Tomasello is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. For the twenty years prior he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, where along with human children he studied the behaviors of other primates- specifically gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos. This book aims to study the ontogeny unique to humans from birth until around six-years-old.
Tomasello suggests a defining characteristic of humans is join intentionality. “Whereas great apes could abstract common features across exemplars and form an abstract representation of a set of entities, early humans could not only do this but also see the same entity from different perspectives, under different descriptions…. Joint intentional activity constituted a shared conceptual world encompassing the partners’ distinct perspective.” This is the building block on which the rest of human ontogeny largely rests. It allows for a socially recursive inference process and the ability to embed one’s intentional state inside another persons and vice versa. This process begins with the “uniquely human gestures of pointing and pantomiming.”
Joint intentionality led, specifically, to humans developing a theory of mind. “Cognitively they were able to executively regulate their own thinking by anticipating how others would understand and evaluate this thinking.” Humans became social creatures with an “objective” moral worldview. “The deviant, if she wanted to stay in good cooperative standing, would actually join with the partner in condemning herself (internalizing into a sense of guilt), in a kind of we>me morality.” This created a second-person morality. Building upon this, “teaching and conformity generated cumulative cultural evolution characterized by the “ratchet effect”—and thus cultural organization in the form of the group’s specific set of conventions, norms, and institutions… group-mindedness, both in taking the perspective of the group cognitively and in caring about the group’s welfare.” In turn, this developed into a concept of the “inside” moral group, even beyond one’s personal relations. “Individuals had not just personal common ground with other individuals but also cultural common ground—even with individuals they had never met before…. They began self-regulating their thoughts via the group’s publicly accepted norms of rationality, and their actions via the group’s publicly accepted norms of morality.”
It is perspective-taking and not mind-reading that is unique to human ontogeny. “The issue is not just “mind-reading”—apes turn out to be pretty good at that. But they do it mostly in competition. Social and mental coordination with others for purposes of cooperation is something different…. Many of humans’ everyday acts are thus designed to actually help others read their minds.” It is the combining of the perspectives of two unique individuals, this joint attention, that is unique in humans among primates. By the time of the third birthday, humans can understand how something appears to another person, though it does not appear that way to them. Furthermore, after age three, humans begin to learn an “objective” perspective and collective intentionality. This is largely done through communication and, eventually, the learning of language. “Children do not need to conventionalize communicative symbols [whether it be pointing, gaze sharing, pantomime, or words] because the conventions already exist around them; they simply need to conform.” Unlike apes, “infants’ pointing and pantomiming are used referentially; that is, they are not just to demand action or draw attention to the self but to direct attention (that is, to share attention) to external entities or situations…. [The] motive is not just to demand something but also, just as often, to inform others of things helpfully or to share information and attitudes with others as a way of expanding common ground…. Iconic gestures would seem to be uniquely human. Great apes could easily gesture with their hands the way humans do to mime eating or drinking, but they do not.”
Tomasello suggests that there is a functional continuity between gestures and words in human ontogeny. “When [gestures] are integrated with language it is done seamlessly, in the same way that linguistic items such as words are combined with one another in grammatical constructions. The fact that they fit together so seamlessly—united by processes such as joint attention, perspective-taking, and emotion sharing—suggests that all are underlain by the same basic skills and motivations of shared intentionality.” This is learned behavior- culturally. Infants are doing all of this almost exclusively with adults. “Effective communication by infants and toddlers depends on an adult partner who scaffolds the interaction.” They are learning a cultural common ground from a mentor. “For the child to understand a word or piece of language she must understand it as something the adult is using to direct her attention to some referent in the environment—he is inviting her to jointly attend with him to that referent—in a way that she, the child, could do in reverse toward the adult if she so wished…. Word learning is thus not about putting labels on things but rather is about acquiring conventional means for coming to share attention with others in a variety of complex social contexts…. Children are inheriting from their culture a whole system of concepts that their forbears have found useful for categorizing and organizing their world. In acquiring the words of conventional language, children are learning to carve up the world in all the ways that others in their culture have found useful.” The child has learned how to use language properly when they can take the perspective of the listener. This requires self-regulation to anticipate what the listener does and does not know already, as well as what the listener might want to know. They become sensitive to feedback- both verbal and facial expressions. “Children begin to self-monitor and anticipate when their listener might have difficulties… imagining the comprehension processes of the listener and adjusting for her ahead of time.”
Humans are unique in that they purposefully teach their young. “Cumulative cultural evolution via the ratchet effect is made possible by special skills of imitation and even conformity, as well as uniquely human pedagogy and instructed learning…. Human infants and toddlers do not just gather information for instrumental tasks by observing others, as apes do, but they actively conform to others.” Pedagogy transmits “objective” cultural knowledge from an expert. Cultural learning is about social solidarity just as much as specific skills. Unlike with apes, it is the action, itself, and not the outcome that is learned and imitated. “Active teaching is extremely rare in the animal kingdom; typically it occurs with a given species for only one specific function…. Among primates, only humans actively instruct their young…. Instructed learning requires that a learner understands that the instructor intends to instruct her, and that she trusts this information and generalizes it appropriately…. [The instructor] is passing on generic cultural knowledge.” Five-year-old children trust what people tell them just as much as what they have seen with their very own eyes. Learning cultural material, symbolic “artifacts,” and “objective” reasoning are not skills that humans are able to learn on their own.
Reasons are the way humans create an “objective” culture. “To argue for and justify their beliefs in the face of potential criticism, children relate to their partners the reason why they believe as they do, and they come to respect the reasons that others give for their beliefs…. Reasons may be normatively evaluated as valid or invalid based on their causal or logical connections to beliefs that we all share in cultural common ground.” This leads to social self-monitoring and a sense of an “objective We.” A critical step for human ontogeny is peer collaboration. “(1) Productive peer collaborations during school age can promote cognitive development (especially in using new conceptual knowledge flexibly) better than adult instruction; (2) productive collaborations are those in which participants directly engage one another’s differing perspectives; (3) it is crucial for the pair to develop a shared representation of the problem to which their differing perspectives are then anchored; and (4) argumentative discourse among peers—presumably because they are of equal status and competence—often ends up incorporating joint “meta-talk” about standards of evidence and argumentation in a way that direct instruction and dialogue with adults does not.”
Humans collaborate with each other in ways that the great apes do not. As per Kant, humans treat other humans as ends and not just as means. “Joint intentional activities also have a unique social-motivational dimension.” Humans decide to do something together. “This recognition of self-other equivalence generates a mutual respect.” Partners are assumed equal in status, even when performing differing roles. “The self is seen as just one agent or person among many.” Humans can practice role-reversal because they are able to take the perspective of others. “Second-personal agents are entitled to make normative claims on their partner.” Joint commitments can only be terminated by both parties. Social sanctions, perhaps culminating in ostracism, punish any defector. Most importantly, the defector realizes that they deserve the sanction, because social norms are “objective.”
Norms are strictly an “in-group” function. “We” is a group solidarity, which starts around the age of three, to include “those who resemble them in behavior and appearance.” At that age, norms also begin to take on a third-party perspective. Three-year-olds will call out a transgressor for norm violations that do not personally affect them. By four to five-years-old kids start to develop their own moral identity. “Children discover others are judging them in this same way, using the same normative standards, so they engage in active attempts at self-representation to influence those judgments.” They want to be cooperatively competent and trustworthy. Or, at least, to appear to be so. They begin to evaluate themselves from the perspective of others in the same way that they are evaluating others. “Only humans can simulate the perspectives and evaluations of others for the purpose of actively managing the impression they are making on them…. Seeing oneself from the outside, as it were—is the cognitive foundation for the moral capacity to have a conscience.” Only humans can create “objective” moral judgements created by a “We” greater than the Self. Feelings of guilt and shame are part of this unique moral framework. “The rational basis of morality lies in the shared justificatory structures of a moral community because these are grounded in the community’s shared ordering of values…. Justifications demonstrate one’s continued identification with the group and its value system…. Reasons, justifications, and excuses are aimed both at others and at the self, as members of the same moral community.”
Tomasello claims his ontogeny fits into a neo-Vygotskian paradigm. Lev Vygotsky stated, “The internalization of socially rooted and historically developed activities is the distinguishing feature of human psychology, the basis of the qualitative leap from animal to human psychology.” To recap, Tomasello sees as uniquely human “our shared intentionality account, processes such as joint attention, perspective-taking, dual-level collaboration, cooperative communication, the enforcement and creation of social norms, and a sense of moral obligation.” This begins with new-borns in emotion sharing, which align psychological states with others. He considers there to be a “nine-month revolution” where infants now share intentional states aimed at external referents. This is where subjective/objective perspectives, a nascent sense of “We”, directed imitation, and the infrastructure of communication first begin. At three-years-old, Tomasello suggests collective intentionality, norms, and a group mind start to form, as nurture gradually begins to propel nature in specific directions. This is the age when peer interaction also becomes as important as adult interaction and executive-level multi-perspectival conceptualization grows. Cognitive contradictions and inconsistencies are first recognized and sorted out. Group norms begin to supersede the subjective Self. Finally, for Tomasello, at around six-years-old, humans can be said to begin the age of reason and responsibility that then continues on into adulthood. The ontogenetic process is fully formed, though, of course, each human has much more specific development to go.
No comments:
Post a Comment