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  1. Self-Assembling Games and the Evolution of Salience.Jeffrey A. Barrett - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (1):75-89.
    This article considers how a generalized signalling game may self-assemble as the saliences of the agents evolve by reinforcement on those sources of information that in fact lead to successful action. On the present account, generalized signalling games self-assemble even as the agents co-evolve meaningful representations and successful dispositions for using those representations. We will see how reinforcement on successful information sources also provides a mechanism whereby simpler games might compose to form more complex games. Along the way, I consider (...)
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  • Toward the Emergence of Nontrivial Compositionality.Shane Steinert-Threlkeld - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (5):897-909.
    All natural languages exhibit a distinction between content words and function words. Yet surprisingly little has been said about the e...
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  • Reflexivity, Functional Reference, and Modularity: Alternative Targets for Language Origins.Travis LaCroix - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (5):1234-1245.
    Researchers of language origins typically try to explain how compositional communication might evolve to bridge the gap between animal communication and natural language. However, as an explanatory target, compositionality has been shown to be problematic for a gradualist approach to the evolution of language. In this article, I suggest that reflexivity provides an apt and plausible alternative target that does not succumb to the problems that compositionality faces. I further explain how protoreflexivity, which depends on functional reference, gives rise to (...)
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  • Pyow-Hack: Ordered Compositions in Lewis-Skyrms Signaling Games.Nathan Gabriel - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-20.
    This paper presents a Lewis-Skyrms signaling game that can exhibit a type of compositionality novel to the signaling game literature. The structure of the signaling game is motivated by an analogy to the alarm calls of putty-nosed monkeys (Cercopithecus nictitans). Putty-nosed monkeys display a compositional system of alarm calls with a semantics that is sensitive to the ordering of terms. This sensitivity to the ordering of terms has not been previously modeled with a Lewis-Skyrms signaling game literature. Signaling games are (...)
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  • Language games and the emergence of discourse.Jeffrey A. Barrett & Jacob VanDrunen - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-15.
    Wittgenstein used the notion of a language game to illustrate how language is interwoven with action. Here we consider how successful linguistic discourse of the sort he described might emerge in the context of a self-assembling evolutionary game. More specifically, we consider how discourse and coordinated action might self-assemble in the context of two generalized signaling games. The first game shows how prospective language users might learn to initiate meaningful discourse. The second shows how more subtle varieties of discourse might (...)
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