Culture, its evolution and anything inbetween
The first day of EvoLang includes several workshops (full list here) to which all attendees are invited. Gregory Mills and I are running a workshop on language evolution and interaction, and the schedule and papers are now available online. Language Adapts to Interaction, 08:30-13:30, Monday, 21st March, 2016, New Orleans Language has been shown to … Continue reading “EvoLang Preview: Language Adapts to Interaction workshop”
Replicated Typo is doing a series of previews for this year’s EvoLang conference. If you’d like to add a preview of your own presentation, get in touch with Sean Roberts. At this year’s EvoLang Liz Irvine and I will be talking about how pointing can inhibit the emergence of symbolic communication. Usually, pointing is thought … Continue reading “EvoLang Preview: Using Minecraft to explore Language Evolution”
As readers of this blog will know, in evolutionary linguistics we use artificial languages in communication games all the time to investigate language evolution. However, these games, for the most part, remain very simple and confined to the lab. Massive multiplayer online role play games (MMORPGs) may provide a new avenue for hypothesis testing in language evolution. … Continue reading “EvoLang Preview: Zombies, MMORPGs and Language Evolution”
This is a guest post by Christine Cuskley TL;DR: Please and thank you play this thing for science. Insofar as the field of language evolution has even had time to spill a lot of ink about anything – if you take Pinker & Bloom’s seminal 1990 paper as the starting point, the field is only … Continue reading “CreaStoria: Experimenting with collaborative stories”
Note: Late on the evening og 7.20.15: I’ve edited the post at the end of the second section by introducing a distinction between prediction and explanation. Thinking things over, here’s the core of my objection to talk of free-floating rationales: they’re redundant. What authorizes talk of “free-floating rationales” (FFRs) is a certain state of affairs, … Continue reading “Dan Dennett, “Everybody talks that way” – Or How We Think”
On Tuesday, July 21st, this year’s International Cognitive Linguistics Conference will host a theme session on “Cognitive Linguistics and the Evolution of Language” co-organized by three Replicated Typo authors: Michael Pleyer, James Winters, and myself. In addition, two Replicated Typo bloggers are co-authors on papers presented in the theme session. The general idea of this … Continue reading “Cognitive Linguistics and the Evolution of Language”
Another working paper (title above). Download at: SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2623118 Academica.edu: https://www.academia.edu/13279876/On_the_Direction_of_19th_Century_Poetic_Style_Underwood_and_Sellers_2015 Abstract, contents, and introduction below: Abstract: Underwood and Sellers have discovered that over the course of roughly a century (1820-1919) Anglo-American poetry has undergone a consistent change in style in a direction favored by editors and reviewers of elite journals. This directional shift aligns … Continue reading “On the Direction of 19th Century Poetic Style, Underwood and Sellers 2015”
And he more or less knows it; but he wants to have his cake and eat it too. It’s a little late in the game to be learning new tricks. I don’t know just when people started casually talking about the brain as a computer and the mind as software, but it’s been going on … Continue reading “Dennet’s WRONG: the Mind is NOT Software for the Brain”
Early in 2013 Dan Dennett had an interview posted at John Brockman’s Edge site, The Normal Well-Tempered Mind. He opened by announcing that he’d made a mistake early in his career, that he opted a conception of the brain-as-computer that was too simple. He’s now trying to revamp his sense of what the computational brain … Continue reading “Has Dennett Undercut His Own Position on Words as Memes?”
A: Because it is daft. I believe there are two answers to that question. For most people it’s convenient. That requires one explanation, which I’ll run through first. For some people, however, memetics is more than convenient. Some, including Dawkins himself and his philosophical acolyte, Dan Dennett, use it as a way of explaining religion. … Continue reading “Q: Why is the Dawkins Meme Idea so Popular?”
