Intentionality and Flexibility in Animal Communication

The insight gained from Ruth Millikan leads us to investigate animal communication not by considering Gricean communicative intentions, but instead by considering feature of intentional communication, namely the flexible interaction between the participants of the communicative situation. Whether nonhuman primates communicate intentionally, that is, whether they rely on intentions, such as goals and beliefs about goals and knowledge states of the recipient, when they produce signals, has attracted much attention recently in the comparative research on animal communication. Thus, communication can only be successful if all participants attend to each other to get the intended message transmitted correctly. In the situation of two signalers' intentions involved in intentional communication, an individual must be capable of displaying second-order intentionality to display informative intentions, that is, the signaler wants the audience to know about something when producing the signal.