Animal Communication Theory: Information and influence in sender–receiver models, with applications to animal behaviour

All options are possible here: an information-based approach might be good in the human case and bad in the animal case. It might be bad in both, or good in both. In an article in the New York Times in 2011, Simon Blackburn admiringly notes that biologists studying animal signals have moved beyond a simple representationalist view, and he hopes that philosophers of language will follow their lead. An information-based view might even be bad in the human case and good in the animal case, because the complexities of human language use have overwhelmed a simpler information-carrying role that still exists in animal signaling. In the animal case, a shift in thinking about communication was linked to a shift in thinking about cooperation. Early work on animal communication was done within a framework that took cooperation and group-level adaptation as common. 3