Meaning in great ape communication: Summarising the debate

Scott-Phillips, T.C.

doi:10.1007/s10071-015-0936-3

Meaning in great ape communication: Summarising the debate

Scott-Phillips, T.C.

Authors

T.C. Scott-Phillips

Abstract

Does non-human great ape communication have meaning in the same way as human words (and some other human behaviours)? I recently argued that the answer to this question is most likely to be in the negative (Scott-Phillips in Anim Cogn 18(3):801–805, 2015a). Here, I (1) briefly respond to criticism of this view; (2) describe exactly what sort of empirical study could settle the matter; and (3) discuss what the best working hypotheses should be, in the absence of definitive empirical studies.

Citation

Scott-Phillips, T. (2016). Meaning in great ape communication: Summarising the debate. Animal Cognition, 19(1), 233-238. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-015-0936-3

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Oct 30, 2015
Online Publication Date	Nov 16, 2015
Publication Date	Jan 1, 2016
Deposit Date	Nov 4, 2015
Publicly Available Date	Feb 15, 2016
Journal	Animal Cognition
Print ISSN	1435-9448
Electronic ISSN	1435-9456
Publisher	Springer
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	19
Issue	1
Pages	233-238
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-015-0936-3
Keywords	Communication, Meaning, Intentionality, Language, Primates, Pragmatics.

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© The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.