Is Anyone Listening? is Denise Herzing’s exciting, well-written chronicle of a lifetime experience as a scientist studying dolphins. Inspired by pioneering researchers such as Jane Goodall (chimpanzees), Diane Fossey (mountain gorillas), and Cynthia Moss (African elephants), Herzing has always believed that learning about animals first of all requires interacting with them. Only in this way can useful theoretical models be built, which in turn allow for testing in practice. The key questions in her book are: how do dolphins (and other animals) communicate with each other? How do they communicate with other species, specifically with humans? And what are the best ways to collect reliable data about both varieties?

A first theme in the book is that biologists have long been biased by their species-specific visual abilities, leading them to think that other species communicate primarily visually, too. While this works relatively when studying chimpanzees’ gestures, dolphins interact with each other mainly via sound. Their hearing far outperforms that of humans, and in water sound is a better mode for long-distance communication than visuals. It is only thanks to relatively recent advances in AI and other digital tools, Herzing points out, that it became possible to collect sonic data that in unmediated form simply were beyond humans’ perception. Moreover, developing and finetuning an underwater keyboard enormously helped initiate and record interactions both between dolphins and between the researchers and the dolphins.

Another theme is Herzing’s emphasis on the nature of her interactions with the dolphins. For one thing, whenever possible, she engages in playing with them, since this is something they love to do. For another, she considers it essential for meaningful interaction that the researchers understand the rules and etiquette a dolphin pod adheres to – and to respect these in order to gain the group’s trust. For instance, she and her team keep their distance when dolphins are fighting, foraging, or mating. Herzing’s determination to consider dolphins and other animals as humans’ equals runs throughout the book – with all the implications for animal rights that follow from taking such equality seriously.

The most fascinating strand in the book is Herzing’s sustained efforts to understand the communication among dolphins – although she also devotes passages to animals such as dogs, corvids, elephants, vervet monkeys, and orcas. (She reports for instance that “some dogs comprehend over a thousand labels or words for toys,” p. 59.) Do these animals have a language? If so, does it make sense to equate certain sounds with words? And if yes, do these “words” have vowels or even phonemes? Are there sequences of sounds that recur, and thereby suggest that dolphin communication has a grammar? Herzing’s views verge toward answering these questions affirmatively. She even claims that different groups of dolphins have different “dialects” (p. 26). Given that making progress in unravelling animal communication requires finding patterns, studying dolphins’ communication is very promising. For a start, each dolphin has a unique “whistle.” But it is the burst-pulse sounds, consisting of densely packed click trains, “that have the greatest bandwidth and comprise the bulk of dolphins’ social communication” (p. 124).

Herzing suggests that a system to share information is particularly important for animals that live long and live in groups. Moreover, she proposes that communication is not just important to warn group members against predators, or inform them where to find food but, perhaps even more importantly, to secure optimal social relations within the group. Sharing emotions, that is, is highly important. A dolphin equivalent to a human “hug,” is mimicking. Such mimicry, and the synchrony needed for successfully performing it, presumably is also the basis for any interspecies communication involving humans: “productive relationships may require an animal seeing you as a peer, or conspecific, and to be a conspecific you need to be able to communicate directly” (p. 58). With the dolphins this is achieved by imitating body postures and even vocalizations (p. 71).

A good candidate for finding patterns in communication in other species, and across species, Herzing submits, is rhythm. Indeed, rhythm is such a profoundly embodied phenomenon that presumably all animals have first-hand experience with it in one way or another: running, heart beats, breathing, eating, drinking, the alternation between day and night, the seasons … Rhythms characterizing communication can moreover cross modes: the Morse system can be used both visually and aurally. And since sound is dolphin’s primary mode of communication, speed, pitch, and loudness are highly informative.

Herzing proposes we can learn a lot about the intra-species and inter-species communication of animals by comparing it with how parents interact with their babies and anthropologists with non-Western peoples: in both cases, there is no pre-existent shared communication system. Here is another analogy: Having studied visual and multimodal communication for decades, I have often been frustrated by linguists’ mistaken idea that “language” can, with minor adaptations, function as the basic model for studying communication in other modes. Just as Herzing, thanks to her long work among dolphins, has learned some of the basics of dolphins’ species-specific ways of communicating, I have gradually come to appreciate how fundamentally differently visuals communicate than language.

Partly based on this experience I have proposed that there is a phenomenon that governs communication in all its varieties, namely the expectation that an act of communication comes with the implicit promise that it will be relevant to whoever this message is addressed. This is the central idea of Sperber and Wilson’s (1995) relevance theory/RT. In my proposals for how RT can be adapted to visual and multimodal mass-communication (Forceville 2020a), I have rephrased this idea as: every act of communication comes with the presumption of optimal relevance to its envisaged audience. Taking RT seriously entails that “meaning” can never be studied without specifying (a) who/what is the communicator; (b) who is/are the envisaged addressees; (c) what are the affordances and constraints of the medium used to communicate; and (d) what presuppositions, background knowledge, and situational context are shared and mutually manifest to the communication partners. I am excited to find that many observations Herzing makes about communication both among dolphins and between dolphins and humans accord perfectly with key ideas in RT. In the following paragraphs, I will elaborate on this compatibility. Indeed, I will go further and suggest that RT helps show how Herzing’s findings can be captured in a single model.

The communicative and the informative intention. RT makes a useful theoretical distinction between the fact that an individual wants to communicate (“communicative intention”) and the contents of whatever it is the communicator wants to convey (“informative intention”). Clearly the latter only becomes pertinent if and when the former has been fulfilled. Herzing implicitly refers to the communicative intention in her interaction with dolphins when she states, “importantly, a species must want to communicate” (169-170, emphasis in original).

Interpretation of a message involves attesting who is its communicator. A dolphin’s unique whistle is recognized by the other members of the pod, and thus functions as a referential sign: it functions as that dolphin’s name (p. 24). Herzing and her team even created dolphin-like whistles for themselves, so that the dolphins could recognize them, as it were, in their own language.

Meaning is meaning to the envisaged audience. Herzing agrees:

“Audience effect is another important thing to consider when capturing behavior. Do the producers of signals adjust their signals depending on who is around? If friends are around, do they share their excitement about finding a good source of food? Or if foes are around, do they try to deceive them and hide the location of a new-found food source? Audience effect is quite prevalent in the animal world, and it demonstrates how cognizant animals are of their environment, their relationships, and the implications of their behavior and actions in a situation (p. 99).”

In Forceville (2020a) I focus on communication that is visual and multimodal (a concept that surfaces several times in Herzing’s book, too), but in fact I believe that the relevance principle is the key to all communication – irrespective of medium, mode, genre, or indeed the species that engage in it (for a brief illustration from communication in a chimpanzee community, see Forceville 2020b). Herzing gives the following example: when a female dolphin swims upside down chasing another dolphin, if this other dolphin is her calf, the mother dolphin is teaching her child rules designed for safety and survival, while if the upside-down dolphin is a male of reproductive age chasing a known female dolphin also of sexual maturity, this is a mating attempt (pp. 100-101). Same communicative posture; different meaning. Here is another example: “It is interesting that the dolphins often address […] signals to me, possibly because I am always in the water, and it may appear that I supervise these other humans to a certain extent (which I do). That would mean they recognize roles and responsibilities in another species and direct their communications appropriately” (p. 153). That is: the dolphins carefully select their “envisaged audience” in interspecies communication as much as in intraspecies communication.

Coded versus inferable information. One of the aspects that makes RT such a good theory is the distinction it makes between coded information and information that needs to be inferred. The meaning of a word and the grammatical acceptability of a sequence of words is coded. This means that a user must have learned the vocabulary and syntax of the language. By that criterion, the dolphin’s “name whistles” are coded. But in by far most situations in which humans communicate, relevance is the result of combining coded information (which can also be non-verbal, as is the case with certain gestures, and with pictograms – see Forceville 2020a: chapter 6) with information that, given the specific moment and place of communication, can be accessed from mutually shared background knowledge or from the mutually shared physical environment. Relevant information gained via this latter procedure is inferred, not decoded. The idea is that communication is most efficient (that is, requires the least mental effort to process it) if information that is already available in the shared background knowledge and/or the shared physical environment of communicator and addressee is not encoded in the message itself. Several of Herzing’s examples suggest that, although she herself refers to her desire to “crack the code” of dolphin’s “language” (p. 2), dolphins infer certain information: “[intentional, ChF] behavior is contextual. […] The important thing is to know the players (their age, sex, and history)” (p. 27). Elaborating on the role of how the specific context within which both intra- and inter-species communication takes place, Herzing emphasizes the importance of cooperation between individuals that have the same interests. Cooperation increases the chances of physical survival (e.g., birds learning to recognize another bird species’ alarm calls warning against a predator; humans learning to interpret the tail slaps of dolphins warning against approaching sharks) but is also important for social reasons – such as a desire to play. “Cooperation in the natural world may be just as important as competition to the evolutionary process” (p. 39) – a view that is echoed in the title of De Waal (2007). Indeed, “it may be that the need to communicate supersedes any required genetic closeness as a factor that drives mutual understanding between species” (p. 42). Thus, honeyguide birds lead humans hunting for honey to locations where hives are – and the hunters in turn open the hives so that the birds can access them. The honey is subsequently shared between the humans and the birds (p. 2). Herzing also recounts how a Kenyan lioness who had recently lost her cub bonded with and protected a young oryx, even forgoing hunting in order to protect the oryx (p. 49). But the author is not afraid to go yet one step further, acknowledging her long-time involvement with SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). So, she is interested not only in communicating with other species on planet earth, but also keen to explore the possibility of communicating with life forms elsewhere in the galaxy (p. 153).

The importance of shared knowledge. RT states that in order to be successful in communicating with (that is: to be optimally relevant to) the envisaged audience, a communicator needs to take into account what that envisaged audience can reasonably be expected to know (and believe, and wish, and fear …). The sum total of what somebody knows, believes, holds dear, fears etc. is referred to as that person’s cognitive environment (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 39). From their cognitive environment, the addressees must recruit the appropriate contextual cues that, in combination with the communicative signal (technically: the “ostensive stimulus,” Sperber and Wilson 1995: 153) provided by the communicator. These “contextual cues” have two possible sources: shared background knowledge and the shared physical environment in which the exchange takes place. The former pertains, in Herzing’s case, to what dolphins know and remember. While dolphins may be even more intelligent than apes (p. 150), it is difficult to say anything about their cognitive abilities – but not impossible. Herzing tells the story of a specific dolphin, Spock, who was rewarded with a fish whenever he brought garbage from his tank to his trainer. One day, a trainer noticed that Spock was bringing up rubber strips that he had been tearing off the rubber caulking around the windows in his tank and was keeping a “stash of rubber ‘currency,’ which he would trade at the surface when he wanted a fish” (p. 167). This shows Spock not only had learned how to take advantage of a specific situation; he also apparently had an idea of the future.

I fully agree with Herzing that “every language has some kind of order and structure” (p. 112). Evidently, trying to lay bare any structures of coded signals used by dolphins will remain a crucial research goal:

“We can ask questions like, Do mothers produce longer signature whistles when their calf is out of sight? Or, Do dolphins make shorter whistles when they are being chased by a predator? This is the acoustic equivalent of an animal speeding up or slowing down their body movements to communicate urgency or a relaxed state.” (p. 114)

The author points out that work in this area can be helped by digging more deeply in the rudimentary “whistling” communication system among sheep herders in the Pyrenees mountains as well as using the understanding of how human “click” languages work (p. 118). That said, I would propose to use the label “coded signals” instead of “words” (as Herzing does), since the latter are a subcategory of the former: dolphins’ name-whistles, shepherds’ whistles, human “clicks,” and pictograms are all coded signals. And although I prefer “structure” over “grammar” (because of the latter’s strong linguistic connotations) for patterns that can be detected in recurring sequences of such coded signals, there is no arguing about labels – as long as there is agreement about the underlying concept.

But searching for patterned sequences of coded signals is only half the story. The other half of charting dolphin communication is focusing on how they infer relevant information. Herzing’s many examples of how coded information is complemented by a mutually shared awareness of, for instance, greeting rituals in previous encounters and of mutually shared ad hoc physical context demonstrate that she is also looking for how dolphins infer – although she does not use that term. I fully endorse her idea that

“the process of communicating socially is not about transfer of information but rather the emergence of mutual understanding through a shared action or thought. Meaning does not reside in words but in the mutual construction of meaning between partners, created through interaction and coregulated by all participants. Increased coordination is seen between individuals as they reach meaning through negotiation.” (p. 138)

So I answer Herzing’s question “Should we be merging decoding and interaction elements when looking at other species?” (p. 149) with a wholehearted “Yes!”

Is Anyone Listening? is a daring, unconventional monograph brimming with ideas and findings that resonate with many dimensions of communication – of the intra-species as well as the interspecies variety.

References

De Waal, Frans (2009). The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. New York: Harmony.

Forceville, Charles (2020a). Visual and Multimodal Communication: Applying the Relevance Principle. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Forceville, Charles (2020b). Rooting chimp communication in relevance theory https://blog.oup.com/2020/10/rooting-chimp-communication-in-relevance-theory/.

Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell.