In ROLSI 56(4), Chloé Mondémé has a lively and carefully research account of how humans and their pets use gaze to communicate with each other. But doing that kind of research is fraught with difficulty: there is always the lurking worry of anthropormisation which risks imposing meaning where none exists. Her account here gives us a fascinating insight into those dangers and how to avoid them.

“What makes you believe that the animal really wanted to communicate? Isn’t it pure anthropomorphism to analyze this behavioral display as the equivalent of a turn? How can we know that the animals here are formatting their action, orienting themselves towards a response or lack of response, producing a meaningful and adjusted move, and not just random behaviour requalified ex-post facto by the human as meaningful?”

These are the kinds of questions – quite legitimate ones – that I had to face when I first became interested in the study of social interactions between humans and animals. These technical questions, though frustrating and sometimes irritating, are also fascinating because they are rooted in (and make visible our undying allegiance to) the entire Western metaphysical tradition: they question the existence (or modes of existence) of animal intentionality – and correlatively, interrogate the existence of human exceptionalism.

How CA helps

Trained in Conversational Analysis, it seemed to me, however, that we could easily get over these idle debates^[1], by simply describing in detail the mutual adjustments that make visible the agentic and reflexive nature of the participants’ (including animal participants’) actions. All I had to do was to observe and analyze instances of joint adjustment and mutual understanding in ordinary, authentic interspecies interactions. And this is what I’ve been doing for the past 10 years, studying dogs, cats, horses and even macaques interacting with humans.

My point was to demonstrate that phenomena analogous to those of inter-human communication were occurring in inter-species interaction: sequentially organized patterns, (so-called “canonical”) pairs of summons/answer, requests/offers, or even gazes fulfilling identical functions in the distribution of action and participation [put a ref to the ROLSI article here]. 

Yet, the aim was in fact theoretical. I wanted to put to the test the idea that interspecies interactions offered a fine entry into rudimentary forms of co-action (rudimentary turn-taking for instance), as a laboratory for the famous axiom that “there is order at all point”. 

On the one hand, this experiment was a way of asserting that linguistics had its place in the production of discourse and knowledge about communicative phenomena involving animals not only ethology and animal behavior sciences!). And secondly, in line with the work of conversationalists, to show that it also had a role to play in terms of social theory.

Towards the discovery of rudimentary forms of sociality

These “rudimentary” forms of sociality in human-animal interaction are crucial, and truly constitute the infrastructure of interaction: by describing successful mutual adjustments, we can dispense with making inferences about what’s inside the participants’ minds, just as Sacks and his successors have taught us about human interaction.

I believe we should be wary of justifying our interest in these forms of communication by a single interest in the origins of human language. It is often claimed that the study of communication in (or with) animals will lead to an investigation into the precursors of human articulated verbal language. However, it seems to me that we can (and should) take an interest in these objects without necessarily having such an assumption in mind – an assumption which, on the one hand, is nothing more than a hypothesis – and which, on the other, perpetuates the idea that the production of knowledge (about the animal world) ultimately serves science about human behavior, human mind, human intelligence, human language. In so doing, it tacitly reconveys the idea (which we now know to be dangerous…) that man is the measure of all things. 

Knowing how humans and animals interact and communicate with each other is interesting in itself, as (if we want to talk about fundamental mechanisms) it helps us understand how organisms that may be phylogenetically distant (as humans and pets are) but ecologically close, manage to routinely understand each other and act together.

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^[1] [1] Which is more parsimonious: presupposing that animals produce actions that make sense and are adjusted to those of others, or that they are mere mechanism responding to stimuli? It seems that, apart from seventeenth-century rationalists, this question is not really up for debate.