Gossip as multi-level abduction

the inferential ground of linguistic niche construction

pp. 111-144

in: Tommaso Bertolotti, Patterns of rationality, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

As presented in the introductory chapter of this part, cognitive niche construction is strictly connected with the need to lessen the unpredictability characterizing most human endeavors: as posited by niche construction theorists, this gives rise to a new kind of pressure resulting from the modified environment . If living in groups and increased sociality are, for instance, examples of cognitive niche construction aimed at improving fitness and welfare, they produce a new series of drawbacks liked to the unpredictability of human behavior. Hence, a new kind of niche construction must reduce this further unpredictability by making human behavior more predictable and controllable. It is interesting to connect recent studies concerning the coevolution of language and enculturation (Castro et al., Biol Philos 19:712–737 2004) with the emergence of assessors and curators overlooking the maintenance of a give niche, ecological at first, then more and more cognitive. It is in this perspective, I suggest, that it could be interesting to frame, and speculate on, the recent re-evaluation of gossip. Dunbar 's famous hypothesis (Dunbar, Rev Gen Psychol 8(2):100–110 2004 ) that gossip developed as an evolutionary assorting device (creating bonds but boundaries as well) can be understood as the selection and formation of the fundamental ground for supporting a cognitive niche: language could in fact mediate, in an unprecedented way, the diffusion and elaboration of information about peers involved in the perpetration of the niche. Thus, language can effectively be considered as a super-niche (Clark, Theoria 54:255–268 2005), and as projecting a zero-level cognitive niche which scaffolds all subsequent niches, just because it is able to organize and maintain the human group s necessary for niche construction.