Michael Tomasello

Wicked takedown of what Tomasello dubs Pinker's "Generative Grammar Is an Instinct" hypothesis. Suck it, Pinker! The fact that some aspects of language are probably innate universals doesn't mean that Chomskyan syntax makes any sense at all, and the idea that we learn by doing has a simplicity that generativists with their "mathematically elegant" (as long as you're working on English!) and empirically empty models of language should probably stop and consider. Cognitive Development 10.

Michael Tomasello is a psychologist, with expertise in child development, anthropology, and familiarity with modern philosophical theories of mind and language. He puts it all together here to give a speculative answer to the question, what makes human thinking so unique by comparison to other animals?

That human thinking is dramatically different from that of even other “intelligent” animals (chimpanzees and bonobos, dolphins, elephants, . . . ) may seem obvious. Humans have social show more organizations and practices — cultures, languages, . . — and intellectual achievements — sciences, literature, technologies, . . . If other animals have any of these, they seem to have them at a vastly lesser scale and different, less developed, character.

A simple, maybe naive theory would be that the development of intelligence leads the way. Humans evolved a more or “higher” intelligence. Somehow humans, maybe via some starter change (e.g., “mirror neurons”, although those are not the exclusive possession of humans), got onto an evolutionary track that changed some initial difference into a vast one. That initially small change then enabled us to do the things we do that differentiate us so markedly.

Thus the development of intelligence would lead the way.

Tomasello reverses the order. His hypothesis here is that it is social cooperation, our social behaviors themselves and a key development he terms “joint intentionality,” that compels, along with ecological pressures, the development of what we call intelligence and the distinctive way that humans think. Cooperation is also the key, for Tomasello, to the development of language, morality, and the shared view of reality that we call “objectivity.”

One very helpful thing about his writing is that he summarizes his main points repeatedly. Here in his own words is his core “joint intentionality hypothesis:”

“And so, in the current view, the most plausible evolutionary scenario is that new ecological pressures (e.g., the disappearance of individually obtainable foods and then increased populations sizes and competition from other groups) acted directly on human social interaction and organization, leading to the evolution of more cooperative human lifeways (e.g., collaboration for foraging and then cultural organization for group coordination and defense). Coordinating the newly collaborative and cultural lifeways communicatively required new skills and innovations for co-operating with others, first via joint intentionality, and then via collective intentionality. Thinking for cooperating.”

By “joint intentionality” Tomasello means a cognitive development in which it became possible for two individuals to share a single common goal and to adopt distinctive roles to achieve it together. For example, in hunting, two individuals share a common goal of catching their prey, with one taking on the role of forcing the animal out of its protective cover and the other spearing it where it comes into the open.

To accomplish such shared goals, individuals must be able to discern each other’s respective intentional states. The one must understand what the other is thinking and how it will respond to actions and events. This is a prerequisite for true cooperation, on Tomasello’s theory — adoption of a common goal and a kind of division of labor to achieve it.

Joint intentionality, though, is not the end of the story. Joint intentionality is individual-to-individual, maintained in that predominantly dyadic relationship. By contrast, “collective intentionality” or “we-intentionality” is normative across a community. Rather than discerning how my partner in the hunt understands actions and events, now I understand how anyone (within my community) understands actions and events.

Collective intentionality, on Tomasello’s theory, becomes the springboard for the capacities most distinctive of human cognitive experience. Those capacities include maybe most notably the ability to participate in shared understandings of symbols — gestures, pictures, and eventually what we recognize as language.

Human cognitive distinctiveness is due then, not simply to the development of bigger or more active brains, but, first to the emergence of cooperation. Tomasello doesn’t have a detailed story of how cooperation itself emerged — he refers, as above, to “ecological pressures” such as the availability of food, population growth, and competition from other species. Whatever those pressures might have been, they were either themselves distinctive to humans or they were responded to distinctively by humans.

Humans then, as distinct from the ancestors they share with the great apes, adapted for cooperation, which in turn led to the development of the capacities associated with complex intentional cognitive behavior.

I won’t try to repeat the details of Tomasello’s theory on the origin of language, or other aspects of complex cognition from the evolutionary imperative to cooperate, but this is the strength of his book. In particular, he sketches out how the very concept of “objectivity” could have evolved as a product of normative, collective intentionality — a single, community-wide understanding of how to understand the world and how to act in the world. Such normative standards of understanding and acting would then set the stage for communal bodies of knowledge and moral practices.

As presented, Tomasello’s claim about the distinctiveness of human thought depends on humans having gone down an evolutionary track that was unavailable to other species. Cooperation, and the ecological pressures to express it, are at the root of human distinctiveness. As evidence, he cites experiments and studies that contrast human performance in cognitive tasks, especially children, with that of our closest relatives, apes, especially chimpanzees.

His claim is that chimps’ cognitive behaviors are “most profoundly” shaped by competition, not cooperation, while even in very young children, cooperation is prevalent. He doesn’t of course deny that chimps do cooperate in some sense, e.g., in hunts, but that their cooperation does not exhibit evidence of joint intentionality. In the case of the hunt, for example, he maintains that each chimp has an individual goal of capturing its prey and that cooperation emerges as a matter of each separately pursuing its own goals and reacting intelligently to the actions, and results of the actions, of others. The chimps are not discerning each others’ intentional states, although they are reacting in complementary, cooperative ways.

Distinguishing joint intentionality from that kind of complementarity is hard experimentally, and Tomasello’s claims are disputed, particularly in the experiments and observations of Frans de Waal (see especially his books, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, and his most recent, Mama’s Last Hug). Tomasello does not address de Waal’s work directly in this book. I wish he had — as it stands, he gives the impression that his own conclusions about chimpanzee cognition are relatively unchallenged.

As presented, like I said, Tomasello’s argument really does depend on chimpanzees and other apes not having the adaptations for cooperation that are the key to human cognitive development. According to his account, that adaptation had to occur after the last shared human/chimpanzee ancestor. Otherwise, he would need some account of why, given the similarities between the two species, chimpanzees didn’t develop more complex cognitive behaviors than they have.

Given that we don’t even have any identified fossils to study that last human/chimpanzee ancestor, much of this argument is necessarily speculative, relying on indirect evidence. Studying modern chimpanzees, and comparing them with human children, is certainly relevant, but we have to keep in mind that chimpanzees have been on a separate evolutionary journey from ours for 7 million years or more. Tomasello’s assumption is that the absence of an adaptation for cooperation in modern chimps would provide good evidence for an absence of that adaptation prior to the branching, so that the adaptation must have happened on the resulting distinctively human branch that followed it.

I’m not sure that Tomasello’s argument absolutely requires such a hard line on chimpanzee cooperation, as against the work of de Waal. I don’t know enough about evolutionary biology to speak confidently, but it would seem as though chimpanzees could have reversed, under their own ecological pressures, an initial adaptation for cooperation, never expressed the relevant genetic modification, or they could have participated in only some part of the adaptation. One or another of those possibilities might account for what evidence of true cooperation (as opposed to what I’m calling complementary cooperation) de Waal has found. Then, placing the adaptation earlier on the branch that still included chimpanzees and humans could both allow for the distinctiveness of human cognition and for instances of true cooperation among chimpanzees.

Still, the great merit, I think, of Tomasello’s book is the (admittedly speculative) story he weaves of the origin of complex, human-style cognition. He’s actually given a naturalistic sketch of where language, moral norms, and objectivity come from. To do so, he’s drawn upon a vast scope of anthropological, psychological, and philosophical work. He’s particularly adept and creative in placing the works of philosophers like Wittgenstein, Searle, and Grice into a theoretical context that makes the work of each take on new significance (not to mention finding complementariness among those thinkers that the thinkers themselves had not seen). He’s also drawn much from Vygotsky on education, Sperber on anthropology and psychology, and many, many more provocative thinkers in their own rights.

Who would be interested in this book? It’s hard to think of who wouldn’t be. Tomasello finds the seed of such a vast scope of human experience in joint intentionality that his work should be of interest to anthropologists, philosophers, cognitive psychologists, linguists, . . . and anyone who is just plain interested in how we got to be who we are. show less

I thought developmental and comparative psychology professor Michael Tomasello's 2018 book 'Becoming Human: A Theory of Human Ontogeny' was brilliant and rigorously argued. Imagine my surprise to find the first three chapters of this short work (164 pages) practically insulting because of sloppy writing and terminological vagueness.

As a result, I decided to call it a day - even though, admittedly, the remaining chapters (about the agency of apes and humans) might play more into Tomasello's show more strengths. My loss, maybe, but I cannot but operate using inference if I read scientific books: if your base is brittle, I'm not going to risk dwelling in a superstructure that seems solid. It's a form a prejudice, yes, but my time is limited, and there's way too much else to read & learn.

A few examples/thoughts:

1. It starts with an unclear conception of 'agency' itself:

"Agency is thus not about all of the many and varied things that organisms do - from building anthills to caching nuts - but rather about how' they do them. Individuals acting as agents direct and control their won actions, whatever those actions may be specifically. The scientific challenge is to identify the underlying psychological organization that makes such individual direction and control possible."

It seems to me that the real scientific challenge is to identify the underlying neural pathways that guide our muscles to perform specific behavior. Tomasello is not clear at all about what "psychological" entails, and how that ties into neurology, biology & evolution. I would advice him to read 2019's 'The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness' of Simona Ginsburg & Eva Jablonka for an example of how a true scientific account of the evolution of agency could be written. It also struck me that Tomasello often names learning as crucial in his early chapters - thus confirming at least a part of Ginsburg & Jablonka's thesis - but not once does he engage in the biological pathways of learning, nor how these neural pathways might have evolved.

A bit later in the book agency turns out to be about the capability of "choosing to act or not to act, or among multiple possible actions, according to its continuous perceptual assessment of the situation as it unfolds over time (sometimes employing executive processes such as inhibition, as a further control process, during action execution)." This is equated with behaving in "psychologically agentive ways".

2. The book is full of modifiers like 'mostly' and 'to some degree', but then fails to conceptually zoom in on what this actually means for the theory at hand. E.g., page 6:

"Tomesello and Call (1997) explicitly stated that things such as spiders building spiderwebs are interesting and complex phenomena, but they are not psychological, precisely because they are mostly not under the individual spider's flexible control. The concept of agency thus, in a sense, represents the dividing line between biological and psychological approaches to behavior; it is the distinction between complex behaviors designed and controlled by Nature, as it were, versus those designed and controlled, at least to some degree, by the individual psychological agent."

Note the words & phrases "mostly", "in a sense", "at least to some degree" and "as it were". Tomesello never specifies these further. Surely it is conceptually very important in which way the individual spider does flexibly control its weaving, as is implied by the use of the word "mostly"? Again, the dividing line between biology and psychology might be clear to Tomesello himself, but he doesn't manage to make it clear to the reader. At one hand, it seems to be something binary, a dichotomy ("a dividing line") but at the same time it isn't (a matter of "degree").

Another example of this page, on the wormlike C. elegans, page 29: "However, it is unlikely that there is also a comparison with some kind of internal goal to create direction: their locomotion is mostly random or stimulus driven. And these organisms do not seem to exhibit anything that we would want to call behavioral control: they do not inhibit or otherwise control action execution, and what they learn is simply the location toward which to direct their hardwired movements."

For starters, again, "mostly"? I would like to know more on that. Second, if they learn to direct themselves to food, at least part of their movements is not "hardwired" anymore, but goal directed, I would say. Tomasello never goes into the nuts and bolts of the distinction between goal-directed behavior, and stimulus driven behavior. It seems to me an internal goal (possibly accompanied by a conscious mental representation, as sometimes in humans) is a stimulus too. The fact that it is a stimulus originating from the neural systems inside the body does not feel so conceptually different from a neural stimulus that originates outside the body, as it only matters for the onset of the stimulus, not the resulting neural paths inside the body, i.e. not for the processing of the signal. Again, as for stimuli and different kinds of learning, I'd rather read another tome that has the same rigorousness as Ginsburg & Jablonka, than this short, breezy book.

When Tomasello also admits that this worm also knows how to avoid noxious chemicals, doesn't it have some kind of "inhibition" too, and thus forms of action control? What's the difference with the "feedback control organization" he talks about on the next page?

By the way, is the phrase "we would want to call" (my italics) a telltale?

3. Tomasello seems to think that "psychologically agentive species" somehow escape mechanic (neurological) pathways. He seems to forget that everything that happens in the brain, the neural system and the body is the result of molecular movement & energetic signals. Is he a closet Vitalist?

4. It seems to me that behavioral flexibility has not so much to do with agency, as Tomasello has it, but with the capacity for learning. Again, see Ginsburg & Jablonka.

5. On lizards, Tomasello introduces the concept of "go-no-go decisions", p. 39:

"Nevertheless, despite functioning as flexible decision-makers, goal-directed agents can make only simple decisions. They do not survey and choose among multiple behavioral possibilities simultaneously but rather move sequentially from one go-no-go decision to the next. This is to be expected of an organism whose behavior emanates exclusively from the single psychological tier of perception and action, rather than from, in addition, an executive tier of decision-making and cognitive control that formulates multiple action plans and then decides among them before acting, as do more complex agents."

My question here is what happens when a lizard perceives two fat insects slowly hovering in place withing reach at about the same distance at the same time?

In the same chapter part of Tomasello's reasoning hinges on the fact that lizards might learn to eat a new insect because of "behavioral agency". It seems to me this kind of behavior has not a lot to do with agency at all. Why do lizards try to eat new insects? Simply because they resemble other insects. They have about the same size, they buzz, they have wings, they have six legs, etc. It seems to me that eating a new kind of insect is not new behavior at all, just the same behavior that operates on a slightly different kind of real world input (an hitherto unmet insect presents itself to the lizard), of which the slight difference does not matter to the lizard's internal decision process, more so, the lizard might not even register that slight difference. It's like certain geese that have been observed to roll back beer cans to their nests because they think the can is one of their eggs. Behavioral agency!

Because of examples like this, I decided to abandon the book 25% in. A go-no-go decision, or a form of inhibitory control? Either way, I'm pretty sure it wasn't a form agency: the decision kinda forced itself through my eyes into my brain.

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Tomasello’s scope is large. He ties the development of human cognition and human sociality together, resulting in synthesizing insights about social norms & moral identity. This in not only a comparative psychology book, but an important work on ethics too. Truly a tour de force, and the first theory I’ve come across that convincingly brings cognition, evolution and ethics together – not in a normative way, but by describing the pathways of how these things arise, starting with show more newborn babies.

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At first, I was a bit suspicious of Tomasello’s claims: I have read quite a lot of Frans de Waal and the likes, and my intellectual stance the last decade or so had been to not overestimate human uniqueness – not in language skills, not in cognition, etc. I considered differences between humans and other animals basically a matter of degree.

To a certain extent this obviously still holds, but one of the merits of Tomasello is that he uses large sets of experimental data that clearly show there are two things that are unique in humans: “shared intentionality” and “collective intentionality”. Basically, the fact that we humans do things together, know that we do things together and have elaborate insights in other humans’ mental states that influence our own mental states. So it’s not only cooperation itself that is important, but the fact that it is a form of recursive cooperation.

Language obviously is important for all of this, and so this is not only an ethics book, but one that should interest linguists too. The same goes for the cultural transmission of knowledge: instructed learning basically doesn’t exist in the rest of the animal kingdom, so yes, pedagogy too.

Rather than try to summarize Tomasello’s theory, in the remainder of this review I’ll do two things: first I’ll list an extensive amount of the information I found particularly interesting – take a look I’d say, it’s the juice of this review – and I end with a short bit on the book as a book: a few words on my reading experience, not the theory itself, so that interested readers better know what to expect.

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