The Talk of the Pirot

By J. L. Speranza
for the Grice Club, etc.


In a post elsewhere, someone asked (I am tempted to write 'axed' which is the original Anglo-Saxon unmethastised),

Why do humans communicate.

Or, as Grice would have it

why do pirots talk?

-- The answer "we might conceive as giving to this question," Grice notes, "may well depend upon the specifics of the truth-conditional semantic we may have adjudicated to the relevant items, to wit: do and why.

----

In "The Implicature was Sex (As Usual)" Geary suggest that for any utterance the pirot will produce it is always possibly to abuct that what the pirot meant was copulation.

"The basis is social-Darwinian", he explains.


"Indeed. Take a pirot. A pirot will talk. A pirot won't walk. A pirot will talk. And talk. And talk. Surely male pirots will talk more than female pirots? But what would happen if a sexual animal that uses sexual courtship display with a serial
pattern generator evolves into a sexual animal that use a finite-state
automaton for courtship display through sexual selection?"

"Unfortunately," Grice adds, "I have a train tomorrow, but I'll call you.

It sounds complicated, but it ain't necessarily so.

To produce a complex sequences of behaviour, a random number generator would
be more appropriate.

However, the nervous system would rather develop a finite-state machine than
a random number generator.

Using the vehicle of sexual display as a rudiment of syntax, symbolized
tokens were presumably arranged to form a primitive language (e.g. "Cum
fuck!").

When the animal has already established a competence for the symbolic
representation ("fuck" = the process of engaging in sex), an elaboration
between the syntactical module and the semantic-symbolic module by social
and sexual selection pressures would reach to a context free grammar
(Pereira & Wright).

This must happen by making an external indexing system to bootstrap the
finite-state syntax, and must be the true key to our understanding of our
own sexual lives.