The Domestication of Language: Cultural Evolution and the Uniqueness of the Human Animal

Where do words get their meaning? Is the relation between things and the sounds associated with them a matter of chance, or was the evolutionary process of language much more deliberate? In this academically rigorous and original book, Cloud (philosophy, Princeton Univ.; The Lily) builds and sustains an analogy of Darwin's classical arguments—he suggests that our language is less like natural selection, in which words get their meaning through a series of adaptations in the face of chance mutations, than like a string of artificial selection, in which the best parts of language are nurtured and propagated, similar to how the best carrier pigeons, or sheepdogs, are mated together. The definitions of words are constantly changing, and their sense is a process of deliberate and rational choice. Cloud adds to the work of David Lewis in Convention and the investigations of Brian Skyrms on the evolution of names and meanings to construct a new and important account.