with the aim of asking for an action to be performed in the present. Events are the essential components of stories (see chapter “Narrative and Persuasion”), but the description of a single event is not enough to characterize Kikan’s pantomime in narrative terms. What emerges is the ability of Kikan to produce a sequence of complex movements to represent a complex action, which Russon and Andrews, correctly, refer to as the ability to represent the constituent structure of sentences.

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This is certainly a sophisticated way of representing events, but it is not an effective way of describing sequences of events causally connected in time. Therefore, it is not possible to ascribe a form of pantomimic storytelling to these apes. In my view, the positive interpretation of results proposed by Russon and Andrews depends on a weakening of both the notion of pantomime and the notion of storytelling. If, on the one hand, it is legitimate to look for simpler and more primitive forms of pantomime in nonhuman animals, on the other hand, however, weakening the notion of pantomime does not serve the cause of continuity. The risk of subtracting from pantomime its distinctive traits is to omit exactly the properties that make this expressive system a point of connection between animal communication and language. Sinha and Gärdenfors (2014, p. 3) have provided an excellent reflection in this regard: There is some evidence that apes can remember episodes and use them in planning, a capacity that has been labeled mental time travel. But nothing in the animal kingdom remotely matches the cognitive and linguistic capacities of even relatively young man children who, at the age of 3 years, can represent in their narratives sequences of events linked by connectives, and can use adverbs and tenses to locate events in time relative to present.

It follows that, in line with the definition I proposed and the role I attributed to pantomime (as the ability to tell stories without language), nonhuman animals, at least on the basis of the findings obtained so far, are not able to use properly pantomimic gestures. Pantomimic communication appears to be a specific trait of human communication (Arbib 2012; Perlman et al. 2014; Zuberbühler 2013; Żywiczyński et al. 2018). To summarize and conclude. Pantomime, for its narrative character, is the material scaffolding upon which language hinges and takes shape. Language inherits the narrative structure from pantomime because pantomime is the first expressive form through which humans have tried to tell stories in the absence of an articulated language. In the light of these considerations, what about the transition from pantomime to modern language? Although there are valid arguments for considering verbalization as not the only way to tell stories, the fact remains that our ability to tell stories (and, more generally, our ability to communicate) is currently anchored in verbal language. The issue to be addressed is whether verbalization involves an ex novo construction of storytelling or whether it involves only a reconstruction, through a new expressive means, of the story structure expressed in a non-verbal format through pantomime. As said, my idea is that the origin of language is linked to the positive characteristics of pantomime, namely to what in verbal language remained (albeit reconstructed and re-elaborated) of the earliest forms of communication. On this view, the advent of grammar and verbalization (typical of Homo sapiens) can be framed within a continuity perspective. The emergence of a new means of expression does not change the nature of the relationship between language and narrative. But it does significantly modify that relationship.

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3 Verbalization and Grammar The transition from gesture to verbalization is a crucial stage in the evolution of modern language. The use of articulated sounds, in addition to gestures, adds expressive power to language, to the extent that many authors consider verbalization as the aspect that makes human language so specific. Although critical of the idea that the vocal apparatus of Homo sapiens can be characterized in terms of uniqueness, Fitch (2009, p. 112) argues that “speech (complex, articulate vocalization) is the default signaling mode for all human cultures, except for small populations (e.g. the deaf) for whom the audiomotor modality is unavailable”. Although the multimodal character of language weakens any sharp distinction between gestural and verbal, there is no doubt that some defining features of language depend on the specificity of verbalization. Not necessarily all, but many authors who stress the central role of verbal articulation share the hypothesis of the propositional structure of thoughts and the primacy of sentence as a way of expressing them. Both aspects relate to the issue of how to make communicative exchanges fast and effortless, within the theoretical framework outlined by the model of communication as information transmission. It is also noteworthy that many authors who insist on verbalization refer to the thesis of isomorphism between thought and language. In this view, verbalization is a powerful tool of information transmission that responds to what Pinker and Bloom (1990, p. 712) consider the adaptive goal of language: “a design for the communication of propositional structures over a serial channel”. Verbalization, in fact, is the most effective way to enhance the combinatory character of language. Against this background, it is not surprising that these authors make explicit reference to Chomsky’s model of language. Fitch (2017, p. 9), for example, argues that “language is a complex faculty that allows us to encode, elaborate, and communicate our thoughts and experiences via words combined into hierarchical structures called sentences”. Emphasizing the association between sound and meaning, such a definition fits within the idea of communication as transmission of information. In this perspective, the advent of articulated language seems to involve expressive capacities of a different nature compared to the capacities prior to verbalization. Even admitting that pantomimic storytelling can represent the mode of communication of our ancestors, the advent of verbalization led modern humans (Homo sapiens, specifically) to an entirely new form of communication, characterized by grammar and isomorphism between thought and language. Such a proposal seems to characterize the transition from protolanguage to language in terms of a real rupture—a qualitative jump, as proponents of the neo-Cartesian model of language firmly argue (e.g., Berwick and Chomsky 2016; Hauser et al. 2014). How to combine the specific features of modern language with the idea of pantomime as a form of narrative protolanguage? A first consideration in this regard is that verbalization and grammar are no exceptions to the general principle of persuasive enhancement, which I specifically related to the enhancement of narrative abilities. Then, a first answer implies

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acknowledging that grammar and verbalization are the linguistic tools invented by humans to construct more structured—thus, more persuasively effective—narratives. The invention of cohesive mechanisms on the linguistic level responds to the need to enhance global coherence on the content level. From this point of view, telling a story through words, instead of gestures, makes a big difference. However, while recognizing the strengths of verbalization in giving rise to new narrative forms, the point to be stressed is that verbalization does not create from the beginning the narrative structure of language but just enhances it. In other words, verbalization is a crucial step in the evolution of modern language that does not, however, change the inherent nature of our communication. This concerns general principles; in the next paragraphs, I will propose an account of how the transition from protolanguage to language (both in terms of the expressive means and of the represented content) responds to these general principles.

3.1

The Issue of the Expressive Means

Hewes (1973) highlighted what is meant to be, also in Corballis’s (2002) perspective, the hard problem of the gestural conception of the origin of language: why did speech eventually take the place of gesture? The issue of the relationship between gestures and verbalization has been addressed in different ways in the language origin debate. MacNeilage (2008), for example, argues for the vocal origin by emphasizing the expressive heterogeneity of gesture and speech and, thus, the difficulty of moving from one modality to the other; Corballis (2002, 2011), a proponent of the gestural origin, attempts to reduce the differences between gesture and speech by arguing that verbalization (due to the movements of the vocal apparatus) is still a form of gesture; McNeill (2012), who posits “equiprimordiality”, claims that gesture and speech, albeit with different roles, are an integral part of a multimodal system characterizing human communication from the earliest stages. I find convincing the proposal highlighting the points of contact between these two forms of expression. If it is true that the distinction of roles between gesture and speech can be used to highlight the difficulty of the transition between the two modalities and, therefore, to emphasize the primacy of speech over gesture (MacNeilage 2008), it is also true that the same distinction can support the idea that no transition from gesture to speech occurred since their intertwining is the basic condition of language from the very beginning. McNeill (2012) uses these considerations to hold that language has—and has always had—a multimodal character: speech cannot renounce to gesture, as much as gesture cannot renounce to speech. Against the thesis of gesture and speech as separate entities, McNeill (2012, p. 64) argues that they comprise a single multimodal system in which “gesture is not an accompaniment, ornament, supplement, or ‘add-on’ to speech but it is actually part of it”. This idea has important implications for the issue of language origin: if multimodality is the typical of human communication, then language should incorporate gesture and speech from the very

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beginning—gesture-speech equiprimordiality. As Kendon (2017, p. 165) also points out, “the fact that speaker gesturing is fully integrated into the utterances of which it forms a part (...) suggests that spoken expression and manual expression evolved conjointly”. That said, the topic of equiprimordiality introduces an issue of great interest for my purposes. Starting from this topic, in fact, McNeill (2012) criticizes the hypothesis of pantomime as an evolutionary precursor of language. As already mentioned, he considers pantomime as “silent” (gesture without speech) and, as such, not traceable to a form of protolanguage. In response to McNeill and in defense of my hypothesis, it is important to show that pantomime is a multimodal expressive system (instead of a pure gesture) and that gesture and speech are not mutually exclusive. As said, Kendon (2017) supports McNeill’s multimodality hypothesis. Unlike McNeill, however, Kendon tries to soften the differences between these two modalities. He indeed considers the problem of the transition between gesture and speech as an entirely inappropriate way of addressing the origin of language because it entails the idea of a process occurring between two distinct and separate entities. In support of his hypothesis, Kendon (2017, pp. 167–168) refers to sign language, which is often taken as a good example of this transition, and challenges the traditional view by maintaining that there is support for the view that the kinesic medium is not markedly favored, in this respect, over the oral-aural medium. Evidence from studies of sound symbolism (Hinton et al. 1994), the mimetic and depictive potentials of the nonverbal capacities of the vocal medium (Perlman et al. 2015), studies of ideophones (Voeltz and Kilian-Hatz 2001), and the example of so-called mimetics in Japanese (Hamano 1998), among much else, supports the notion that iconicity is a fundamental feature of the vocal as of the kinesic modality (see also Dingemanse et al. 2015; Nuckolls 1999; Perniss and Vigliocco 2014). (...) I conclude, thus, that the mimetic process is common and important for both vocal and kinesic modalities. If this is the case, a ‘gesture-first’ theory of language emergence may be unnecessary.

Corballis (2011) also aims to solve the switch problem by removing the reason of the dispute (the transition between distinct modes of expression). But his intent is very different from that of Kendon: he points to reiterate the priority of gesture over speech. The strength of this hypothesis is that there is no transition from gesture to speech for the simple fact that speech is also a form of gesture: speech itself can be viewed as gestural rather than acoustic. The motor theory of speech perception (...) is based on the idea that perceiving speech sounds depends on the mapping of those sounds onto the articulatory gestures that produce them. This has led to what is known as articulatory phonology, in which speech is understood as gestures produced by six articulatory organs: the lips, the velum, the larynx, and the blade, body, and root of the tongue (Corballis 2011, p. 70).

In the light of these considerations, the switch problem is not sufficient to challenge the thesis of the gestural origin of language because verbalization does not entail a break compared to the first gestural forms of communication. I think that a similar argument is also valid to stem criticism of the idea that pantomime is an evolutionary precursor of modern language. That said, a final step is required. While pantomime is

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governed by global coherence (which is independent of grammar), verbal language is strictly connected to grammar and, specifically, to combinatorial syntax. To validate the hypothesis of pantomime as a protolanguage, then, it is important to understand how syntax could have originated from global coherence. In this regard, the point to be addressed concerns the issue of the represented content.

3.2

The Issue of the Represented Content

Although effective in coherently conveying information about who, where and when, pantomime has been shown to exhibit deep degrees of ambiguity. An expressive code equipped with a lexical system and a complex grammatical structure is the best way to overcome such difficulty. Besides the speed of transmission, the advantage is the possibility of exploiting an expressive system of great precision in information encoding. But how such a complex system originated and evolved? My claim is that the origin of grammar (and, specifically, of syntax) should be considered with reference to the expressive enhancement of narrative communication. In my view, in fact, grammar is an evolutionary development of pragmatics— the pragmatics of persuasion—since in evolutionary terms syntax is subjected to global coherence. This perspective opens the way to the possibility of considering the origin of syntax as related to pragmatic precursors. Before providing arguments in favor of this hypothesis, I will briefly mention some of the alternative current views. The topic of the origin of syntax is approached in different ways in the literature. Considered the primacy of Chomsky’s theory in contemporary cognitive science, this topic has been largely characterized by the debate on the origin of UG. As is well known, Chomsky (1988) has classically described UG as an all-or-nothing system with no precursors or simpler forms from which it would have evolved. In compliance with the Cartesian idea of language as a qualitative jump between humans and other animals, Chomsky (2010) sustains Tattersall’s (2008, 2010) “big bang” theory, which views language as an entirely new structure in nature: UG is a complex organ that cannot be explained in gradualist terms, i.e. with reference to natural selection. Consistently, Berwick and Chomsky (2016, p. 72) argue that, when dealing with the issue of origins, “there is no room (. . .) for any precursors to language”. This means rejecting any possibility to frame grammar in gradualist and continuity terms—it is no coincidence that Chomsky (1988) considers comparisons with nonhuman animals a perfect waste of time. In his Cartesian perspective, the problem of grammar origin itself (hence, of language) is a nonsense. On the contrary, several authors have considered the idea of explaining the origin of grammar from a perspective in line with the theory of evolution. Two theoretical perspectives are of particular interest in this work. The first perspective attempts to combine UG with the gradualist thesis of language as a biological adaptation driven by natural selection (Jackendoff 1999; Pinker 1994; Pinker and Bloom 1990; Progovac 2015). To spell out in detail the

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debate internal to this perspective would be beyond the scope of this book (for a review, see Ferretti 2015). The point to underline here is that the attempt to darwinize Chomsky is primarily driven by the intent to undermine the idea that the emergence of grammar ushered in a completely qualitatively different pattern of innovation in nature, referable to a sudden and unexpected event. The second perspective challenges the Cartesian account through an interpretative model implying cultural, more than biological, evolution. As we will see in the next section, in this view language is a cultural adaptation (the product of grammaticalization) involving natural-historical languages, rather than language faculty (Hurford 2011; Wray 1998, 2000; for a discussion, see Ferretti 2015, 2019). Before addressing the debate on the nature of the precursors of grammar, two brief general remarks about the two above interpretative models. First, the process that fostered grammar evolution involves both biological and cultural adaptations; second, as already mentioned, grammar is the evolutionary product of a process triggered by the pragmatics of persuasion.

3.2.1

The Synthetic and Holistic Models of the Origin of Grammar

The idea that grammar should be considered as a biological adaptation and, thus, framed within a gradualistic evolutionary process characterizes models aimed at combining UG with the theory of evolution. Bickerton (2009, p. 170), for example, although strongly sympathetic to the Chomskyan perspective, argues that Chomsky “is completely wrong” about language evolution. Against the thesis of a qualitative jump, Bickerton (1990, 1995) views language as the evolutionary advancement of a simpler and more ancient form of communication (a form of “protolanguage”), characterized by a basic lexicon without syntax. In favor of protolanguage are “living fossils”: great apes, little children or adults with communicative difficulty show that, in the absence of a fully-fledged language, speakers use simpler and more primitive forms of communication. An example of living fossils considered by Bickerton (1990) to describe the transition from protolanguage to fully-fledged language (the transition from expressions without syntax to syntactically complex expressions) concerns the transformation of pidgin into creole language (Bickerton 1990, 1995; Jackendoff 1992; Pinker 1994). Bickerton has long studied the communicative forms of communities characterized by a strong linguistic promiscuity. An example is what happened in Hawaii (between 1870 and 1880) after the influx of laborers from China, Japan, Korea, Philippines, and Portugal caused by the expansion of sugar cane cultivation. In similar contexts, given the heterogeneity and diversity of the languages spoken, communication among the members occurs through a “primitive” language (pidgin), consisting of a few basic terms and characterized by an extremely poor grammatical structure. According to Bickerton, what happens in the following generations of speakers is of great interest: the newborns are able to produce utterances that are more complex than those heard, that is, to produce, in one generation only, a language that is structurally more

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complex and uniform than the previous one. In this way, pidgin undergoes a creolization. That said, how to account for the shift from protolanguage to syntax? The origin of language concerns exactly this point, given that “syntax, rather than the referential meaning, may be what most decisively separates us from other species” (Bickerton 1990, p. 57). The transition from pidgin to creole language is illustrative in this regard: while speakers of creole can create sentences by combining words in the same way that speakers of fully-fledged language do, pidgin speakers construct ordered sequences of words just as who creates a necklace by stringing pearls one after the other. Since the ability to construct ordered sequences of words is nonetheless an effective way of connecting words, Bickerton’s attempt to ascribe such minimal combinatorial properties to protolanguage is a way of arguing that protolanguage is a precursor to language. In considering the transition from pidgin to creole as a good example of the transition from protolanguage to language, however, Bickerton seems to underestimate a difficulty, concerning the heterogeneity between protolanguage and language. Indeed, if protolanguage exploits rules of combination different from those characterizing a recursive syntax, then the issue of how to account for the evolutionary transition between the two combinatorial systems remains unjustified. In other terms, if the principle of structural hierarchy governing syntax is specific to language, and if this principle cannot be derived from the principles governing linear sequences of words (as Chomsky has always maintained), then protolanguage cannot be considered a precursor of language and is completely useless in accounting for the origin and evolution of language—for this reason, Chomsky considers the idea of protolanguage as a logical nonsense. To surmount the difficulty, Jackendoff’s (1992) suggestion is to consider the transition from pidgin to creole as handled by the speakers’ mental structures. If children use the same (poor) input as the community of speakers and produce as output a more complex and articulated communicative tool, then this tool, not being able to be learned from experience, will depend on internal constraints. In other terms, if children impose an organization on the input that cannot be acquired by imitating what they hear from the environment, then this observation provides evidence of innate internal resources for learning language. Nevertheless, this explanation leaves entirely unresolved the issue of how UG evolves and organizes itself in the speaker’s mind. It is the famous dead-end addressed by Chomsky through the big bang model, an explanation that Corballis (2017) defines in terms of a miracle. It is no coincidence then that Bickerton (1990, p. 171) refers to a catastrophic leap to account for the transition from protolanguage to language, a transition that “was abrupt, occurring in the space of a few months in individuals, in a single generation where whole communities are concerned. There is no indication of an intermediate phase in either case”. If this transition has no intermediate stages, then the reference to a single catastrophic event is the only way to account for the origins of syntax—as underlined also in Bickerton (1995) with regard to the sudden transition from lexicon to syntax, that is justified appealing to the notion of punctuated equilibrium by Eldredge and Gould (1972). As much as Bickerton criticizes Chomsky in evolutionary terms, catastrophism is a conception

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which he shares with the American linguist more than he is willing to acknowledge (Ferretti 2019). The transition from protolanguage to language requires an innate grammar, but innate grammar requires a miracle. How to exit from such a dead-end? In strong contrast to Bickerton’s compositional model, Wray (1998, 2000) and Arbib (2012) have proposed an alternative explanation of the origin of grammar and syntax, which challenges the innatist model and relies on cultural, rather than biological, evolution. At the basis of this alternative model of protolanguage is grammaticalization, a process inherent in the speakers’ communicative practices. According to the “holistic” model, the process of grammaticalization follows a specular path with respect to the one (from simple to complex) hypothesized by the compositional model. In the holistic model, in fact, there is a categorical rejection of the idea that language evolution is initiated by syntactically simple but morphologically structured units such as words. Both the absence of internal structure in global expressions and the ability to convey complex meanings represent the core of the holistic notion of protolanguage proposed by Wray (1998). In such a perspective, the problem of language origin concerns the process (from complex to simple) of transformation of global units without structure into structured expressive units. To this extent, the holistic model is also called “analytic” because the transition from functional to structural complexity depends on the analysis and segmentation of expressions that were originally lacking in structure. To illustrate the segmentation process, Wray gives the example of two arbitrary unstructured expressions associated with two arbitrary complex meanings: 1. mebita ¼ give-her-the-food 2. kameti ¼ give-her-the-stone The starting point of the process is the association (at the beginning, totally by chance) between some fragments of the sound sequences and some components of the meaning expressed by these sequences. However random, Wray considers a similar association as able to start the segmentation process. Indeed, although only by accident /mebita/ and /kameti/ share the sound sequence /me/ and this sequence can be associated with the meaning “singular female recipient”, it is plausible that recognizing this association would lead individuals to create a morpheme boundary around /me/, giving it the meaning “her” (cf. Wray 1998, p. 56). Once a starting point has been established, the same segmentation process is applied to the rest of the sound sequence and, progressively, to the rest of the possible sequences. Even if, as Wray acknowledges, the difficulties encountered by our ancestors to create a grammar were certainly greater than those encountered by modern children in the acquisition of language, exploring the first phases of the development of human communication gives a privileged insight into the segmentation process underlying the holistic model of protolanguage. In her view, investigating the processes that allow the child to construct a grammar starting from raw material makes it possible to derive empirical confirmations in favor of the holistic model. Since the first stages of word acquisition in children are characterized by holophrastic expressions, it is possible to hypothesize that the problem to be overcome in ontogeny is the same as the one our ancestors had to face in phylogeny: ensuring the

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transition from holistic units of protolanguage to structured units of language utterances. When moving from the acquisition level to the origin level of investigation, the process of analysis and segmentation takes on the features of what in linguistics is called grammaticalization (Heine and Kuteva 2002, 2007; Hurford 2011). At the basis of this process—experimentally corroborated by artificial simulation models (Kirby et al. 2004)—is the idea that grammar is the product of a long evolutionary path governed by the activities of analysis and segmentation carried out by the speakers’ community in ordinary communication. Grammaticalization does not involve specific language-related processing systems but is inherent in the communicative exchanges, which are enough to construct a grammatically complex code—it is a process driven by cultural evolution rather than biological evolution. It is considered a late process in the evolutionary history that, most likely, concerns individuals of our species. Following some scholars, in my view the interesting point is that the invention of grammatical codes (the naturalhistorical languages), characterized by arbitrary and abstract symbols, responds to the need of enhancing narrative communication already present long before the advent of Homo sapiens. According to Barnard (2016), for example, grammar is at the service of narrative. Evidence of this comes from the case of the Naro language spoken in Botswana and characterized by high grammatical complexity (86 persongender-number markers). How to justify the grammatical complexity of a language spoken by very few individuals? Why should a band of 20 or 30 non-literate hunter-gatherers need such grammatical complexity? For me the answer is pretty obvious. They need it to tell stories, to devise mythological systems and the sets of beliefs that surround these. Such stories and myths, and the very ability to narrate at all, enabled their ancestors (and ours) to populate the globe (Barnard 2016, p. xi).

In the light of these considerations, grammaticalization can be seen as a process driven by selective pressures acting towards the enhancement of narrative competence. More precisely, in this perspective grammaticalization is the linguistic artifice used by modern humans to refine and strengthen the persuasive narrative characterizing pantomimes of archaic humans. Grammaticalization enhances, through a new expressive form, a pre-existing communicative structure without altering its function. From a structural point of view, the construction of the new expressive system is an enhancement of narrative competence and, specifically, of global coherence— the property characterizing the constitutive structure of storytelling. In turn, global coherence constrains grammaticalization in both structural and functional terms. Concerning the structural conditions, cognitive architectures impose constraints on the process of grammaticalization since the devices comprising the narrative brain affect the processing of global coherence. Specifically, if global coherence is a constraint on the construction of grammar, and if the processing of global coherence is closely dependent on systems of navigation in space and time, then early forms of grammaticalization should include spatiotemporal markers. Empirical research in this direction seems to support this hypothesis (Botne 2006). That said, the most significant constraints imposed by narrative on grammaticalization are related to

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functional conditions, i.e. the enhancement of persuasive communication. The most important product shaped by selective pressures towards persuasion is the specific form of communication characterizing Homo sapiens, that is, conversation governed by persuasive reciprocity. As we shall see briefly, modern humans could gain this form of communication by means of an expressive code, mainly verbal, endowed with a complex grammar (Benítez-Burraco et al. 2021; Ferretti and Adornetti 2021).

4 Communication and Conversation In functional terms, the selective pressures underlying grammaticalization are the same driving the evolution of every communicative system: communicating better to better persuade. As claimed in chapter “Narrative and Persuasion”, the enhancement of human persuasive abilities is mainly related to the speaker’s need to overcome the listener’s epistemic vigilance. The continuous alternation of roles between speaker and listener characterizes human communication in terms of an exchange of different points of view. Since in conversation it is not enough to understand what is being said but interlocutors should also accept the message, the diversity of interlocutors’ points of view finds realization on the conversational level in a form of communication governed by persuasive reciprocity. Conversation is the characteristic trait of human language (pertaining to modern humans, as we shall see in the final part of this chapter). As Pickering and Garrod (2004, p. 169) argue: The most natural and basic form of language use is dialogue. Every language user, including young children and illiterate adults, can hold a conversation, whereas reading, writing, preparing speeches, and even listening to speeches are far from universal skills.

In this perspective, conversation analysis (Sacks et al. 1974; Schegloff 1997; Sidnell 2011) represents an important theoretical reference. Proponents of this approach emphasize the constructive nature of communication. Perkins (2007), for example, argues that conversation analysis makes it possible to frame communicative exchanges as forms of ongoing construction of the context shared by the interlocutors. Considerations of this kind hinge on the idea of the cooperative foundation of conversation. Several scholars exploit Grice’s (1989) conversational maxims to claim that human communication is the result of cooperation between individuals (Tomasello 2008). The thesis of the cooperative foundation of language fits with the idea that communication is based on a pact of trust between speaker and listener—an idea shared by philosophers (Burge 1993; Davidson 1984; Lewis 1969) and psychologists (Gilbert and Malone 1995; Gilbert et al. 1990). Wacewicz and Żywiczyński (2018) interpret human communication with reference to the Platform of Trust (PoT), which is based on the ability to overturn “the default setting from expecting manipulation to expecting honesty” (Wacewicz and Żywiczyński 2018, p. 170). Tomasello (2009) considers humans as naturally altruistic, specifically, with respect to the altruistic transmission of information: unlike other animals, humans are

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willing to share information with conspecifics, who in turn, unlike conspecifics of other animals, expect useful information from others to solve a given problem. The role of cooperation in communication is undeniable and it is not my intention to question it. Notwithstanding, the exclusive reference to cooperation risks overshadowing a constitutive factor of conversation, that is specular but equally important: the role of competition in communication (Benítez-Burraco et al. 2021; Ferretti and Adornetti 2021). Proponents of “strategic pragmatics” have challenged the claim that the Gricean cooperation principle can be applied to understand how conversation works (Asher and Lascarides 2013; Lascarides and Asher 2008; Reboul 2017). Consistently, Pinker et al. (2008, p. 833) also argue that the unique reference to cooperation to explain human communication undermines the fact that “most social relationships involve combinations of cooperation and conflict”. Considering only the cooperative character makes it impossible to take into consideration the role of competitive pressures in conversation characterized by persuasive reciprocity. Human conversation, in fact, given the constant alternation of roles between interlocutors in the attempt to mutually persuade, puts speaker and listener in competition with each other. It is competition that gives communication the progressive and cumulative character that allows interlocutors to carry on communication even when they think differently (Ferretti and Adornetti 2012, 2021). In other words, what keeps communication alive is the conflict between interlocutors: in conversation, the recipient is not only vigilant with respect to coherence and truth of the message, but is mostly engaged in defending his own point of view. In the light of these considerations, the conversational context driven by persuasive reciprocity is not only the result of enhanced persuasive capacities, but also a source of new selective pressures. The selective pressures in favor of a communication based on persuasive reciprocity find realization in the construction of a new expressive system, a language in which both grammar and verbalization have a key role.

4.1

The Emergence of Modern Language

The above considerations are of great importance for the investigation of the origin of modern language. If the earliest human forms of communication exploited pantomime as a tool of narrative persuasion, the need for a more effective conversational tool fostered the evolution of a grammatically complex and verbally organized expressive code. In line with this hypothesis, the transition from the pantomimic protolanguage of Homo ergaster to the modern forms of language typical of Homo sapiens can be interpreted with reference to the transition from mainly gestural communication to forms of expression characterized by a wider use of verbalization. Pantomime, in fact, is particularly effective in one-to-many communication: the pantomimic tale of a tribal chief is highly persuasive because, by exploiting the imaginative and emotional level, it works as an excellent instrument of transportation and engagement of the members, who trust and respect the chief (cf. chapter “Narrative and Persuasion”). However, when communication begins to

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take a conversational form, with the prevalence of face-to-face exchanges characterized by turn-taking and mutual persuasive strategies, pantomime appears to be a less functional means of expression. Conversation entails argumentative persuasive strategies for which pantomime does not seem specifically equipped. In order to convince someone in conversational dialectics, transportation and emotional engagement enabled by narrative are often not enough: what is further needed is the ability to argue, which requires sophisticated forms of reasoning and inferential skills (Benítez-Burraco et al. 2021; Ferretti and Adornetti 2021; Ferretti et al. 2022). Analyzing the case of epistemic vigilance strategies, I have argued that the argumentative model proposed by Sperber et al. (2010) is not useful to investigate the initial stages of human communication. That said, in the conversational context governed by persuasive reciprocity, argumentation becomes crucial and, hence, also the need to hypothesize expressive codes suitable for it. Since argumentation is the product of reasoning and reasoning is a form of inference, one way to enhance argumentative skills is to act on the representational structures involved in inferential processes. As argumentation implies computational processes that apply to the propositional structures of represented content, the evolution of syntactically complex structures becomes an important factor in such a communicative model (Benítez-Burraco et al. 2021). As Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995, p. 57) claim, in fact, there is a very good reason for anyone concerned with the role of inference in communication to assume that what is communicated is propositional: it is relatively easy to say what propositions are, and how inference might operate over propositions. No one has any clear idea how inference might operate over non propositional objects: say, over images, impressions or emotions. Propositional contents and attitudes thus seem to provide the only relatively solid ground on which to base a partly or wholly inferential approach to communication.

These considerations highlight that the evolution of a complex grammar has a great adaptive value for the development of communication characterized by persuasive reciprocity. The problem is to justify how the expressive code could achieve the degree of articulation appropriate to support communicative exchanges based on argumentative persuasion. This question relates again to the topic of the origin of grammar and, specifically, of syntax. My idea about the origin of syntax is consistent with the model of grammaticalization and, in particular, exploits the arguments used by interactional linguistics in favor of “grammar in everyday talk” (Thompson et al. 2015). In such a perspective, “syntax cannot be fully understood without an account of its interactional inhabitat in a turn” (Lindström 2009, p. 99). The interactive nature of grammar at work can be analyzed from different perspectives. For my purposes, of particular interest is the dependence of clause construction on the conversational context, since Thompson and Couper-Kuhlen (2005) consider the clause as a locus of interaction in everyday conversation. In their view, the clause can be considered as “the crystallization of solutions to the interactional problem of signaling and recognizing social actions” (Thompson and Couper-Kuhlen 2005, p. 484). In such a perspective, the conversational context is the evolutionary pressure for grammatical

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complexity, a process in constant change, as clauses are shaped in contingent situations of interaction and “grammar is constantly being shaped and re-shaped, constantly undergoing revision and redesign as it is deployed in everyday talk” (ibid., p. 482). Furthermore, grammar involved in the enhancement of persuasive abilities is thought of as the product of the conversational context in which the exchange of arguments strongly affects the ongoing adjustment of inferential structures and processes. A final consideration before concluding. The indications provided so far contribute to depict conversation as the hallmark of Homo sapiens’ communication. That said, what do studies on nonhuman animals suggest in this regard? Although research on animal conversation is scanty, an interesting case is offered by a study by Pedersen and Fields (2009) on the bonobo Panbanisha. Although respecting conversational turns, communication of this animal did not exhibit the characteristic traits of conversation—the directional, progressive and cumulative characters which I posit to be at foundation of this type of communication (Ferretti and Adornetti 2012). The communicative exchanges of Panbanisha were characterized merely by a directional character: her communicative intent (to be taken on the experimenter’s shoulders) was very clear and repeated obsessively, although her request was not complied with by the researcher since Panbanisha had just chased the dog that became very scared and had to be taken on the experimenter’s lap. The interesting point is that, unlike in humans, the reasons provided by researchers had no effects on Panbanisha, whose communication seemed blocked: she insistently repeated her request even after various attempts to distract her and persuade with arguments to justify their refusal. It was not possible to convince Panbanisha, because a nonhuman animal is not able to withdraw from its intentions even in light of good arguments: The directional, progressive and cumulative character of human communication is founded on the ability of the interlocutors to constantly adjust their own point of view on the basis of what others say. This ability is completely precluded to Panbanisha: rather than proceeding towards a point of convergence, her communication has a strongly regressive character. To display the directional, progressive, and cumulative character of human conversation, Panbanisha should be able to adapt her perspective and be convinced by the reasons given by her interlocutors; or, rebutting the experimenters’ reasons, she should to be able to provide further reasons in order to convince the interlocutors to meet her request. (...) To do this, however, an ape should not be an ape, but rather a human being (Ferretti and Adornetti 2012, p. 180).

The case of Panbanisha shows at the same time why apes cannot communicate through forms of argumentation and what apes cannot do because they are unable to argue. Clearly, also humans often behave as Panbanisha does: they refuse to give up on their own beliefs not only when they think they are right, but also when they know they are wrong. However, while Panbanisha would not be able to give up on her own beliefs even if she wants to, humans have the great possibility to do so—a possibility implying effort and sacrifice, but which characterizes us as linguistic animals and, ultimately, as inherently humans.

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5 Conclusions In this book, I have explored the commonalities and differences between human and animal communication through the investigation of persuasive skills. Continuity and specificity are deeply intertwined in the study of language origin: the ability to tell stories is a refinement and enhancement of a type of communication widely present among other animals. The elements of continuity and specificity are the product of an evolutionary process based on the competition between selective pressures (the problem of changing environmental situations, which is solved through new forms of communication) and the available structural resources (the brain and bodily structures that our ancestors were endowed with to face the problems posed by changing environmental situations). As discussed in the first part of this book, selective pressures represent the functional reasons behind the human enhancement of persuasive abilities. If communication at every level has a strong persuasive character, the question of why humans had to enhance their persuasive abilities is noteworthy for evolutionary issues: answering to this question, I faced the criticism, based on the passivity of recipients, usually directed at persuasive models of communication. Moreover, through the analysis of the structural conditions involved in our ancestors’ response to selective pressures, I claimed (against the proponents of the qualitative leap of language) that, like any other form of evolution, the evolution of language does not come from nothing. Without the appropriate brains and cognitive systems, our ancestors could never have created such an innovative and persuasively effective form of communication. In the light of these considerations, in this chapter I have considered the issue of the material conditions (the expressive system used in persuasive communication) underlying the origin of language. With reference to these conditions, I hypothesize that humans gave rise to language in two steps. The first, referable to archaic hominins (Homo ergaster), involved the use of pantomime to persuade by telling stories in the absence of language. The second, referable to modern humans (Homo sapiens), involved the use of verbalization and a complex grammar to initiate argumentative forms of persuasion. The transition between these forms of communication was not the outcome of a sudden change: narrative competence is the structure of language marking a line of continuity between archaic and modern humans. The invention of modern language, in fact, is nothing more than the reconstruction, through a new expressive code, of a more ancestral form of communication. On this perspective, even persuasive argumentation is not an entirely new entity but the refinement, by means of a complex grammar and verbalization, of the persuasive possibilities of narrative constrained by persuasive reciprocity. The result of these considerations is an idea of language as a set of characteristic aspects all equally important both for its current functioning and for its evolutionary history. Some of these aspects fostered the emergence of new traits, favoring a series of chain modifications governed by the leading principle of every evolutionary process: the new is always a reconstruction of what was already there and, above

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all, what was already there continues to remain as a constitutive trait in the new. Therefore, in the evolution of language the new never completely replaces the old: verbal language does not replace gestural language, grammar does not replace global coherence (less structured on the syntactic level but more effective on both the imaginative and emotional level), nor does argumentation replaces older forms of persuasion such as storytelling. In these terms, language is a multistratified entity in which the older features comprise the internal structure of the latest ones. The multistratified complexity of language is what makes human communication an extremely flexible tool. Here my final remarks. The general principle underlying this book is the idea that the multistratified complexity of language represents the structural response to the functional need to communicate for persuasive purposes. Starting from this general principle, the structural reconstructions characterizing the transition from animal to human communication have met the requirements of the selective pressures on the functional level. The refinement of persuasive abilities, through the functional and structural modifications characterizing the evolution of modern language, has given rise to a new type of communication: conversation based on persuasive reciprocity. As far as we know, this mode of communication is the specific feature of human language.

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