Epistemology and the Structure of Language

Abstract

We are concerned here with how structural properties of language may come to reflect features of the world in which it evolves. As a concrete example, we will consider how a simple term language might evolve to support the principle of indifference over state descriptions in that language. The point is not that one is justified in applying the principle of indifference to state descriptions in natural language. Instead, it is that one should expect a language that has evolved in the context of facilitating successful action to reflect probabilistic features of the world in which it evolved.

Communicative bottlenecks lead to maximal information transfer

“…Again, this is even though the cost of signalling is not a cost for being less informative. Barrett and LaCroix (2020) use these results to explain how the structural properties of a language come to reflect the world in which the language evolved. This shows how something like a principle of indifference (in a Bayesian sense) might arise naturally in an evolutionary context.…”

“…2 Though this simple syntactic game is not itself compositional, see the discussion in Franke (2016); Steinert-Threlkeld (2016); LaCroix (2019a). 3 In a related paper, Barrett and LaCroix (2020) use these results to explain how the structural properties of a language come to reflect the world in which the language evolved. This shows how something like a principle of indifference (in a Bayesian sense) might arise naturally in an evolutionary context.…”

The Linguistic Blind Spot of Value-Aligned Agency, Natural and Artificial

“…46 Using the signalling-game framework, Steinert-Threlkeld (2016) argues that compositional signalling is only evolutionarily beneficial when the world is sufficiently complex. It should be unsurprising that the structural properties of language are affected in non-trivial ways by the world in which those language evolve (Barrett and LaCroix, 2022). 47 See also discussion in Sterelny (2014Sterelny ( , 2021.…”

Biology and Compositionality: Empirical Considerations for Emergent-Communication Protocols

“…This is to say nothing of the signalling-game framework (Lewis, 1969;Skyrms, 1996Skyrms, , 2010 in evolutionary game theory, which has seen a number of significant advances in a variety of philosophically interesting domains. These include, e.g., the difference between indicatives and im-peratives (Huttegger, 2007;Zollman, 2011); signalling in social dilemmas (Wagner, 2014); network formation (Pemantle and Skyrms, 2004;Barrett et al, 2017); deception (Zollman et al, 2012;Martínez, 2015;Skyrms and Barrett, 2018); meta-linguistic notions of truth and probability (Barrett, 2016(Barrett, , 2017; syntactic structure and compositionality (Franke, 2016;Steinert-Threlkeld, 2016;Barrett et al, 2018;LaCroix, 2019e);vagueness (O'Connor, 2014); and epistemic representations, such as how the structure of one's language evolves to maintain sensitivity to the structure of the world (Barrett and LaCroix, 2020). See LaCroix (2019b) for an overview.…”