There are very real situations where signaling actually explains something. Mostly they involve people doing something that seems irrational or hypocritical on the surface; the hidden variable is of course social approval. In other situations, however, 'People do X to signal they do X' really is just a complicated way of saying 'People like to do X'. Once you have the action, it really doesn't make any sense to bother figuring out why.

It doesn't explain porn. Most people watch porn in isolation and never talk about it so it can't be based on signaling. Hence it doesn't explain everything.

It's valuable because it explains some actions that may be foreign to the observer. It may not be particularly common in most people's lives, and it may not occur to some people at all, but it's especially true in some politics or business relationships that are incomprehensible if you don't have it as a tool.

I really don't see how a theory that can't be invalidated is useful for anything, other than a rhetorical device. Apart from a thought experiment along the lines of The Flying Spaghetti Monster, what good is a theory that can never be tested? It's a tautology.

Well, you can also use it to transmute your feelings of inadequacy into feelings of cleverness and insight.

It's not that life's passing me by as I punch a keyboard at a big multinational, no siree, it's those those people posting pictures of themselves having fun who are the real fools.

I find it hard to believe you have never seen social signaling 'in the wild'.

A lot of behaviour that otherwise seems nonsensical can be explained by social signaling.

Why do rich people often spend tons of money on things they don't need or use? To impress other rich people.

You are describing a theory of "some things are signalling", which is pretty different from "everything is signalling"

Yes I know. The person I was replying to seemed to not believe in signaling in general though.

I find it hard to believe you have never seen the flying spaghetti monster 'in the wild'.

A lot of behaviour that otherwise seems nonsensical can be explained by the flying spaghetti monster.

Why do rich people often spend tons of money on things they don't need or use? To impress the flying spaghetti monster.

This is not equivalent since it is reliant on the existence of the FSM, which is not usually taken to be proven, unlike (hopefully) the existence of other people.

How is the existence of other people proof of signalling theory? I believe you exist. Signalling theory could, for example, say I am holding up this argument on the internet because I want to show others how persistent I am. How does your existence prove or disprove why I am saying what I am saying?

But it doesn't explain anything. It's ability to explain is entirely unproven.

The social sciences for a long time were just ancient white men writing ever larger treatises "explaining" everything. None of it had any explanatory power and fell apart at the slightest mention of an actual experiment.

Sure, but it's not to hard to think of examples of things which signalling theories would say shouldn't happen. For example, people should not be impressed by signals that are known to be easy to fake or that are in no way impressive in the first place. This may seem trivial, but it does have implications. For example, if you claim "I did X over the weekend" and I reply with "I call bullshit", it implies not only that I doubt your claim, but also that at least to some extent I care whether it is true, and also that you care whether I believe you or not (or at least that I think you care).

> For example, if you claim "I did X over the weekend" and I reply with "I call bullshit", it implies not only that I doubt your claim, but also that at least to some extent I care whether it is true, and also that you care whether I believe you or not (or at least that I think you care).

This doesn't refute anything, in fact it reinforces the theory! Why did I make a claim about what you did over the weekend at all other than to signal to you about it? And of course I care what you think, because that's the entire point of social signalling.

I could say your entire response was a signal itself, and you're not consciously aware of how signalling is driving your behavior. At this point the theory becomes useless.

A good theory has hypotheses that can be (in)validated.

The point is that you might as well just not do the thing and say you did it, because nobody will ever verify it. So the doing of it can't have been motivated entirely by signalling; it would have been easier to do something else and just lie.

Before we had a theory of planetary motion, epicycles were used. While obviously we stopped adding circles everytime a planetary prediction was off, the fact that some waves can approximate any reasonable function *is* interesting in it’s own right. I take a similar stance with signaling.

Every theory can be invalidated by analysis or empirical verification, the latter is not the only criterion of truth even for the most empirical epistemologies.