What is it about?
Herzing's book is about (mainly) communication between dolphins and between dolphins and human researchers.
Featured Image
Photo by May Manzur on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Dolphins are among the most intelligent species on earth. Studying dolphin communication helps us understand communication more generally, and contributes to respecting other species.
Perspectives
In the review I show how Herzing's insights are fully compatible with Relevance Theory/RT's (Sperber & Wilson 1995) take on communication. I suggest that it may be good to shift the attention from just "coded" communication to communication via inference, which Herzing and her team already practice, particularly via playing with dolphins. Herzing could model all her insights on dolphin communication in the overarching RT claim that all communication is geared toward optimizing relevance.
Dr Charles Forceville
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Is Anyone Listening? What Animals are Saying to Each other and to us, Leonardo, January 2025, The MIT Press,
DOI: 10.1162/leon_r_02691.
You can read the full text:
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