Perhaps the idea is something like “Some species had to get there first. That species will be the ‘first observer’, in some meaningful sense. Whenever that happened, and whatever species became that first observer, there’d likely be a while in which no other species had language, and that species wondered why that was so.”
I think this is the idea. You’re right that it doesn’t change our estimate of how difficult language is from the non-existence of a second species with language; the thing that it does is point out that “even if you observe 1 element of a rare set, you shouldn’t think the set is common instead of rare, because you were conditioning on observing at least one element of that set.” [That is, we’re not seeing any of the planets that have life but no language, or directly observing any of the 50 kiloyear time periods when Earth was one of those.]
(Not sure the following makes sense—I think I find anthropics hard to think about.)
Interesting. This sounds to me like a reason why the anthropic principle suggests language may been harder to evolve than one might think, because we think we’ve got a data point of it evolving (which we do) and that this suggests it was likely to evolve by now and on Eath, but in fact it’s just that we wouldn’t be thinking about the question until/unless it evolved. So it could be that in the majority of cases it wouldn’t have evolved (or not yet?), but we don’t “observe” those.
But I thought the OP was using anthropics in the other direction, since that paragraph follows:
If language isn’t a particularly difficult cognitive capacity to acquire, why don’t we see more animal species with language? (emphasis added)
Basically, I interpreted the argument as something like “This is why the fact no other species has evolved language may be strong evidence that language is difficult.” And it sounds like you’re providing an interesting argument like “This is why the fact that we evolved language may not provide strong evidence that language is (relatively) easy.”
Perhaps the OP was indeed doing similar, though; perhaps the idea was “Actually, it’s not the case that language isn’t a particularly difficult cognitive capacity to acquire.”
But this all still seems disjointed from “Since we shouldn’t expect to see more than one dominant species at a time”, which is true, but in context seems to imply that the argument involves the idea that we shouldn’t see a second species to evolve language while we have it. Which seems like a separate matter.
I think this is the idea. You’re right that it doesn’t change our estimate of how difficult language is from the non-existence of a second species with language; the thing that it does is point out that “even if you observe 1 element of a rare set, you shouldn’t think the set is common instead of rare, because you were conditioning on observing at least one element of that set.” [That is, we’re not seeing any of the planets that have life but no language, or directly observing any of the 50 kiloyear time periods when Earth was one of those.]
(Not sure the following makes sense—I think I find anthropics hard to think about.)
Interesting. This sounds to me like a reason why the anthropic principle suggests language may been harder to evolve than one might think, because we think we’ve got a data point of it evolving (which we do) and that this suggests it was likely to evolve by now and on Eath, but in fact it’s just that we wouldn’t be thinking about the question until/unless it evolved. So it could be that in the majority of cases it wouldn’t have evolved (or not yet?), but we don’t “observe” those.
But I thought the OP was using anthropics in the other direction, since that paragraph follows:
Basically, I interpreted the argument as something like “This is why the fact no other species has evolved language may be strong evidence that language is difficult.” And it sounds like you’re providing an interesting argument like “This is why the fact that we evolved language may not provide strong evidence that language is (relatively) easy.”
Perhaps the OP was indeed doing similar, though; perhaps the idea was “Actually, it’s not the case that language isn’t a particularly difficult cognitive capacity to acquire.”
But this all still seems disjointed from “Since we shouldn’t expect to see more than one dominant species at a time”, which is true, but in context seems to imply that the argument involves the idea that we shouldn’t see a second species to evolve language while we have it. Which seems like a separate matter.