Preface
This book is a sequel—or, better, a prequel—to The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Harvard University Press, 1999). But it also has a slightly different focus. In the 1999 book the question was what makes human cognition unique, and the answer was culture. Individual human beings develop uniquely powerful 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. Individuals 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 different question and slightly different answer lead to a very different book. The 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-like culture or cognition. Based on much research reported here, the critical difference now seems to be that humans not only understand others as intentional agents but also put their heads together with others in acts of shared intentionality, including everything from concrete acts of collaborative problem solving to complex cultural institutions. The focus now is thus less on culture as a process of transmission and more on culture as a process of social coordination—and indeed, we argue here that modern human cultures were made possible by an earlier evolutionary step in which individuals made a living by coordinating with others in relatively simple acts of collaborative foraging.
The specific focus on thinking means that this book does not simply document that humans participate in shared intentionality in a way that their nearest primate relatives do not, which has been done elsewhere. Rather, in addition, it examines the underlying thinking processes involved. To describe the nature of these thinking processes—in particular, to distinguish human thinking from that of other apes—we must characterize its component processes of cognitive representation, inference, and self-monitoring. The shared intentionality hypothesis claims that all three of these components were transformed in two key steps during human evolution. In both cases, the transformation was part of a larger change of social interaction and organization in which humans were forced to adopt more cooperative lifeways. In order to survive and thrive, humans were forced, twice, to find new ways to coordinate their behavior with others in collaborative (and then cultural) activities and to coordinate their intentional states with others in cooperative (and then conventional) communication. And this transformed, twice, the way that humans think.
The writing of this book, as most others, was made possible by the support of many institutions and people. I would like to thank the University of Pittsburgh Center for Philosophy of Science (John Norton, director and seminar leader extraordinaire) for hosting me for one peaceful semester of concentrated writing in the spring of 2012. I especially benefited during this stay from Bob Brandom’s generosity with his time and thoughts on many topics central to the current enterprise. I thank Celia Brownell at the Pitt Department of Psychology and Andy Norman at Carnegie Mellon for many useful discussions during this semester as well. The ensuing summer I benefited greatly from presenting the themes of the book to the SIAS Summer Institute titled The Second Person: Comparative Perspectives, organized in Berlin by Jim Conant and Sebastian Rödl. The book is better for all of these encounters.
With regard to the manuscript itself, I would like to thank Larry Barsalou, Mattia Galloti, Henrike Moll, and Marco Schmidt for reading various chapters and providing very useful feedback. Of special importance, Richard Moore and Hannes Rakoczy each read the entire manuscript at a fairly early stage and provided a number of trenchant comments and suggestions, regarding both content and presentation. Thanks also to Elizabeth Knoll and three anonymous reviewers at Harvard University Press for a number of helpful comments and criticisms on the penultimate draft.
Last and most important, I thank my wife, Rita Svetlova, for providing constant and detailed critical commentary and suggestions throughout. Many ideas were made clearer through discussion with her, and confusing passages were made clear, or at least clearer, by her literate eye.
1
Only cooperation constitutes a process that can produce reason.
—JEAN PIAGET, SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES
Thinking would seem to be a completely solitary activity. And so it is for other animal species. But for humans, thinking is like a jazz musician improvising a novel riff in the privacy of his own room. It is a solitary activity all right, but on an instrument made by others for that general purpose, after years of playing with and learning from other practitioners, in a musical genre with a rich history of legendary riffs, for an imagined audience of jazz aficionados. Human thinking is individual improvisation enmeshed in a sociocultural matrix.
How did this novel form of socially infused thinking come to be, and how does it work? One set of classic theorists has emphasized the role of culture and its artifacts in making possible certain types of individual thinking. For example, Hegel (1807) argued that the social practices, institutions, and ideologies of a particular culture at a particular historical epoch constitute a necessary conceptual framework for individual human reason (see also Collingwood, 1946). Peirce (1931–1935) claimed more specifically that virtually all of humans’ most sophisticated types of thinking, including most especially mathematics and formal logic, are possible only because individuals have available to them culturally created symbolic artifacts such as Arabic numerals and logical notation. Vygotsky (1978) emphasized that human children grow up in the midst of the tools and symbols of their culture, including especially the linguistic symbols that preorganize their worlds for them, and during ontogeny they internalize the use of these artifacts, leading to the kind of internal dialogue that is one prototype of human thinking (see also Bakhtin, 1981).
The other set of classic theorists has focused on the fundamental processes of social coordination that make human culture and language possible in the first place. Mead (1934) pointed out that when humans interact with one another, especially in communication, they are able to imagine themselves in the role of the other and to take the other’s perspective on themselves. Piaget (1928) argued further that these role-taking and perspective-taking abilities—along with a cooperative attitude—not only make culture and language possible but also make possible reasoning in which individuals subordinate their own point of view to the normative standards of the group. And Wittgenstein (1955) explicated several different ways in which the appropriate use of a linguistic convention or cultural rule depends on a preexisting set of shared social practices and judgments (“forms of life”), which constitute the pragmatic infrastructure from which all uses of language and rules gain their interpersonal significance. These social infrastructure theorists, as we may call them, all share the belief that language and culture are only the “icing on the cake” of humans’ ultrasocial ways of relating to the world cognitively.
Insightful as they were, all of these classic theorists were operating without several new pieces of the puzzle, both empirical and theoretical, that have emerged only in recent years. Empirically, one new finding is the surprisingly sophisticated cognitive abilities of nonhuman primates, which have been discovered mostly in the last few decades (for reviews, see Tomasello and Call, 1997; Call and Tomasello, 2008). Thus, great apes, as the closest living relatives of humans, already understand in human-like ways many aspects of their physical and social worlds, including the causal and intentional relations that structure those worlds. This means that many important aspects of human thinking derive not from humans’ unique forms of sociality, culture, and language but, rather, from something like the individual problem-solving abilities of great apes in general.
Another new set of findings concern prelinguistic (or just linguistic) human infants, who have yet to partake fully of the culture and language around them. These still fledgling human beings nevertheless operate with some cognitive processes that great apes do not, enabling them to engage with others socially in some ways that great apes cannot, for example, via joint attention and cooperative communication (Tomasello et al., 2005). The fact that these precultural and prelinguistic creatures are already cognitively unique provides empirical support for the social infrastructure theorists’ claim that important aspects of human thinking emanate not from culture and language per se but, rather, from some deeper and more primitive forms of uniquely human social engagement.
Theoretically, recent advances in the philosophy of action have provided powerful new ways of thinking about these deeper and more primitive forms of uniquely human social engagement. A small group of philosophers of action (e.g., Bratman, 1992; Searle, 1995; Gilbert, 1989; Tuomela, 2007) have investigated how humans put their heads together with others in acts of so-called shared intentionality, or “we” intentionality. When individuals participate with others in collaborative activities, together they form joint goals and joint attention, which then create individual roles and individual perspectives that must be coordinated within them (Moll and Tomasello, 2007). Moreover, there is a deep continuity between such concrete manifestations of joint action and attention and more abstract cultural practices and products such as cultural institutions, which are structured—indeed, created—by agreed-upon social conventions and norms (Tomasello, 2009). In general, humans are able to coordinate with others, in a way that other primates seemingly are not, to form a “we” that acts as a kind of plural agent to create everything from a collaborative hunting party to a cultural institution.
Further in this theoretical direction, as a specific form of human collaborative activity and shared intentionality, human cooperative communication involves a set of special intentional and inferential processes—first identified by Grice (1957, 1975) and since elaborated and amended by Sperber and Wilson (1996), Clark (1996), Levinson (2000), and Tomasello (2008). Human communicators conceptualize situations and entities via external communicative vehicles for other persons; these other persons then attempt to determine why the communicator thinks that these situations and entities will be relevant for them. This dialogic process involves not only skills and motivations for shared intentionality but also a number of complex and recursive inferences about others’ intentions toward my intentional states. This unique form of communication—characteristic not just of mature language use but also of the prelinguistic gestural communication of human infants—presupposes both a shared conceptual framework between communicative partners (a.k.a. common conceptual ground) and an appreciation of those partners’ individual intentions and perspectives within it.
These new empirical and theoretical advances enable us to construct a much more detailed account than was previously possible of the social dimensions of human cognition in general. Our focus in this book is on the social dimensions of human thinking in particular. Although humans and other animals solve many problems and make many decisions based on evolved intuitive heuristics (so-called system 1 processes), humans and at least some other animals also solve some problems and make some decisions by thinking (system 2 processes; e.g., Kahneman, 2011). A specific focus on thinking is useful because it restricts our topic to a single cognitive process, but one that involves several key components, especially (1) the ability to cognitively represent experiences to oneself “off-line”; (2) the ability to simulate or make inferences transforming these representations causally, intentionally, and/or logically; and (3) the ability to self-monitor and evaluate how these simulated experiences might lead to specific behavioral outcomes—and so to make a thoughtful behavioral decision.
It seems obvious that, compared with other animal species, humans think in special ways. But this difference is hard to characterize using traditional theories of human thinking since they presuppose key aspects of the process that are actually evolutionary achievements. These are precisely the social aspects of human thinking that are our primary focus here. Thus, although many animal species can cognitively represent situations and entities at least somewhat abstractly, only humans can conceptualize one and the same situation or entity under differing, even conflicting, social perspectives (leading ultimately to a sense of “objectivity”). Further, although many animals also make simple causal and intentional inferences about external events, only humans make socially recursive and self-reflective inferences about others’ or their own intentional states. And, finally, although many animals monitor and evaluate their own actions with respect to instrumental success, only humans self-monitor and evaluate their own thinking with respect to the normative perspectives and standards (“reasons”) of others or the group. These fundamentally social differences lead to an identifiably different type of thinking, what we may call, for the sake of brevity, objective-reflective-normative thinking.
In this book we attempt to reconstruct the evolutionary origins of this uniquely human objective-reflective-normative thinking. The shared intentionality hypothesis is that what created this unique type of thinking—its processes of representation, inference, and self-monitoring—were adaptations for dealing with problems of social coordination, specifically, problems presented by individuals’ attempts to collaborate and communicate with others (to co-operate with others). Although humans’ great ape ancestors were social beings, they lived mostly individualistic and competitive lives, and so their thinking was geared toward achieving individual goals. But early humans were at some point forced by ecological circumstances into more cooperative lifeways, and so their thinking became more directed toward figuring out ways to coordinate with others to achieve joint goals or even collective group goals. And this changed everything.
There were two key evolutionary steps. The first step, reflecting the focus of social infrastructure theorists such as Mead and Wittgenstein, involved the creation of a novel type of small-scale collaboration in human foraging. Participants in this collaborative foraging created socially shared joint goals and joint attention (common ground), which created the possibility of individual roles and perspectives within that ad hoc shared world or “form of life.” To coordinate these newly created roles and perspectives, individuals evolved a new type of cooperative communication based on the natural gestures of pointing and pantomiming: one partner directed the attention or imagination of the other perspectivally and/or symbolically about something “relevant” to their joint activity, and then that partner made cooperative (recursive) inferences about what was intended. To self-monitor this process the communicator had to simulate ahead of time the recipient’s likely inferences. Because the collaboration and communication at this point were between ad hoc pairs of individuals in the moment—based on purely second-personal social engagement between “I” and “you”—we may refer to all of this as joint intentionality. When put to use in thinking, joint intentionality comprises perspectival and symbolic representations, socially recursive inferences, and second-personal self-monitoring.
The second step, reflecting the focus of culture theorists such as Vygotsky and Bakhtin, came as human populations began growing in size and competing with one another. This competition meant that group life as a whole became one big collaborative activity, creating a much larger and more permanent shared world, that is to say, a culture. The resulting group-mindedness among all members of the cultural group (including in-group strangers) was based on a new ability to construct common cultural ground via collectively known cultural conventions, norms, and institutions. As part of this process, cooperative communication became conventionalized linguistic communication. In the context of cooperative argumentation in group decision making, linguistic conventions could be used to justify and make explicit one’s reasons for an assertion within the framework of the group’s norms of rationality. This meant that individuals now could reason “objectively” from the group’s agent-neutral point of view (“from nowhere”). Because the collaboration and communication at this point were conventional, institutional, and normative, we may refer to all of this as collective intentionality. When put to use in thinking, collective intentionality comprises not just symbolic and perspectival representations but conventional and “objective” representations; not just recursive inferences but self-reflective and reasoned inferences; and not just second-personal self-monitoring but normative self-governance based on the culture’s norms of rationality.
Importantly, this evolutionary scenario does not mean that humans today are hardwired to think in these new ways. A modern child raised on a desert island would not automatically construct fully human processes of thinking on its own. Quite the contrary. Children are born with adaptations for collaborating and communicating and learning from others in particular ways—evolution selects for adaptive actions. But it is only in actually exercising these skills in social interaction with others during ontogeny that children create new representational formats and new inferential reasoning possibilities as they internalize, in Vygotskian fashion, their coordinative interactions with others into thinking for the self. The result is a kind of cooperative cognition and thinking, not so much creating new skills as cooperativizing and collectivizing those of great apes in general.
And so let us tell a story, a natural history, of how human thinking came to be, beginning with our great ape ancestors, proceeding through some early humans who collaborated and communicated in species-unique ways, and ending with modern humans and their fundamentally cultural and linguistic ways of being.