All that glitters is not gold: The false-symbol problem in archaeology.

Stibbard-Hawkes forcefully alerts us to the pitfall of false-negative reasoning in symbolic archaeology. We highlight the twin problem of false-positive reasoning in what we call the "false-symbol problem." False symbols are intuitively special entities that, owing to their non-utilitarian nature, invite symbolic interpretation.

Expanding the causal menu: An interventionist perspective on explaining human behavioural evolution.

Theorists of human evolution are interested in understanding major shifts in human behavioural capacities (e.g. the creation of a novel technological industry, such as the Acheulean).

Memetics and the Parallel Architecture.

The evolution of human communication and culture is among the most significant-and challenging-questions we face in attempting to understand the evolution of our species. This article takes up two frameworks for theorizing about human communication and culture, namely, Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture of the human language faculty, and the cultural evolutionary framework of Memetics. The aim is to show that the two frameworks uniquely complement one another in some theoretically important ways.

The Agential View of Misfortune.

In many traditional, small-scale societies, death and other misfortunes are commonly explained as a result of others' malign occult agency. Here, we call this family of epistemic tendencies "the agential view of misfortune." After reviewing several ethnographic case studies that illustrate this view, we argue that its origins and stability are puzzling from an evolutionary perspective.

The evolution of hierarchically structured communication.

Human language sentences are standardly understood as exhibiting considerable hierarchical structure: they can and typically do contain parts that in turn contain parts, etc. In other words, sentences are thought to generally exhibit significant nested part-whole structure. As far as we can tell, this is not a feature of the gestural or vocal communication systems of our great ape relatives.

Using the sender-receiver framework to understand the evolution of languages-of-thought.

This commentary seeks to supplement the case Quilty-Dunn et al. make for the psychological reality of languages-of-thought (LoTs) in two ways. First, it focuses on the reduced physical demands which LoT architectures often make compared to alternative architectures.

Not by signalling alone: Music's mosaicism undermines the search for a proper function.

Mehr et al. seek to explain music's evolution in terms of a unitary proper function - signalling cooperative intent - which they cash out in two guises, coalition signalling and (allo)parental attention signalling. Although we recognize the role signalling almost certainly played in the evolution of music, we reject "ultimate" causal explanations which focus on a unidirectional, narrow range of causal factors.

On Scott-Phillips' General Account of Communication.

The purpose of this paper is to critically engage with a recent attempt by Thom Scott-Phillips to offer a general account of communication. As a general account, it is intended to apply equally well to both non-human and human interactions which are prima facie communicative in character. However, so far, Scott-Phillips has provided little detail regarding how his account is supposed to apply to the latter set of cases.