--- abstract: |- What lies on the two sides of the linguistic divide is fairly clear: On one side, you have organisms buffeted about to varying degrees, depending on their degree of autonomy and plasticity, by the states of affairs in the world they live in. On the other side, you have organisms capable of describing and explaining the states of affairs in the world they live in. Language is what distinguishes one side from the other. How did we get here from there? In principle, one can tell a seamless story about how inborn, involuntary communicative signals and voluntary instrumental praxis could have been shaped gradually, through feedback from their consequences, first into analog pantomime with communicative intent, and then into arbitrary category names combined into all-powerful, truth-value-bearing propositions, freed from the iconic "shape" of their referents and able to tell all. The attendant increase in speed and scope in acquiring and sharing information can be demonstrated in simple artificial life simulations that place the old and new means into direct competition: Symbolic theft always beats sensorimotor toil, and the strategy is evolutionarily stable, as long as the bottom-level categories are grounded in sensorimotor toil. altloc: - http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.praxis.htm chapter: ~ commentary: ~ commref: ~ confdates: 3-6 April 2000 conference: The Evolution of Language. Proceedings of 3rd International Conference confloc: Paris contact_email: ~ creators_id: [] creators_name: - family: Harnad given: Stevan honourific: '' lineage: '' date: 2000 date_type: published datestamp: 2001-06-19 department: ~ dir: disk0/00/00/16/19 edit_lock_since: ~ edit_lock_until: ~ edit_lock_user: ~ editors_id: [] editors_name: [] eprint_status: archive eprintid: 1619 fileinfo: /style/images/fileicons/text_html.png;/1619/1/harnad00.praxis.htm full_text_status: public importid: ~ institution: ~ isbn: ~ ispublished: pub issn: ~ item_issues_comment: [] item_issues_count: 0 item_issues_description: [] item_issues_id: [] item_issues_reported_by: [] item_issues_resolved_by: [] item_issues_status: [] item_issues_timestamp: [] item_issues_type: [] keywords: 'language evolution, symbolic grounding, iconicity, imitation, iconicity, propositions' lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:54:42 latitude: ~ longitude: ~ metadata_visibility: show note: ~ number: ~ pagerange: 118-125 pubdom: FALSE publication: ~ publisher: ~ refereed: FALSE referencetext: |- Andrews, J., Livingston, K. & Harnad, S. 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