I bet this is a side effect of having a large pool of bounded rational agents that all need to communicate with each other, but not necessarily frequently. When two agents only interact briefly, neither agent has enough data to work out what the “meaning” of the other’s words. Each word could mean too many different things. So you can probably show that under the right circumstances, it’s beneficial for agents in a pool to have a protocol that maps speech-acts to inferences the other party should make about reality (amongst other things, such as other actions). For instance, if all agents have shared interests, but only interact briefly with limited bandwidth, both agents would have an incentive to implement either side of the protocol. Furthermore, it makes sense for this protocol to be standardized, because the more standard the protocol, the less bandwidth and resources the agents will need to spend working out the quirks of each others protocol.
This is my model of what languages are.
Now that you have a well defined map from speech-acts to inferences, the notion of lying becomes meaningful. Lying is just when you use speech acts and the current protocol to shift another agents map of reality in a direction that does not correspond to your own map of reality.
I bet this is a side effect of having a large pool of bounded rational agents that all need to communicate with each other, but not necessarily frequently. When two agents only interact briefly, neither agent has enough data to work out what the “meaning” of the other’s words. Each word could mean too many different things. So you can probably show that under the right circumstances, it’s beneficial for agents in a pool to have a protocol that maps speech-acts to inferences the other party should make about reality (amongst other things, such as other actions). For instance, if all agents have shared interests, but only interact briefly with limited bandwidth, both agents would have an incentive to implement either side of the protocol. Furthermore, it makes sense for this protocol to be standardized, because the more standard the protocol, the less bandwidth and resources the agents will need to spend working out the quirks of each others protocol.
This is my model of what languages are.
Now that you have a well defined map from speech-acts to inferences, the notion of lying becomes meaningful. Lying is just when you use speech acts and the current protocol to shift another agents map of reality in a direction that does not correspond to your own map of reality.