Much of the apparent complexity is supplied by the observer rather than the signal

The argument

A second argument that animal communication is simple concerns the reliability of the readings rather than the animals. Proponents argue that people are strongly disposed to attribute intention and meaning to behaviour, including to machines and to weather, and that this disposition operates most powerfully on the species we live alongside. Where an animal's response happens to suit the moment, observers tend to record communication; where it does not, they tend to record noise. On this account the richness attributed to signalling systems often reflects an observer's ability to construct a meaning rather than any content the signal carried. The second strand concerns mechanisms that mimic understanding. Animals are acutely sensitive to posture, gaze, tension, timing and the small movements that precede action, and proponents argue that much of what is taken for conversation is this reading of cues, by the animals and by the people watching them. An animal responding appropriately may be tracking its handler rather than the signal, and a sequence of calls that appears to answer another may be two individuals responding separately to the same event. These possibilities are difficult to exclude, and proponents argue that they are frequently not excluded. The conclusion is methodological caution rather than denial. Proponents accept that the question is open and that careful work has established real structure in some systems. Their point is that the burden belongs with the richer reading: where a plainer mechanism accounts for the behaviour, the plainer account should stand, and under that discipline most animal signalling is still best described as simple.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Those who hold that animal communication is complex accept the warning and deny that it settles anything. Experimental work on signalling is designed precisely to exclude cue-reading, by playing recorded calls to listeners with no sender present and recording how they respond, and structured responses survive that control. They add that the appeal to parsimony cuts both ways: insisting on the thinnest possible mechanism for behaviour in other species while allowing a rich one for the same behaviour in humans is itself an assumption rather than a finding, and it has repeatedly had to be revised as the evidence came in.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A disposition to over-attribute meaning is a reason for controlled experiment rather than a finding about animals, and it says nothing about the systems that have been tested under controls. [Rejecting P2] Playback work is designed to exclude cue-reading by removing the sender altogether, and structured responses persist, so the alternative mechanisms offered here have in fact been excluded in the cases that matter. [Rejecting P3] Parsimony applied asymmetrically is an assumption rather than a discipline: the thinnest available mechanism is demanded for other species while a rich one is allowed for the same behaviour in humans. [Rejecting C] Methodological caution supports suspending judgement on untested systems, not the positive conclusion that animal communication is simple.