And sometimes a fancier word has a sound that’s better for your purposes for some reason
In non-poetry uses, I think you’d be hard-pressed to identify a word sounding good over alternatives that doesn’t have to do with subconcious signaling. Sure, I sometimes smile when I listen to lyrical alliteration, but don’t you smile since it signals smarts and sophistication? And OJ’s lawyers put a rhyme to a use most sublime when they said “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit”, but surely it’s a good sign when a potential ally can make their sounds align.
Of course some poets sometimes may be signalling sophistication too.
Since when has poetry (or most art for that matter) been anything but signaling?
I don’t at all deny that felicitous word choices may serve a signalling purpose. But e.g. if OJ’s lawyers correctly guessed that the jury would find their rhyming nonsense persuasive because of the rhyme, then it seems to me that they used those word choices for a non-signalling purpose. Maybe in some sense they used brain mechanisms whose underlying function is signalling-related, but I don’t think that’s relevant here; unless I misunderstood, the point of your argument about signalling was something like “we have all these words only for the sake of signalling; this is a sufficient explanation for their use in our language; so it will do us no harm for non-signalling purposes to throw them out”, and if some use of those words co-opts our signalling machinery for other purposes then the conclusion no longer holds.
I don’t really know how to address a bare unevidenced unargued-for claim that something is “nothing but signalling”, but it seems to me that the arts in general are not pure signalling. The fact that many people listen to music even when they’re doing it through earphones and no one else can tell what they’re listening to is some evidence of that, although of course it’s not conclusive (and I don’t see how anything could be).
“From the inside” it certainly seems that plenty of poetry is moving, plenty of paintings are pleasant to look at in ways that resemble (e.g.) the ways some actual landscapes, people, etc., are pleasant to look at, and so forth. I would say that that’s already enough to show that these arts aren’t only signalling. Depending on exactly what the proposition “X is nothing but signaling” means to you, you may well disagree; if so, and if you can give me an idea of what kind of evidence could possibly convince you otherwise, then I’m willing to argue the case :-).
In non-poetry uses, I think you’d be hard-pressed to identify a word sounding good over alternatives that doesn’t have to do with subconcious signaling. Sure, I sometimes smile when I listen to lyrical alliteration, but don’t you smile since it signals smarts and sophistication? And OJ’s lawyers put a rhyme to a use most sublime when they said “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit”, but surely it’s a good sign when a potential ally can make their sounds align.
Since when has poetry (or most art for that matter) been anything but signaling?
I don’t at all deny that felicitous word choices may serve a signalling purpose. But e.g. if OJ’s lawyers correctly guessed that the jury would find their rhyming nonsense persuasive because of the rhyme, then it seems to me that they used those word choices for a non-signalling purpose. Maybe in some sense they used brain mechanisms whose underlying function is signalling-related, but I don’t think that’s relevant here; unless I misunderstood, the point of your argument about signalling was something like “we have all these words only for the sake of signalling; this is a sufficient explanation for their use in our language; so it will do us no harm for non-signalling purposes to throw them out”, and if some use of those words co-opts our signalling machinery for other purposes then the conclusion no longer holds.
I don’t really know how to address a bare unevidenced unargued-for claim that something is “nothing but signalling”, but it seems to me that the arts in general are not pure signalling. The fact that many people listen to music even when they’re doing it through earphones and no one else can tell what they’re listening to is some evidence of that, although of course it’s not conclusive (and I don’t see how anything could be).
“From the inside” it certainly seems that plenty of poetry is moving, plenty of paintings are pleasant to look at in ways that resemble (e.g.) the ways some actual landscapes, people, etc., are pleasant to look at, and so forth. I would say that that’s already enough to show that these arts aren’t only signalling. Depending on exactly what the proposition “X is nothing but signaling” means to you, you may well disagree; if so, and if you can give me an idea of what kind of evidence could possibly convince you otherwise, then I’m willing to argue the case :-).