A natural history of human thinking PDF
Preview A natural history of human thinking
A Natural History of Human Th inking A Natural History of Human Th inking Michael Tomasello Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En gland 2014 Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Tomasello, Michael. A natural history of human thinking / Michael Tomasello. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674- 72477- 8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Cognition— Social aspects. 2. Evolutionary psychology. 3. Psychology, Comparative. I. Title. BF311.T6473 2014 153—dc23 2013020185 For Rita, Anya, Leo, and Chiara Contents Preface ix 1. Th e Shared Intentionality Hypothesis 1 2. Individual Intentionality 7 Evolution of Cognition 7 Th inking like an Ape 15 Cognition for Competition 26 3. Joint Intentionality 3 2 A New Form of Collaboration 33 A New Form of Cooperative Communication 49 Second- Personal Th inking 6 8 Perspectivity: Th e View from Here and Th ere 76 viii Contents 4. Collective Intentionality 80 Th e Emergence of Culture 81 Th e Emergence of Conventional Communication 93 Agent- Neutral Th inking 1 13 Objectivity: Th e View from Nowhere 120 5. Human Th inking as Cooperation 1 24 Th eories of Human Cognitive Evolution 125 Sociality and Th inking 1 33 Th e Role of Ontogeny 144 6. Conclusion 149 Notes 155 References 159 Index 173 Preface Th is book is a sequel—o r, better, a prequel—t o Th e Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Harvard University Press, 1999). But it also has a slightly diff erent focus. In the 1999 book the question was what makes human cognition unique, and the answer was culture. Individual human beings develop uniquely pow- erful cognitive skills because they grow to maturity in the midst of all kinds of cultural artifacts and practices, including a conventional language, and of course they have the cultural learning skills necessary to master them. Indi- viduals internalize the artifacts and practices they encounter, and these then serve to mediate all of their cognitive interactions with the world. In the current book, the question is similar: what makes human thinking unique? And the answer is similar as well: human thinking is fundamentally cooperative. But this slightly diff erent question and slightly diff erent answer lead to a very diff erent book. Th e 1999 book was clean and simple because the data we had comparing apes and humans were so sparse. We could thus say things like “Only humans understand others as intentional agents, and this enables human culture.” But we now know that the picture is more complex than this. Great apes appear to know much more about others as intentional agents than previously believed, and still they do not have human-l ike culture
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