Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Topoi https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09908-3 On the Genealogy and Potential Abuse of Assertoric Norms Mitchell Green 1 Accepted: 17 March 2023 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2023 Abstract After briefy laying out a cultural-evolutionary approach to speech acts (Sects. 1–2), I argue that the notion of commitment at play in assertion and related speech acts comprises multiple dimensions (Sect. 3). Distinguishing such dimensions ena- bles us to hypothesize evolutionary precursors to the modern practice of assertion, and facilitates a new way of posing the question whether, and if so to what extent, speech acts are conventional (Sect. 4). Our perspective also equips us to consider how a modern speaker might employ an illocutionary analogue of A.N. Prior’s “runabout-inference ticket”, in which the pragmatic “introduction rules” for utterances correspond to evolutionary precursors of modern speech acts, but in which the “elimination rules” correspond to their modern descendants (Sect. 5). Such behavior would be abusive, though not in a way readily discernible without an evolutionary perspective on speech acts that attends to the dimensions of commitment that they encompass. Such behavior also raises the question how we may safeguard against it in public discourse, and I close (Sect. 6) with some suggestions for doing so. Keywords Speech acts · Cultural evolution · Inferentialism · Linguistic conventions · Assertion · Speech act norms 1 Cultural Evolution: Basic Concepts The core idea of cultural evolution (or CE in what follows), as traditionally propounded, is that behavior patterns in a social group may be accounted for in non-genetic terms as being adaptations to that group’s environment. 1 Such pat- terns are transmitted by means of learning rather than geneti- cally. As such the transmission process may run through parents (vertical), but also through teachers, mentors, and other high-status community members (oblique), as well as through peers (horizontal), as opposed to the entirely vertical transmission found genetic evolution (Creanza et al. 2017). Both the “teaching” and “learning” processes emphasized in CE might be done implicitly, so that the “teacher” might not be intending to convey information, 2 and the “learner” might acquire new information or skills without trying to or real- izing that she is doing so. Also, although the explanation is in non-genetic terms, the phenomena to be explained might interact in interesting ways with genetic changes. That is part of the story about, for instance, the evolution of lactose tolerance among Western adults (Ibid, p. 7783). To be explained in CE terms, the behaviors thus trans- mitted must give the community in which they propagate a survival advantage over other communities that are oth- erwise similar including earlier versions of that same com- munity. CE would accordingly ofer explanations of such human practices as sophisticated hunting techniques and the construction of tools. It could also provide explanations of patterns of behavior not essentially bound up with artifacts such as incest taboos and conversational turn-taking. Either way it might account for why anatomically modern humans survived over the last 100,000 years while, say, Neander- thals did not. It might also account for why certain human groups have been more successful than others as measured * Mitchell Green Mitchell.green@uconn.edu 1 University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA 1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Norms of Pub- lic Argument: A Speech Act Perspective Workshop in Lisbon, Portu- gal, June, 2022. At the Annual Meeting of the Polish Cognitive Lin- guistics Society, October, 2022; at the EVOPRAG group November, 2022; and at the SPAGAD group in December, 2022. My thanks to audience members for their insights on those occasions. My thanks also to two anonymous referees for this journal, as well as the Edi- tors of the Special Issue on Norms of Public Argument, for their com- ments on an earlier draft. 2 I use the term ‘information’ and cognates in such a way as to not guarantee factivity: an object may convey the information that P, even though P is not the case. Bearing information is, following Skyrms (2010), a matter of raising probabilities. Conveying information to a