Language games and cultural evolution

Catalog description

This is a course about how language and communication can be thought of as games. When people use language to communicate, they are following rules to perform actions that have an effect on the world, including other people. These actions might achieve goals, and they might prompt further actions, and so on. Perhaps more interestingly, these communicative actions can, over time, lead to changes in the environment and even the rules of the game itself. In other words, the playing field changes dynamically as a result of the actions performed on it. This way of looking at language is not new, and this is also a course about how thinking about language this way can inspire (and has inspired) formal models and laboratory experiments that help us to understand how humans use language and how it evolves. In doing so we will also situate this approach to studying language in a broader context of studying the cultural evolution of complex behavioral systems more generally.