Solving the Partition Problem: Signaling Games and the Cost-Based Perception Model.
Signaling games have been widely used as a powerful theoretical tool for investigating the propositional content of signals in the evolution of language and communication. Although significant progress has been made, information-theoretic approaches to content within the sender-receiver framework fa...
| Published in: | Erkenntnis Vol. 91; no. 4; pp. 2035 - 2063 |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | Article |
| Published: |
Springer Nature
Apr2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| Summary: | Signaling games have been widely used as a powerful theoretical tool for investigating the propositional content of signals in the evolution of language and communication. Although significant progress has been made, information-theoretic approaches to content within the sender-receiver framework face what Jonathan Birch calls the "partition problem." In this article, we address this problem by integrating signaling games with cost-based perception to model the internal state of an organism as it perceives objects in its environment. We propose a simple model that shows how an organism can spontaneously learn to partition external states in different ways through reinforcement learning, thereby offering a promising solution to the partition problem. |
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