ИСТИНА

It is widely assumed that perceivers fulfill their half of the Gricean equation in the animal kingdom (Fitch 2010) while signalers do not, because they produce signals unintentionally (Bar-On, Moore 2017). But, in fact, no intentionality is necessary in this case because index signals (as most animal signals are) are honest and relevant by definition, while natural selection eliminates signals that fail to be recognized because of being either not informative or not perspicuous enough. Thus, all communication systems can be viewed as having evolved not for transmitting but for acquiring information (Burlak 2017). A pool of conspecifics ready to acquire information irrespective of its intendedness form a niche where the most easily recognizable signals are favored by natural selection. For example, an individual whose aggressive mood can easily be detected has better chances to avoid a traumatic physical contact. This is a solution for the problem of gradual change in the evolution of human language: if we assume that natural selection favors not production but interpretation, then any minor behavior feature that may give a cue to the perceiving individual would be useful because it would help such an individual to obtain new information and thus to choose a more appropriate behavioral program. So, even if the first precursors of language utterances in the genus Homo were inarticulate and unintentional, they must still have been favored by natural selection. Therefore, the human mind (its “System 1”, see Kahneman 2011) is predisposed to treat any utterance as following the Gricean maxims. In this sense, human language is far from being an optimal means of communication: the smarter is the listener, the less restrictions are necessary for the speaker. One can compare here the claim by Chomsky (2002, 2010) that language evolved not for communication but rather for internal thought.