Language and the game of life (to appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2005)

Abstract: Steels & Belpaeme's simulations contain all the right components, but they are put together wrongly. Color categories are unrepresentative of categories in general and language is not merely naming. Language evolved because it provided a powerful new way to acquire categories (through instruction, rather than just the old way of other species, through trial-and-error experience). It did not evolve so that multiple agents looking at the same objects could let one another know which of the objects they had in mind, co-coining names for them on the fly. Contra Wittgenstein (1953), language is not a game. (Maynard-Smith 1982), would no doubt plead nolo contendere.) The game is life, and language evolved (and continues to perform) in life's service – although it has since gained a certain measure of autonomy too. So are Steels & Belpaeme (S&B) inquiring into the functional role for which language evolved, the supplementary roles for which it has since been coopted, or merely the role something possibly resembling language might play in robotics (another supplement to our lives)? For if S & B are studying the functional role for which language evolved, that role is almost certainly absent from the experimental conditions that they are simulating. Their computer simulations do not capture the ecological conditions under which, and for which, language began. The tasks an