Semantic content and pragmatic convention: Emergence through individual advantage in spatialized environments

Abstract

This paper reviews and extends earlier work on the emergence of semantics in spatialized environments of wandering food sources and predators. Communication of any sophistication demands a semantic base, but also relies on conventions of information transfer, of truthfulness, and of relevance. These are pragmatic conventions, formulated in the linguistics literature in terms of H. P. Grice's maxims of quality, quantity, and relation. Simulations offered here show that conditions sufficient for the emergence of simple semantics are also sufficient for the emergence of simple pragmatics. Pragmatic conventions of precisely the type Grice outlines emerge naturally within spatialized networks of individually informationmaximizing agents in an environment of locally significant events. Patrick Grim 978-1-4244-2763-5/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE