Abstract
Evolving signaling systems can be said to induce partitions on the space of world states as they approach equilibrium. Formalizing this claim provides a general framework for understanding what it means for language to “cut nature at its seams”. In order to avoid taking our current best science as providing the adaptive target for all evolving systems, the state space of the world must be characterized exclusively in terms of the coincidence of stimuli and payoffs that drives the evolution of cognitive complexity. Cognition exploits the reliable clustering of events in this space. Using this framework to analyze our ordinary concepts of truth and justification, it appears that while justification can be a simple matter of conforming to historically entrenched strategies, truth cannot be fully specified on the basis of the system’s causal history, but requires a robust clustering in the larger world state space.
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Notes
Notice that fitnesses in the usual sense are interpreted as probabilities of reproductive success. It is undesirable at this point to include probabilities in our ontology. Though there is no need to do this for our preliminary model, in later versions we will be able to avoid the inclusion of real probabilities by replacing the single fitness parameter per action with individual fitness component parameters involving energy budget, tissue damage, reproductive opportunities, and so forth. Since these are historical fitness contributions, no probabilities are needed.
I am not suggesting that the “justification” here has genuine normative force. Rather, the idea is that the satisfaction of signal production conventions is the subject matter of our statements about justification. I have argued elsewhere (Harms 2004a) that it is not until a system can refer to its own signal production that statements about justification become possible.
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Harms, W.F. Determining truth conditions in signaling games. Philos Stud 147, 23–35 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9448-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9448-9