When we look around the world, we see signs of
competition everywhere. The Presidential election is hotly contested, and there is a bitter rivalry between Democrats and Republicans. Stores compete for your business. On a typical weekend day in the Fall, you see thousands of people gathered to watch football games in which
teams struggle to win a game, and fans support their team and look for victory over the opponent.
With this backdrop, it is easy to think that competition is a crucial part of humanity. And of course, competition does affect a lot of human life. At the same time, though, it is important to recognize that that cooperation is a big part of what makes humans unique. Nowhere is that more evident than in our ability to communicate with language.
Mike Tomasello makes this point clearly in his new book, Origins of Human Communication. He points out the significant cooperation that is involved in most communicative acts.
You might think that cooperation is just something that we might choose to do with our communicative acts. Tomasello argues, though, that cooperation is critical to the success of communication at all.
Imagine that you are walking down the street with a friend, and you point to a car parked by the side of the road. What does that gesture mean? Clearly you are calling attention to the car by pointing to it. But the meaning of the gesture depends on the context. If you and your friend are both car enthusiasts, then maybe you are pointing out a particularly interesting car. If the car belongs to a friend that both of you know, then you might mean to suggest that your friend may be nearby. If the car has a flat tire, then perhaps you are indicating the tire problem.
Interestingly, we use this kind of context automatically when we communicate with others. Not only that, we expect others to act cooperatively with us in performing this communication. If we point to a particularly cool car with a friend, then we expect him to be impressed. If he just stares dumbly at the car, we are annoyed.
This kind of cooperation is all the more important when we are communicating with language. Language allows us to state all kinds of complex concepts, but again, the context is crucial for interpreting an utterance. Consider a simple sentence often used in linguistics textbooks: "The cat is on the mat." What does this mean? Well, just looking at the words, we might just assume that it means that there is a cat and it is currently on top of a small rug. When that sentence is spoken, though, there must be some reason why it has been said, and that forms a crucial part of the meaning. It might be used to point out that the cat looks very cute on the mat. Or perhaps you and the speaker know that the mat has just been vacuumed in preparation for the arrival of company, and so this statement is a request to remove the cat from the mat. Just as with pointing, interpreting the meaning of a sentence requires that the participants in a conversation cooperate.
Clearly, our communication abilities evolved. Tomasello argues that the cognitive ability to share goals and to work cooperatively with others to satisfy joint goals is a pre-requisite to the development of human communication. Other animals do perform some kinds of cooperative behaviors, but none as sophisticated as those that even young children exhibit from an early age.
From this perspective, of course, it is important to remember that many of the examples of competition in human existence are performed against a backdrop of cooperation. The Presidential election can only occur in a country that agrees to laws governing elections. Competition among stores requires an economy in which people agree on its rules. And, of course, a football game only makes sense if the teams agree to be bound by the rules of the game and to follow the dictates of the officials. In many ways, then cooperation is so much a part of the fabric of our existence, that we may fail to see how deeply it affects our behavior.
