Metalinguistic signalling for coordination amongst social agents

This paper argues that critics of the established paradigm in linguistics exaggerate if they go so far as to doubt that natural language are systems for digital signalling. On the contrary, explaining how digital signalling is possible amongst creatures-H. sapiens-whose brains are probably not serial processors remains a primary task for cognitive science. In the context of accounts of mind based on the distributed cognition model, the appropriate technology for this task is evolutionary game theory. I show how evolutionary game theory can be used to state Dennett's theory of the relationship between language and the etiology of the human narrative self more precisely than Dennett has done. I conclude by responding to some questions posed by Clark (2002) on the extent to which Dennett's theory of the self implies that possession of language confers unique cognitive capacities on humans. It does so in suggesting that, in terms of the view defended in this paper, humans can use digital signalling to play strategic games that have as outcomes games in which the players are transformed into agents with different utility functions and, hence, new identities.