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Such simple signaling obviously falls short of anything that is genuinely linguistic. Many (related) features of language are missing from such a system

—compositional grammar, systematic situational variation, stable conventions of use, inference, and so on—but the most fundamental (for our purposes) is that there is nothing like a context-independent content, no force-content distinction. No matter how complexly differentiated the performances become (perhaps imitating a grammar that allows for the production of a huge variety of signaling performances), no matter how many “signaling-signaling” moves come to be licensed, the significance of any signaling performance is thoroughly tied to a particular context of skillful engagement: this hunt, with

these hunters, at this point in the day, for this community, in this condition, and so on. And there does not seem to be any obvious way to remove that context dependency by adding more of the same sort of practical signaling. A linguistic act, by contrast, has a meaning. If I assert that P, this is something that someone else can assert, or disagree with, when not hunting, on a different day, in a different social context.

Imagine that the same utterance (side question: what does that mean? For now, we can suppose that it is a matter of objective sonic similarity) is used in a range of situations. Maybe a group of gatherers/cooks who will be preparing dinner when we return from the hunt are watching from the safety of a nearby hill. They are gathering herbs, vegetables, and firewood. Perhaps their collective activity differs depending on the likely result of the hunt—some animals will be grilled for a long time, others boiled, some cooked with these herbs, some with those—thus explaining why they keep a watch on our activity.

In such a context, one gatherer might call out “boar by oak,” and this may set the group off on the specific boar-meal gathering pattern. The point is that adding this usage by others does nothing to bring us closer to a public meaning for a declarative utterance. In fact, if anything, it takes us further from a common meaning because this pattern of use is so very different. The import of the utterance for the gatherer/cook group is utterly different from that for the hunting group. It is true that the utterance is elicited by the same event in the world, but this is not of use to the pragmatist—we are trying to explain aboutness and content in terms of proprieties of use, not assuming them to characterize use—and if we are looking at the more specific mode of skillful engagement that precedes the utterance, then we see no obvious similarity between the two contexts. Thus either we take this to be a functionally different signal with superficial sonic similarity to the previous—in which case it adds nothing—or we stipulate that it is the same signal, and now have two radically different functions for the same signal.

The problem can be put abstractly as a tension between two core ideas of the sort of contemporary Heideggerian pragmatism one finds running along the Berkeley-Chicago-Pittsburgh axis. The first is that skillful understanding is tied to local contexts of involvement, and the second is that language is to be understood as a particular sort of tool, defined by the way it is taken up in skillful use. Taken together, these two ideas seem to imply that there is no such thing as the noncontextual meaning of a claim, and if this assertion is right, the whole idea of objectivity and truth seems threatened. A proposition is not

true-in-this-context, true-for-me, true-for-us, and so on. It is either true or false simpliciter, and the same goes for meaning. A content is something that anyone can endorse or challenge as true or false, whatever their contextual goals. If I can think that P, then you can think “that’s wrong; ~P.” So the meaning (of a proposition) can’t be something that is defined by its function in a particular context, individual skill, mode of comportment, or anything else. But, as we emphasize in Kukla and Lance 2014, this means that the norms of correctness governing signaling acts are simply the norms of practical utility in that context, not norms of truth. There is no sense in which the utterance has a constitutive goal of getting the world right.⁷ I return to this issue in section 6.

4 Simulation

Our skills are not perfect. This is a simple point that is often lost in discussions of the phenomenology of engaged coping, no doubt because it is so obvious as to be thought not worth discussing. (What is usually at issue and deemed worthy of explanation in the current philosophical context is that unthinking skillful behavior is so successful.) Obvious or not, however, the point has important implications for the development of social practice. Suppose our hunters come upon a young boar hiding in a bush. In an epistemically ideal situation, they would have a clear view of the surrounding area and understand how to proceed. In a less-ideal situation, the heavy vegetation would make it unclear whether a mother boar is around. This makes a difference, of course, since mother boar are formidable adversaries, whereas young ones are easy dinner. (Again, to say that this distinction matters to our hunters’ practice is not to assume that they are engaging in propositional representation. So long as there are behavioral implications to the difference between the two circumspectively ideal situations, then we will expect to see an intermediate form of cautious engagement in nonideal situations.)

A signaling-simulator is a critter capable not only of responding to signaling performances by others in the same way that they would in the presence of receptive uptake of changes in their environment, but also of simulating such responses without acting. That is, signaling-simulators are capable of experiencing and acting on the basis of internal processes that run for a time in

a way similar to processes that form a part of their actual engaged behavior.⁸ Imagine a signaling-simulator on a hunt of the sort just described; he spots a young boar but is in the mode of circumspective uncertainty between the-boar-is-alone mode and the-boar’s-mother-is-nearby mode. Our signaling-simulator can at this point fruitfully engage in something like protoreasoning—again without assuming that there is anything like an explicit grasp of propositional contents, or of propositional contents at all, for that matter. He might—out loud or sotto voce—token the “there is a mother boar” signal and run through a simulation of the next few minutes of the hunt, simulating how he would behave had that signal been received. Perhaps this takes the form of a sensory experience, a visual, emotional, and auditory presentation that goes the way that a normal involved engagement in a hunt would go; or perhaps it involves something else. The engineering of the inner life of signaling-simulators is not my concern here.⁹ What is true of such creatures, by definition, is that they are capable of running through something like a skillful engagement in a hunt, one occasioned by the signaling move “there is a mother boar,” where this likeness is sufficient for them to experience the likely emotional or evaluative upshot of that process.

But this upshot is not certain until it happens. Sometimes our hunting party succeeds in killing a mature mother boar, and sometimes a hunter dies in the attempt, and the others have to flee. The latter happens most often when they rush in to kill a young boar and are surprised by the mother. When they cautiously encircle a mother boar, they generally succeed in killing it, but not always.

With this in mind, imagine that our signaling-simulator engages in a sort of branching simulation process: she first tokens “there is a mother boar hiding”

and then “we attack the baby straightaway.” This simulation leads to images of (or other simulations of) death to tribe members and a failed hunt. This makes our signaling-simulator feel bad. Now she tokens “there is a mother boar” and

“we slowly encircle the area with spears out,” and the simulation ends with a happy and successful killing of two boars and a feeling of great joy. Next she runs two other simulations: one involving “there is no mother boar” and “we slowly encircle.” Result: successful hunt with a bit of wasted time, but an underlying sense of fear. And “there is no mother boar” and “we rush in and kill the young one.” Result: successful hunt with no wasted time—Big Happy.

Finally, let’s add one more step of complication. What the signaling-simulator has done so far is to simulate a simple branching process that we,

from the outside, can represent as in figure 5.3.

Figure 5.3

At the first branch, A₁ represents the decision to rush in against the young boar, and A₂ the decision to slowly encircle it. E₁₁₁ and E₁₂₁ represent the result that there is a mother boar hiding, while E₁₁₂ and E₁₂₂ represent the result that there is not.

Suppose now that a signaling-simulator is what we call a “pragmatic optimizer,” someone wired in such a way as to allow such a process of reasoning to guide its behavior in a pragmatically rational manner. He will be deterred by the Big Ick in the topmost branch—Big Ick, recall, being the negative reaction to a simulation of someone in the group being killed by a boar. The net result of our four simulations and behaviorally guiding reactions, for a pragmatic optimizer, is that he will be motivated to actualize, A₂.