Abstract
In recent years, the methods of formal semantics and pragmatics have been fruitfully applied to the analysis of primate communication systems. Most analyses therein appeal to a division of labor between semantics and pragmatics which has the following three features: (F1) calls are given referential meanings (they provide information about the world rather than just about an action to be taken), (F2) some calls have a general meaning, and (F3) the meanings of calls in context are enriched by competition with more informative calls, along the lines of scalar implicatures. In this paper, we develop highly simplified models to independently assess the conditions under which such features would emerge. After identifying a sufficient condition for (F1), we find a range of conditions under which (F2) and (F3) are not evolutionarily stable, and discuss the consequences for both modeling and empirical work.
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Notes
Note that one might attempt to explain these facts by positing that animals do not tend to repeat actions. Zuberbühler et al. (1999, p. 39) consider this hypothesis, but argue that it makes predictions that are not supported by the data. See Suzuki (2018) for a similar argument about repetitions in birds.
See Price et al. (2015) for evidence of wider distribution of Vervet calls than merely in alarm contexts.
This issue has also arisen in the signaling games literature. Lewis (1969) already noticed that he cannot distinguish between assertions and imperatives, because in his signaling systems there is no way to break the symmetry between cause of production of a signal and the action it then causes. Huttegger (2007) and Zollman (2011) provide models which attempt to break this symmetry. We discuss them more below. Skyrms (2010) shows how to quantify the amount of information of each type.
See, for an overview, Skyrms (2010).
Often in games with multiple receivers, the following information asymmetry is made, so the reader can prefix what follows with implicit quantification over the receivers.
See Geanakoplos and Polemarchakis (1982), Goodman and Stuhlmüller (2013) for examples of signaling games without the aforementioned information asymmetry. The related field of epistemic game theory (Perea 2012; Pacuit and Roy 2015) studies explicitly agents’ reasoning about each others’ information.
By wholly determining the action, we intend to include only relatively ‘physiologically simple’ actions and to exclude conditional imperatives, indexicals, and the like from counting as determining an action.
The reader may find the contrapositive statement and its proof to be helpful. If \(\mathbf{M} \) does not refine \(\mathbf{A} \), then either \(\mathbf{M} \ne \mathbf{S} \) or \(\mathbf{S} \) does not refine \(\mathbf{R} \). Proof: Suppose that \(\mathbf{M} \) does not refine \(\mathbf{A} \). So: there is a cell \(c_a \in \mathbf{A} \) such that \(c_a\) is not the union of any set of cells from \(\mathbf{M} \). Because \(\mathbf{A} \) coarsens \(\mathbf{R} \cap \mathbf{M} \), we have that \(c_a\) is the union of a set of cells from the latter. That is to say: for all \(\mathsf {m} \subseteq \mathbf{M} \), \(c_a \ne \bigcup \mathsf {m}\), while at the same time there is \(\mathsf {m} \subseteq \mathbf{M} , \mathsf {r} \subseteq \mathbf{R} \) such that \(c_a = \bigcup \left\{ m \cap r : m \in \mathsf {m} , r \in \mathsf {r} \right\} \). Together, these imply that for some \(m \in \textsf {m} , r \in \textsf {r}\), \(r \cap m \ne m\), which entails that \(\mathbf{M} \) does not refine \(\mathbf{R} \). Now: recall that \(\mathbf{M} \) is a coarsening of \(\mathbf{S} \). So, either \(\mathbf{M} = \mathbf{S} \), in which case the above reasoning shows that \(\mathbf{S} \) does not refine \(\mathbf{R} \), or \(\mathbf{M} \ne \mathbf{S} \). \(\square \)
See Zuberbühler (2001).
More formally, \(\mathbf{M} = \mathbf{M} _1 \cap \cdots \cap \mathbf{M} _n\), where \(\mathbf{M} _i = \left\{ \left\{ w : \overrightarrow{\sigma ([w]_\mathbf{S} )}_i = m \right\} : m \in M\right\} \) is the partition where worlds belong to the same cell if the sender sent the same message to receiver i in each world. And mutatis mutandis for \(\mathbf{A} \) and \(\mathbf{A} _i\).
We note that this verdict in one sense agrees and in another disagrees with the discussion of a two-person version of the game in Zollman (2011, p. 167). He argues that the two-person and three-person case are “essentially equivalent” and that, therefore, the signals should be understood as assertions in both. The present exercise shows that on our analysis of when an action-based analysis can be given, the two cases are not in fact equivalent.
Compare Zollman (2011, p. 167) and the discussion of multiple receivers in the previous section.
Code for the numerical results may be found at https://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/WZmNmEyN/.
Here we follow the discussion on pp. 197–198 of Schlenker et al. (2016b).
See, e.g., Weibull (1995) for a reference on evolutionary game theory.
Proof sketch: One can verify that \(F(\alpha , \alpha ) = 1/(2-\alpha )\) and that \(F(\alpha , 1) = (5-\alpha ^2)/4(2-\alpha )\). This yields that \(F(\alpha , \alpha ) > F(\alpha , 1)\) if and only if \(1 > (5-\alpha ^2)/4\), which never holds since \(\alpha \le 1\).
Code for running these simulations may be found at https://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/WZmNmEyN/.
Because A means there is a serious non-ground alert.
Schlenker et al. (2014) quantitatively compared the uses of krak in eagle situations to the uses of hok in leopard situations. The difference provided a preliminary argument for the general call function of krak.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Guillame Dezecache and Mélissa Berthet for helpful comments and discussion, as well as two anonymous referees and our handling editor Patrick Georg Grosz for comments that have greatly improved the paper. This research received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No 788077, Orisem, PI: Schlenker). Research was conducted at Institut d’Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure - PSL Research University. Institut d’Etudes Cognitives is supported by Grant FrontCog ANR-17-EURE-0017.
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Steinert-Threlkeld, S., Schlenker, P. & Chemla, E. Referential and general calls in primate semantics. Linguist and Philos 44, 1317–1342 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-021-09322-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-021-09322-1