Teleosemantics and Animal Communication

Resumo

This paper proposes a hybrid teleosemantic account of meaning in (non-human) animal-to-animal communication. I consider two families of cases: signals about events external to the sender, and signals about the sender’s identity or current condition. On the most influential teleosemantic approach to animal communication, such signals represent the conditions in the world required for their receivers’ signal-guided behavior to be beneficial. I argue that, taken on its own, this benefit-based approach yields implausible ascriptions of content, diverging both from ethological practice and from what the view is advertised as delivering in cases of animal communication. To address this problem, I draw on a teleosemantic framework I previously developed for simple perceptual representations, which I here extend to the case of animal signals. In particular, I supplement the benefit-based approach with a signal-production condition that constrains content to what causally elicits the sender’s signaling. The resulting hybrid delivers plausible contents for signals about both events in the external world and a sender’s identity or current condition.