The cooperative nature of communicative acts

Communicative interaction is a form of social interaction where individuals use overtly intentional acts, such as utterances, gestures or controlled facial expressions. The available evidence from the fields of animal communication and paleoanthropology suggests (1) that humans are the only primates that are naturally able and motivated to engage in communicative interaction, and (2) that this ability evolved for the purpose of permitting more complex forms of social cooperation in early Homo. I argue that these considerations should prompt us to rethink the basic functional anatomy of communicative acts. The hypothesis offered here is that most communicative acts can be reconceptualized as proposals or requests for the addressee to carry out a cooperative response. This hypothesis turns out to work effectively for many imperative as well as interrogative acts. I show that it also extends to a large class of declarative acts, with the exception of a well-defined residual category. The suggested reconceptualization of communicative acts, I argue, is not only compatible with evolutionary theory. It is also more “social” than Austin's and Searle's original conception of speech acts because it explains how the agency of addressees is implied by the performance of many communicative acts.