A Natural History of Human Thinking Hardcover
Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Tomasello Page - ISBN: 0674724771 - Language: English - Format: PDF, EPUB
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Review
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 2013-12-02)
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 2014-01-04)
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 2014-02-07)
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 2014-02-06)
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 2013-12-02)
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 2014-01-04)
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 2014-02-07)
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 2014-02-06)
About the Author
Michael Tomasello is Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
DETAILS
- Hardcover: 192 pages
- Publisher: Harvard University Press (February 3, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0674724771
- ISBN-13: 978-0674724778
- Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #159,983 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #27 in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Zoology > Primatology
- #61 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Anthropology > Physical
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Michael Tomasello is a behavioral and evolutionary anthropologist who heads the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. His major contributions deals with the ways in which human thinking goes beyond that of other primates not simply quantitatively (we have bigger brains that can do more computations faster) but especially qualitatively (we can think in ways that are not available at all even to the great apes).
Tomasello derives his conclusions from careful and close study in the laboratory of differences in behavior of adult and child humans on the one hand, and non-human primates, especially the great apes, on the other. He shows that there are three types of human cognition, only one of which, individual rationality (“me-thinking”) is shared with the great apes (and a fortiori with other animal species).
Individual rationality is exemplified by the economist’s utility maximizer. Individual rationality can be purely selfish, in which individuals are sociopaths who care about others only as objects that may help satisfy their personal needs, but can also include elements of empathy in which individuals care about the suffering of others, and also elements of negative hostility in which individuals gain pleasure from hurting and punishing others who have displeased them..
A second kind of human cognition is what Tomasello calls “collective intentionality,” Tomasello writes: “Modern humans became cultural beings…by creating…cultural conventions, norms, and institutions built not on personal but on cultural common ground. They thus became thoroughly group-minded individuals.” (p. 80) This sort of human cognition is extremely well-known, as developed in sociology by Emile Durkheim, George Herbert Mead, Talcott Parsons and many others.
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