Quotes from “Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language”

By Chris Knight (2016)

• Humans routinely expect literal meanings to be false, uninformative, banal and/or irrelevant. We may have recourse to a shared code, but that’s never enough. In real life, successful communication presupposes inferential abilities… If language works at all, in other words, it’s because humans have a sense of humour, can detect irony, cope with metaphor, enjoy the absurd. The system works, in short, because we are willing to rejoice in patent falsehoods, valuing them as windows into our own and one another’s minds.#
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• Only where meanings don’t matter is ‘syntactical’ complexity free to evolve.#
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• Zahavi’s… move was to divide ‘natural selection’ into two distinct categories. First, ‘utilitarian selection’ – selection for ever greater efficiency in, say, locomotion, circulation or vision. The other category is what Zahavi terms ‘signal selection’, whose logic is the reverse. Signal selection (which includes sexual selection) is selection for ‘wastefulness’.#
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• No physical entity, then, can be digital in itself. An object’s changing states may serve as digits, but only to a receiver programmed to ignore intermediate states.#
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• The communicative use of language presupposes anomalously high levels of mutual cooperation and trust – levels beyond anything which current Darwinian theory can explain.#
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Kazuo Okanoya, “Sexual display as a syntactical vehicle: the evolution of syntax in birdsong and human language through sexual selection” (2002)

• As soon as a signal is under voluntary control, it can be produced both honestly and for the purposes of deceit. Thus, it is no longer reliably honest like a reflex, limbic signal is. It follows that there is no possibility of creating voluntary strings of semantic tokens (that is, meaningful language) without sacrificing the guarantee of honesty.#
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Amotz Zahavi, The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece in Darwin’s Puzzle (1997)

• The reliability required in signaling militates against efficiency. Handicaps increase the reliability of signals not despite the fact that they make an animal less efficient, but because they do. Any improvement in a signal must be accompanied by a cost to the signaler – that is, must make the signal’s bearer less well-adapted to its environment.#
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• In signals, cost is of the very essence; it is necessary to the existence of the signal. If there is no cost, nothing prevents cheaters from using a signal to their benefit and to the detriment of the receivers, and that signal will lose its value as a signal.#
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M.D. Hauser, “The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?” (2002)

• There is a mismatch between the conceptual capacities of animals and the communicative content of their vocal and visual signals. For example, although a wide variety of nonhuman primates have access to rich knowledge of who is related to whom, as well as who is dominant and who is subordinate, their vocalizations only coarsely express such complexities.#
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