Norms, Discussion, and Ritual: Evolutionary Puzzles

Abstract

Why do people talk? I have a story about that-a 'just so story perhaps, I have to admit. My story is not the whole of why we talk, but it might be a part of it. A crucial of talk, I want to say, is to adjust the terms of social cooperation. Talk helps adjust the norms we accept together, and the norms we accept, in turn, have much to do with the ways we interact. When I speak of a function here, I mean a biological function: we have to talk in the same way as fish have to swim and birds to fly. Speculation along these lines raises puzzles, and my aim in this article is to say what some of those puzzles are. First, though, let me run through the story more slowly. It is a rough game-theoretic story, but not with the standard application of game theory. Rather, the game theory applies in the first instance in evolutionary terms, along the lines pioneered by John Maynard Smith. Begin with some of the truisms of social life-truisms that crop up both in game theory and in the writings of moral theorists from Hume to Rawls. Life is replete with situations having these two features: they call for cooperation, and they raise problems of distribution. Cooperation we can read broadly as including mutual restraint, and still the structure of these situations remains importantly the same. On the one hand, there are possibilities of disagreement: one or more combinations of ways we might act if each simply does as well for himself as possible given expectations of what the others do. We might ignore each other, or we might actively hurt each other. On the other hand, various possible schemes of cooperation or mutual restraint do better than disagreement: better for every one of us. We can stop attacking each other, draw lines, and stay behind them. Or we can cooperate actively, say, in some form of production that requires specialization. In either case distributive questions arise. We can draw the lines to give me much room and you little, or to give you much room and me little. We can distribute much of our joint product to me and a little to you, or the other way around. Various