Reason, we are told, is what makes us human, the source of our knowledge and wisdom. If reason is so useful, why didn't it also evolve in other animals? If reason is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly reasoned nonsense? In their groundbreaking account of the evolution and workings of reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber set out to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue with a compelling mix of real-life and experimental evidence, is not geared (...) to solitary use, to arriving at better beliefs and decisions on our own. What reason does, rather, is help us justify our beliefs and actions to others, convince them through argumentation, and evaluate the justifications and arguments that others address to us. In other words, reason helps humans better exploit their uniquely rich social environment. This interactionist interpretation explains why reason may have evolved and how it fits with other cognitive mechanisms. It makes sense of strengths and weaknesses that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists--why reason is biased in favor of what we already believe, why it may lead to terrible ideas and yet is indispensable to spreading good ones.--. (shrink)

The Handicap Principle represents a central theory in the biological understanding of signaling. This paper presents a number of alternative theories to the Handicap Principle and argues that some of these theories may provide a better explanation for the evolution and stability of honest communication.

This paper aims to identify the constitutive rule of assertion, conceived by analogy with the rules of a game. That assertion has such rules is by no means obvious; perhaps it is more like a natural phenomenon than it seems. One way to find out is by supposing that it has such rules, in order to see where the hypothesis leads and what it explains. That will be done here. The hypothesis is not perfectly clear, of course, but we have (...) at least a crude conception of constitutive rules, which we may refine as we elaborate the hypothesis. Although no attempt will be made here to define ‘rule’, some remarks on constitutive rules will focus the discussion. (shrink)

Assertions are praised as true, informative, relevant, sincere, warranted, well-phrased, or polite. They are criticized as false, uninformative, irrelevant, insincere, unwarranted, ill-phrased, or rude. Sometimes they deserve such praise or criticism. If any respect in which performances of an act can deserve praise or criticism is a norm for that act, then the speech act of assertion has many norms. So has almost any act; jumps can deserve praise as long or brave, criticism as short or cowardly. But it is (...) natural to suppose that some norms are more intimately connected to the nature of asserting than any norm is to the nature of jumping. One might suppose, for example, that someone who knowingly asserts a falsehood has thereby broken a rule of assertion, much as if he had broken a rule of a game; he has cheated. On this view, the speech act, like a game and unlike the act of jumping, is constituted by rules. Thus, not all norms for assertion are on a par. Norms such as relevance, good phrasing, and politeness are just applications of more general cognitive or social norms to the specific act of assertion. Perhaps the norm of informativeness results from a more complex interaction between a general norm of cooperativeness and the nature of assertion as a source of information. But on this view, not all norms for assertion derive from more general norms; otherwise nothing would differentiate it from other speech acts. (shrink)

The honesty of animal communication is in the spot lights in the last 30 years. During most of this time the field was dominated by one explanation: Zahavi’s handicap principle (Zahavi, J Theor Biol 67:603–605, 1975 ; Grafen, J Theor Biol 144:517–546, 1990 ). Grose (Biol Philos 2011 ) embarks to explain both the success of the theory and the empirical difficulties that exist despite this success. While I wholeheartedly agree with the criticism offered by Grose and with almost all (...) the claims he makes, the treatment of the issue is far from complete and it still leaves much to be explained. Accordingly, my commentary consist of six sections: in the first section I clear up some technical issues left unexposed, most importantly the role of strategic cost in handicap signalling; in the second section I relate this to empirical testing; in the next section I comment on the historical development of the handicap principle; in the fourth section I review the biological models that came up with conclusions that contradict the handicap principle; in the fifth section I discuss the reasons behind the success of the handicap theory; finally, in the last section I discuss the application of the handicap theory to anthropology and human sciences. (shrink)

The Evolution of Animal Communication is a detailed examination of a wide variety of animal signalling systems. The main focus of the book is explaining how such signalling systems remain reliable when there is apparent evolutionary pressure to deceive. The principle strategy is to appeal to signal costs: signals remain reliable because the potential benefits of deceit are outweighed by the costs of producing the deceptive signal. In this review I show just how difficult this idea is to test, even (...) in the simplest cases. (shrink)

Many researchers have assumed that punishment evolved as a behavior-modification strategy, i.e. that it evolved because of the benefits resulting from the punishees modifying their behavior. In this article, however, we describe two alternative mechanisms for the evolution of punishment: punishment as a loss-cutting strategy (punishers avoid further exploitation by punishees) and punishment as a cost-imposing strategy (punishers impair the violator’s capacity to harm the punisher or its genetic relatives). Through reviewing many examples of punishment in a wide range of (...) taxa, we show that punishment is common among plant and animal species and that the two mechanisms we describe have often been important for the evolution of punishment. (shrink)

The story of the fall and rise of Zahavi’s handicap principle is one of a battle between models. Early attempts at formal modeling produced negative results and, unsurprisingly, scepticism about the principle. A major change came in 1990 with Grafen’s production of coherent models of a handicap mechanism of honest signalling. This paper’s first claim is that acceptance of the principle, and its dissemination into other disciplines, has been driven principally by that, and subsequent modeling, rather than by empirical results. (...) Secondly, there is a vast literature on biological signalling but few studies that make all of the observations necessary to diagnose the handicap mechanism. My final claim is that many of the applications of costly signalling theory in other disciplines are conceptually confused. Misinterpretations of what is meant by costly signalling are common. Demonstrating that a signal is costly is insufficient and is not always necessary in order to prove that, and explain why, a signal is honest. In addition to the biological modelling of signals, there is an economic literature on the same subject. The two run in parallel in the sense that they have had little mutual interaction. Additionally, it is the biological modelling that has been picked up, and often misapplied, by other disciplines. (shrink)

Abstract: One oft-cited feature of speech acts is their expressive character: Assertion expresses belief, apology regret, promise intention. Yet expression, or at least sincere expression, is as I argue a form of showing: A sincere expression shows whatever is the state that is the sincerity condition of the expressive act. How, then, can a speech act show a speaker's state of thought or feeling? To answer this question I consider three varieties of showing, and argue that only one of them (...) is suited to help us answer our question. I also argue that concepts from the evolutionary biology of communication provide one source of insight into how speech acts enable one to show, and thereby express, a psychological state. (shrink)

Two recent overviews of costly signalling theory—Maynard-Smith and Harper ( 2003 ) and Searcy and Nowicki ( 2005 )—both refuse to count signals kept honest by punishment of dishonesty, as costly signals, because (1) honest signals must be costly in cases of costly signalling, and (2) punishment of dishonesty itself requires explanation. I argue that both pairs of researchers are mistaken: (2) is not a reason to discount signals kept honest by punishment of dishonesty as cases of costly signalling, and (...) (1) betrays too narrow a focus on certain versions of costly signalling theory. In the course of so arguing, I propose a new schema for classifying signal costs, which suggests productive research questions for future conceptual and empirical work on costly signalling. (shrink)

This paper reviews recent philosophical work on assertion, with a special focus on work exploring the theme of assertion's norm. It concludes with a brief section characterizing several open questions that might profitably be explored from this perspective.