Tension in the Natural History of Human Thinking

Journal of Social Ontology

article

Henrike Moll¹ 

[1] University of Notre Dame;University of Southern California

关键词: Shared intentionality;    Cooperation;    Joint attention;    Evolutionary theory;    Human phylogeny;    Human development;   

DOI  :  10.1515/jso-2015-0043

来源: De Gruyter

【 摘 要 】

Michael Tomasello has greatly expanded our knowledge of human cognition and how it differs from that of other animals. In this commentary to his recent book A Natural History of Human Thinking , I first critique some of the presuppositions and arguments of his evolutionary story about how homo sapiens’ cognition emerged. For example, I question the strategy of relying on the modern chimpanzee as a model for our last shared ancestor, and I doubt the idea that what changed first over evolutionary time was hominin behavior, which then in turn brought about changes in cognition. In the second half of the commentary I aim to show that the author oscillates between an additive and a transformative account of human shared intentionality. I argue that shared intentionality shapes cognition in its entirety and therefore precludes the possibility that humans have the same, individual intentionality (as shown in, e.g. their instrumental reasoning) as other apes.

【 授权许可】

CC BY-NC-ND