Evolutionary game-theoretic semantics and its foundational status

Abstract

Most of the current theories on language evolution on the market are structural and functional rather than strategic in nature, and are built upon the presupposition that it is possible to model our innate linguistic endowment and then correlate these models with some neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. I argue that, alternatively, complex meaning relations between assertions and the world emerge from evolutionary semantic games played by the Population of Utterers and the Population of Interpreters sampled from a diamorphic population of agents. These games provide a realistic application of game-theoretic semantics (GTS) to evolutionary situations (EGTS). I will discuss the foundational status of EGTS, relating it to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language games and Charles S. Peirce’s pragmatist philosophy, thus providing an alternative to adaptation in evolutionary epistemology.