“non-verbal bargaining is the default from which explicit bargaining emerges when it’s insufficient”
The point I’m gesturing at is more abstract than this—it’s not that tacit bargaining is literally prior to explicit bargaining, in the sense that everyone always starts tacit and then resorts to explicit if that fails. I’m saying that tacit bargaining is “conceptually” prior to explicit bargaining; i.e.:
We can observe a world where tacit bargaining takes place without even the possibility of explicit bargaining (i.e. the world of cats).
However, (I claim) we cannot imagine the opposite. Explicit bargaining cannot take place without the background possibility of tacit bargaining, because otherwise the words used in the attempted explicit bargaining would have no meaning.
Is there an example you can share between humans who otherwise could engage in explicit bargaining that reinforces the non-verbal bargaining you observed in the cats?
I haven’t actually read this, but there’s a book on this subject, The Territorial Imperative, whose Wikipedia summary is interesting and provocative. The author argues that human territorial behavior is essentially the same as that of animals, and so the verbiage we pile on top of it is less relevant to understanding what goes on in human conflicts than observations of animals.
Assuming the claim is true, where do you go from here?
Potential answers:
This can motivate us to look more closely at animal behavior and evolutionary history to help us understand how humans behave in territorial conflicts (as alluded to in that book I mentioned) - because if human territorial behavior is not fundamentally linguistic in nature, then there’s no reason to suppose it’s unique to humans.
By contrast, in an area of human behavior that clearly is linguistic, e.g. storytelling, studying animals won’t tell us much.
The problems of philosophy are iatrogenic[1]. So maybe if you haven’t spent a lot of time getting yourself confused by debating metaethics, this conclusion seems trite to you; but for some of us it helps dissolve the confusions we acquired earlier. (For example, I used to favor the position that moral statements are purely logical, analytic truths like those of mathematics, and so any attempt to justify them by empirical observation or “human nature” is immediately suspect.)
More speculatively: People have been talking recently about LLMs engaging in negotiations. But LLMs are not animals, but purely linguistic entities. So what they’re doing may differ from what humans do in some important way.
The point I’m gesturing at is more abstract than this—it’s not that tacit bargaining is literally prior to explicit bargaining, in the sense that everyone always starts tacit and then resorts to explicit if that fails. I’m saying that tacit bargaining is “conceptually” prior to explicit bargaining; i.e.:
We can observe a world where tacit bargaining takes place without even the possibility of explicit bargaining (i.e. the world of cats).
However, (I claim) we cannot imagine the opposite. Explicit bargaining cannot take place without the background possibility of tacit bargaining, because otherwise the words used in the attempted explicit bargaining would have no meaning.
I haven’t actually read this, but there’s a book on this subject, The Territorial Imperative, whose Wikipedia summary is interesting and provocative. The author argues that human territorial behavior is essentially the same as that of animals, and so the verbiage we pile on top of it is less relevant to understanding what goes on in human conflicts than observations of animals.
Thank you for clarifying, that helps.
I think this is true, but if this is true, then that hints that the claim may not be falsifiable.
I say that not to diminish the claim in any way, but I’m not sure how to apply something you can’t test.
Assuming the claim is true, where do you go from here?
Potential answers:
This can motivate us to look more closely at animal behavior and evolutionary history to help us understand how humans behave in territorial conflicts (as alluded to in that book I mentioned) - because if human territorial behavior is not fundamentally linguistic in nature, then there’s no reason to suppose it’s unique to humans.
By contrast, in an area of human behavior that clearly is linguistic, e.g. storytelling, studying animals won’t tell us much.
The problems of philosophy are iatrogenic [1] . So maybe if you haven’t spent a lot of time getting yourself confused by debating metaethics, this conclusion seems trite to you; but for some of us it helps dissolve the confusions we acquired earlier. (For example, I used to favor the position that moral statements are purely logical, analytic truths like those of mathematics, and so any attempt to justify them by empirical observation or “human nature” is immediately suspect.)
More speculatively: People have been talking recently about LLMs engaging in negotiations. But LLMs are not animals, but purely linguistic entities. So what they’re doing may differ from what humans do in some important way.
See also Aaronson: “the world needs good philosophers, if for no other reason than to refute bad philosophers!”
Those are really clarifying! Thanks for taking the time to draw those out.