Related papers: The Evolution of Language and Human Rationality
Language enables humans to share knowledge, reason about the world, and pass on strategies for survival and innovation across generations. At the heart of this process is not just the ability to communicate but also the remarkable…
Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to understand human thinking and decision-making, an ability that plays a crucial role in social interaction between people, including linguistic communication. This paper investigates to what extent…
Human languages employ constructions that tacitly assume specific properties of the limited range of phenomena they evolved to describe. These assumed properties are true features of that limited context, but may not be general or precise…
Theory of Mind is the ability to attribute mental states (beliefs, intents, knowledge, perspectives, etc.) to others and recognize that these mental states may differ from one's own. Theory of Mind is critical to effective communication and…
Inferring the abstract relational and causal structure of the world is a major challenge for reinforcement-learning (RL) agents. For humans, language--particularly in the form of explanations--plays a considerable role in overcoming this…
The purpose of this study is to find evidence for supporting the hypothesis that language is the mirror of our thinking, our prejudices and cultural stereotypes. In this analysis, a questionnaire was administered to 537 people. The answers…
Languages are not created randomly but rather to communicate information. There is a strong association between languages and their underlying meanings, resulting in a sparse joint distribution that is heavily peaked according to their…
Language evolution might have preferred certain prior social configurations over others. Experiments conducted with models of different social structures (varying subgroup interactions and the role of a dominant interlocutor) suggest that…
Despite the increasing effectiveness of language models, their reasoning capabilities remain underdeveloped. In particular, causal reasoning through counterfactual question answering is lacking. This work aims to bridge this gap. We first…
This paper explores the impact of variable pragmatic competence on communicative success through simulating language learning and conversing between speakers and listeners with different levels of reasoning abilities. Through studying this…
Dynamics of a social population is analyzed taking into account some physical constraints on individual behavior and decision making abilities. The model, based on Evolutionary Game Theory, predicts that a population has to pass through a…
A key feature of human theory-of-mind is the ability to attribute beliefs to other agents as mentalistic explanations for their behavior. But given the wide variety of beliefs that agents may hold about the world and the rich language we…
Recent approaches to human concept learning have successfully combined the power of symbolic, infinitely productive rule systems and statistical learning to explain our ability to learn new concepts from just a few examples. The aim of most…
When communicating, people behave consistently across conversational roles: People understand the words they say and are able to produce the words they hear. To date, artificial agents developed for language tasks have lacked such symmetry,…
To investigate the evolution of syntax, we need to ascertain the evolutionary r\^ole of syntax and, before that, the very nature of syntax. Here, we will assume that syntax is computing. And then, since we are computationally Turing…
Languages are shaped by the inductive biases of their users. Using a classical referential game, we investigate how artificial languages evolve when optimised for inductive biases in humans and large language models (LLMs) via Human-Human,…
In this paper, we make a review on the concepts of rationality across several different fields, namely in economics, psychology and evolutionary biology and behavioural ecology. We review how processes like natural selection can help us…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
Conversations allow the quick transfer of short bits of information and it is reasonable to expect that changes in communication medium affect how we converse. Using conversations in works of fiction and in an online social networking…
Human languages expand vocabularies by combining existing morphemes rather than inventing arbitrary forms. Communicative efficiency shapes lexical systems at multiple levels (Gibson et al., 2019), yet morphological composition -- combining…