Chris Knight

Quotes From

“Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language” (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.#
• Only where meanings don’t matter is ‘syntactical’ complexity free to evolve.#
• 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’.#
• 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.#
• The communicative use of language presupposes anomalously high levels of mutual cooperation and trust – levels beyond anything which current Darwinian theory can explain.#