Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

This thesis inquires into how human language relates to morality -- and shows the ways language enables, extends, and maintains human value systems. Though we ultimately need to view the relation between language and morality from many different perspectives -- biological, psychological, sociological, and philosophical -- the approach here is primarily a linguistic one informed by evolutionary theory.

At first, this study shows how natural selection relates to the problem of altruism and how language serves human moral ontogeny. Subsequently, the argument demonstrates how language helps enable cultural group selection. Moreover, as language helps influence human behavior in an altruistic direction beyond in-group non-kin (helping facilitate cultural group selection), we also consider how language can help facilitate altruistic behavior towards out-group non-kin. This therefore raises the prospect of a limited moral realism in a world of evolutionary processes.

With these issues and possibilities in mind, we consider and analyze the properties of language that help extend human morality. Specifically, discussion covers how recursion, linguistic creativity, naming ability, displacement, stimulus freedom, compositionality, cultural transmission, and categorization extend moral systems. Moreover, because language so broadly influences morality, the inquiry extends into how linguistic differences (specifically between English and Japanese) might also cause subtle differences in moral perception between Japanese and English speakers.

Lastly, we consider how moral ideas might take on a life of their own, catalytically propagating in degrees dependent and independent of human intention. That is, we consider how ideas might become memetic. After considering the serious problems of memetics, this approach employs a linguistic version of memetic theory and considers how psychological, social, and linguistic constraints may cause moral memes to attain a memetic state and spread by an independent or semi-independent replicator dynamic. Thus, some moral ideas that we possess through language may actually possess us.

This paper argues that the evolution of human language is a prerequisite to the evolution of human morality. Human moral systems are not possible without fully complex language. Though protolanguage can extend moral systems, the design features of human language greatly extend human moral ability. Specifically, this paper focuses on how recursion, linguistic creativity, naming ability, displacement, and compositionality extend moral systems. The argument descriptively defines altruism as self-sacrificial behavior for others and morality as how a group classifies right and wrong behavior. No comment is made on how altruism squares with the replicatory selfishness of genes, or on the controversy of group selection. However, along with Dawkins (Dawkins, 1976), the author concurs that humans can use linguistically based concepts to help constrain genetic selfishness and promote degrees of altruism and morality. Though drawing on previous research, the ideas presented here are novel to the extent that they demonstrate how the design features of language support and extend human altruism and morality.