Antonovsky A.Yu., Barash R.E. The evolution of communication - science and language. In: Social Evolutionism Today: towards the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex : Monograph ...

Abstract

The authores apply to the contemporary methodology of the general theory of evolution in order to analyse the language-phenomenon and to solve the non-trivial problem, that is common as to the philosophy of language and consciousness as to the communication theory. They study the problem of ambivalence of meanings. The authors put forward a hypothesis that the main evolutionary mechanism that stabilizes key communicative meanings is the propositional attitudes that used to be a kind of carriers or frameworks of typical communicative environments, indirect contexts in which propositional content is localized. The authors set themselves the task of resolving the paradox associated with the progress of scientific knowledge, consisting in the fact that, on the one hand, science formulates true and objective judgments, and only this distinguishes it from the world of judgments of value, on the other hand, the lifetime of scientific truths is extremely small. The way out of this paradox, according to the authors, can be offered by the socio-evolutionary interpretation of science, where the “criterion” of the best (or more justified) theory will be the ability to respond to the challenges of the external environment, to which the best theory adapts better and, as a result - is selected.

Content (in russ)