A Natural History of Human Thinking

Michael Tomasello

Published by Harvard University Press 2014

A Natural History of Human Thinking

Michael Tomasello

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674726369

Overview
Contents

About this book

Language or culture, tool-making or religion: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what differentiates human beings from other animals. Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness.

Author / Editor information

Tomasello Michael :

Michael Tomasello is Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Reviews

What makes human thinking unique? Michael Tomasello's clear and elegant new book demonstrates once more his ability to draw on his experimental work with apes and children to offer major new insights into the evolutionary origins of human cognition.
-- Dan Sperber, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris

Human thought, in Tomasello’s conception, is different from that of all other organisms because humans alone have the capacity to think about the thoughts of others, and do so collectively. Tomasello’s greatest strength is his insistence on relying on data to support his hypotheses, particularly the fascinating studies he summarizes comparing pre‐ linguistic children to our great ape relatives.
-- Publishers Weekly

What is it that differentiates humans from other animals? It’s the question that keeps evolutionary anthropologists like Michael Tomasello up nights. But after 20-plus years wrestling with the thorny subject, he puts forward his ‘shared intentionality hypothesis,’ designed to account for how early humans learned to coordinate their actions and communicate their thoughts with collaborators.
-- New Scientist

Tomasello has spent a lifetime conducting…tests on both great apes such as chimpanzees and on humans of different ages, in order to pin down exactly where our capacities differ. In this difficult but rewarding book, he attempts to place these results into a grand theory of how and why these differences evolved…Tomasello’s account of how co-operation drove the development of our distinctive intellect is controversial…It is also highly speculative: a trait such as co-operation leaves few traces in the fossil record. But it is speculation by a thinker at the top of his field, based on the latest research, and as such is likely to be the definitive statement of human uniqueness for some time to come.
-- Stephen Cave Financial Times

Tomasello argues that human thinking is unique because it is cooperative. He posits that environmental upheavals forced early humans to channel their thinking towards collective aims through two evolutionary innovations: collaboration while foraging, and the rise of culture as population and competition burgeoned. Tomasello convincingly sets out how ‘shared intentionality,’ in which social complexity spawned conceptual complexities, sets us apart.
-- Nature

Michael Tomasello is one of the few psychologists to have conducted intensive research on both human children and chimpanzees, and A Natural History of Human Thinking reflects not only the insights enabled by such cross-species comparisons but also the wisdom of a researcher who appreciates the need for asking questions whose answers generate biological insight. His book helps us to understand the differences, as well as the similarities, between human brains and other brains.
-- David P. Barash Wall Street Journal

Compelling reading…In a reassessment of his earlier work, Tomasello argues that apes are cognitively much closer to humans than had been thought only a decade ago…The book’s great virtue is its conceptual analysis of the cumulative steps in cognition required to get us from ape to human…Highly stimulating.
-- Stephen Levinson Science

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
1. The Shared Intentionality Hypothesis Only cooperation constitutes a process that can produce reason Jean Piaget Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Individual Intentionality Understanding consists in imagining the fact Ludwig Wittgenstein Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	7
3. Joint Intentionality Conceptual contents are essentially expressively perspectival Robert Brandom Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	32
4. Collective Intentionality Th ere is no thinking apart from common standards of correctness and relevance, which relate what I do think to what anyone ought to think. Th e contrast between “I” and “anyone” is essential to rational thought Wilfrid Sellars Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	80
5. Human Th inking as Cooperation Th e internalization of socially rooted and historically developed activities is the distinguishing feature of human psychology Lev Vygotsky Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	124
6. Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	173

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Edition: Pilot project, eBook available to selected US libraries only
Audience: College/higher education;Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 192

eBook

Published: February 17, 2014
ISBN: 9780674726369