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 (...) complex communication systems via modular composition. (shrink)

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 (...) co-emerge with a meaningful language. (shrink)

David Hume’s skeptical solution to the problem of induction was grounded in his belief that we learn by means of custom. We consider here how a form of reinforcement learning like custom may allow an agent to learn how to learn in other ways as well. Specifically, an agent may learn by simple reinforcement to adopt new forms of learning that work better than simple reinforcement in the context of specific tasks. We will consider how such a bootstrapping process may (...) lead to a system that includes trial-and-error forms of learning like win-stay/lose-shift, probe and adjust, and simple reinforcement itself together with higher-rationality inferential tools. (shrink)