Animal signalling between informing and influencing: setting the stage for a pragmatic-rhetorical model of communication

One of the most heated debates in animal communication studies over the past fifty years can be summarized in terms of the opposition between two approaches: the informational model and the manipulative (or even influence) model. According to proponents of the former model, communication is a process involving the transfer of information from a sender to a receiver. Proponents of the manipulative model, on the other hand, argue that communication can be defined not in terms of information, but in terms of the influence that signals produced by the sender have on the receiver: from this point of view, animal signals are functional in that they influence receivers to act in a certain way. This chapter reconstructs some of the major stages of this debate and argues in favour of the communication-as-influence model. It is argued that such an approach is consistent with the basic assumptions of some pragmatic models of human communication, according to which the production of utterances aims to bring about a change in the recipient's representation of the world, and that this change then has a cascading effect on his or her actions.