“it is impossible for there to be a language in which most sentences were lies” Is it? If 40% of the time people truthfully described what colour a rock was, and 60% of the time they picked a random colour to falsely describe it as (perhaps some speakers benefit from obscuring the rock’s true colour but derive no benefit from false belief in any particular colour), we would have a case where most sentences describing the rock were lies and yet listening to someone describing an unknown rock still allowed you to usefully update your priors. That ability to benefit from communication seems like all that should be necessary for a language to survive.
What if the lies are biased. And they involve observations about an event you cannot check or it is expensive to do so. As an example, how many ribs do men and women have.
“it is impossible for there to be a language in which most sentences were lies”
Is it? If 40% of the time people truthfully described what colour a rock was, and 60% of the time they picked a random colour to falsely describe it as (perhaps some speakers benefit from obscuring the rock’s true colour but derive no benefit from false belief in any particular colour), we would have a case where most sentences describing the rock were lies and yet listening to someone describing an unknown rock still allowed you to usefully update your priors. That ability to benefit from communication seems like all that should be necessary for a language to survive.
Agreed. Good counter-example.
I’m very curious as to whether Zac has a way of reformulating his claim to save it.
What if the lies are biased. And they involve observations about an event you cannot check or it is expensive to do so. As an example, how many ribs do men and women have.