The costs of religious ‘cheap talk’: the semiotics of interpretant driven costly signaling within contested communicative environments
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent decades scholars of religion have used costly signaling theory to advance our understanding of seemingly wasteful behaviors by showing how they may function as in-group signals, enhancing social solidarity and cooperation. However, most analyses have assumed that speech and other forms of ‘cheap talk’ like common adornments are too cheap to function as costly signals. This article argues that integrating recent work on the multiple mechanisms of honest signaling and paying closer attention to the semiotic analyses of Charles Peirce, especially his focus on interpretants, allows us better to assess the relationships between signal costs and culturally heterogeneous communicative environments. In religiously contested communicative environments ostensibly cheap signs may function as costly signals. The article develops a theory of interpretant driven costly signaling and lays out the conditions for religious ‘cheap talk’ and inexpensive adornment to function as costly signals in religiously plural communicative environments.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it