Deception, Mimicry, and Meaning

Deception, Mimicry, and Meaning

If mimicry lies somewhere in the evolutionary history of meaning,[1] and mimicry involves deception, then deception is at the heart of meaning. Language is custom-made for lying. Speech has lying in its DNA, literally. The octopus can change its color and texture to mimic its environment to an uncanny degree, the better to fool a potential predator. I see no reason to deny that this is a conscious intentional act on the octopus’s part: it is trying to deceive another animal, to produce a false belief (or some equivalent). It is telling a lie. It isn’t under the illusion that it has become part of its environment; it knows quite well that it is still a squishy tasty octopus. Butterflies deceive with their wing designs, the better to survive in a world of butterfly eaters. Some predators mimic their prey in order to get in close. Some male animals impersonate females so as to elude the notice of the presiding alpha male, thereby gaining mating opportunities. We also have stick insects, parrots, and cuckoos. Deceiving is a tried-and-true means of surviving and reproducing. Humans disguise themselves in war and love (camouflage and make-up, respectively), impersonate others, play mimetic games, wear wigs, dress up, etc. Human life is rife with mimetic deception. With it we communicate falsehoods constantly. We could even say that genes are mimics, copy-cats: they copy each other as they are passed down the ancestral line. The mimetic gene. Genes can’t survive without the power to imitate other genes. The biological world is an imitation game.

Now suppose we have persuaded ourselves that meaning in human languages depends on mimetic neural machinery and overt behavior; in short, that speech acts are imitative. To make things simple, let’s suppose that the speech act is (perhaps covertly) mimetic (think onomatopoeia). The phonology mimics the phonology of other speakers, and the meaning itself is constituted by acts of mimicry, internal and external, past and present, original or derivative (for concreteness you might think of it as an imitative act of the imagination). Then we can draw the following conclusion: meaning is inherently deceptive—not all the time, to be sure, but potentially, dispositionally, intrinsically. It is built for lying, designed for it. It can easily slip into lying mode. But isn’t that exactly what we observe about human speech? it functions as a powerful organ of deception. It isn’t as if sentences stubbornly refuse to tell a lie; they are practically on the point of it all the time. Language is not designed with truthfulness in mind; it is designed with lying in mind. It is really good at lying. It has an uncanny ability to deceive, like the octopus’s epidermis. And that is not surprising, given that its roots lie in deceptive mimicry.

Did speech evolve precisely so as to deceive—is that why meaning exists? Not to inform, but to misinform. We can imagine such a scenario: a social animal striving to survive in a world of competitors, conspecific and interspecific. Lying is a way of life (part of the species’ “form of life”). Bartering, mating, befriending, stealing, tricking, bull-shitting, manipulating, exploiting: all these will naturally call on a person’s ability to tell a convincing lie, of varying shades of gray. Those with the “gift of the (deceptive) gab” will win out in the struggle for survival—the smooth talkers, the oracular fibbers. Speech is power, and power requires persuasion. It could be done with non-linguistic imitation perhaps, but language streamlines the process; it is the greatest engine of deception ever invented by nature—even better than the octopus’s skin! Thus, the human brain assigns precious space to language and its deceptive machinery. True, we sometimes use it non-deceptively—we call that “teaching”—but we also, and primarily, use it manipulatively, employing our prior mimetic prowess. This would explain why only we have the awesome power of language at our disposal; for we are the deceptive animal par excellence. We live by strategic deception. Language is cognitively expensive, so a species will not adopt it lightly; but our social existence came to depend on our ability to mislead and deceive and misdirect. Call this the “deception hypothesis”: meaning evolved in humans in order to prop up and promote our deceptive proclivities (it wasn’t for the poetry or the altruism). We deceive, therefore meaning exists. Language has allowed us to become unbelievable liars (very believable ones). We can out-deceive all-comers. Meaning is saturated with the bitter juice of deception. A proposition is a lie waiting to happen. The theory of meaning is therefore the theory of linguistic mimetic deception. Syntax and phonetics are the enablers of mendacious meaning. Children start lying as soon as they start talking; they aren’t stupid, they realize what kind of power they now possess. Semantic knowledge is knowledge of the possibilities of deception—you just have to produce a few sounds in a grammatical order and you can control the world! To mean is to have power over other people’s minds—the greatest power of all. Propaganda is just the natural upshot of the mimetic history of human speech. Language is built on deceptive foundations. It is as if the octopus had a language that evolved from its powers of mimicry; that language would have deception built into its foundations. Thus, the mimicry theory of meaning leads to the deception hypothesis. We have lying in our linguistic bones. Meaning is fundamentally unethical.[2]

[1] See my “Meaning Explained (Finally)”.

[2] This isn’t to say it can’t be ethical; it clearly can. Some of us are more ethical speakers than others. But the theory I am sketching awards pride of place to the deceptive powers of meaning: this is what recommended meaning to amoral natural selection—what gave speakers the edge in the fight for survival. It wasn’t that speaking could benefit other people (how would that help me?); it was that speaking served the speaker’s interests by allowing a measure of control over others. Crudely, speaking enables me to enlist you in my survival plans, by hook or by lying crook. The gene for meaning is a selfish gene, and lying is just one tool at its disposal (a particularly sharp one). Meaning is a device (an adaptation, a weapon) for misleading individuals with whom I am competing. No doubt this produced an evolutionary arms race in which humans tried to out-deceive each other linguistically. As it were, Shakespeare is the alpha male (Jane Austen is the alpha female). Insincerity is like a sharp tooth—good for getting your way in a ruthless world. Ethics pits itself against meaning, inter alia.