"It is entirely consistent with natural selection that humans would possess a language ability," Dr. Bloom said.
Key problems in the first category include the question of what it means to possess a language, the use of language in understanding and conceptualization, and the nature of communication and interpretation.
At a very general level, what drives both Quine and Lewis is the assumption that to possess a language is to have an ability.
Language learners who possessed a higher level of language proficiency demonstrated a higher level of knowledge of formulaic sequences than language learners who possessed a lower level of language proficiency.
Moreover, a being with such a network of propositional attitudes would be capable of high level thought, and therefore be possessed of a language in which to do this thinking.
As Marina Warner, chair of the judges for this year's Man Booker International prize, put it recently: "Possessing a world language can make us oddly provincial in outlook".
Similarly, the need for games to possess a universal language which must be understood by millions of users worldwide necessitates a reliance on traditional conventions and a rejection of ambiguity.
"Possessing a world language can make us oddly provincial in outlook," she will say, as she reflects on the two years she has spent reading fiction from around the world to judge the Man Booker International.
According to this view, stingless bees (Melipona) might not even possess a dance language, since they live in small, less-organized colonies (that is, they are lower on the phylogenetic grade of social complexity than honeybees).
It is argued that such alternate versions should be explicitly genre-based, possess a strong language focus, and include at least some instances of comparison of English and LI genre exemplars in order to develop the learners' abilities of making more conscious selections and choices in writing.
The thought experiment hypothesizes a community of proto-humans who lack concepts of inner psychological states, although they possess a complex language for describing and explaining objects and events in the world.
