Michael Tomasello

The Cultural Origins of HUMAN COGNITION Harvard Univ. Press 2000 pg 1 A PUZZLE AND A HYPOTHESIS All the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the power of unaided individuals. Charles Sanders Peirce Somewhere in Africa, sometime about 6 million years ago, in a routine evolutionary event, a population of great apes became reproductively isolated from its conspecifics. This new group evolved and split into still other groups, leading eventually to several different species of bipedal ape of the genus Australopithecus. All of these new species eventually died out except one tbat survived until about 2 million years ago, by which time it had changed so much that it needed not just a new species designation but a new genus designation, Homo. Compared with its australopithecine forebears—who were four feet tall with ape Then, somewhere still in Africa, sometime about 200,000 years ago, one population of Homo began on a new and different evolutionary trajectory. It began living in new ways in Africa and then spread out across the world, outcompeting all other papulations of Homo and leaving descendants that are known today as Homo sapiens (see Figure 1.1). The individuals of this new species had a number of new physical characteristics, including somewhat larger brains, but most striking were the new cognitive skills and products they created: They began to produce a plethora of new stone tools adapted to specific ends, with each population of the species creating its own tool They began to use symbols to communicate and to structure their social lives, including not only linguistic symbols but also artistic symbols in the form of stone carvings and cave paintings—resulting eventually in some populations creating such things as written language, money, mathematical notation, and art. They began to engage in new kinds of social practices and organizations, including everything from the burying of the dead ceremonially to the domestication of plants and animals—resulting eventually in some populations creating such things as formalized religious, governmental, educational, and commercial institutions. The basic puzzle is this. The 6 million years that separates human beings from other great apes is a very short time evolutionarily, with modern humans and chimpanzees sharing something on the order of 99 percent of their genetic material—the same degree of relatedness as that of other sister genera such as lions and tigers, horses and zebras, and rats and mice (King and Wilson, 1975). Our problem is thus one of time. The fact is, there simply has not been enough time for normal processes of biological evolution involving genetic variation and natural selection to have created, one by one, each of the cognitive skills necessary for modern humans to invent and maintain complex tool There is only one possible solution to this puzzle. That is, there is only one known biological mechanism that could bring about these kinds of changes in behavior and cognition in so short a time— whether that time be thought of as 6 million, 2 million, or one The evidence that human beings do indeed have species The basic fact is thus that human beings are able to pool their cognitive resources in ways that other animal species are not. Accordingly, Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner (1993) distinguished human cultural learning from more widespread forms of social learning, identifying three basic types: imitative learning, instructed learning, and collaborative learning. These three types of cultural learning are made possible by a single very special form of social cognition, namely, the ability of individual organisms to understand conspecifics as beings like themselves who have intentional and mental lives like their own. This understanding enables individuals to imagine themselves "in the mental shoes" of some other person, so tbat they can learn not justfrom the other but through the other. This understanding of others as intentional beings like the self is crucial in human cultural learning because cultural artifacts and social practices—exemplified prototypically by the use of tools and linguisÜc symbols—invariably point beyond themselves to other outside entities: tools point to the problems they are designed to solve and linguistic symbols point to the communicative situations they are designed to represent. Therefore, to socially learn the conventional use of a tool or a symbol, children must come to understand why, toward what outside end, the other person is using the tool or symbol; that is to say, they must come to understand the intentional significance of the tool use or symbolic practice—what it is "for," what "we," the users of this tool or symbol, do with it. Processes of cultural learning are especially powerful forms of social learning because they constitute both (a) especially faithful forms of cultural transmission (creating an especially powerful cultural ratchet) and (b) especially powerful forms of social The complete sequence of hypothesized evolutionary events is thus: human beings evolved a new form of social cognition, which enabled some new forms of cultural learning, which enabled some new processes of sociogenesis and cumulative cultural evolution. This scenario solves our time problem because it posits one and only one biological adaptation—which could have happened at any time in human evolution, including quite recently. The cultural processes that this one adaptation unleashed did not then create new cognitive skills out of nothing, but rather they took existing individually based cognitive skills—such as those possessed by most primates for dealing with space, objects, tools, quantities, categories, social relationships, communication, and social learning—and transformed them into new, culturally based cognitive skills with a social Cumulative cultural evolution is thus the explanation for many of human beings' most impressive cognitive achievements. However, to fully appreciate the role of cultural This new understanding and these new activities thus form the basis for children's initial entry into the world of culture. The outcome is that each child who understands her conspecifics as intentional/mental beings like herself—that is, each child who possesses the social For the child with autism there are cognitive shoulders to stand on, if only she could, whereas for the imaginary wild child there are no cognitive sholders to stand on. In either case the result is, or would be, the same: something other than species But growing up in a cultural world has cognitive implications that go beyond even this. Growing up in a cultural world—assuming possession of the social be construed as the coast, the shore, the beach, or the sand—all depending on the communicative goals of the speaker. As the child masters the linguistic symbols of her culture she thereby acquires the ability to adopt multiple perspectives simultaneously on one and the same perceptual situation. As perspectivally based cognitive representations, then, linguistic symbols are based not on the recording of direct sensory or motor experiences, as are the cognitive representations of other animal species and human infants, but rather on the ways in which individuals choose to construe things out of a number of other ways they might have construed them, as embodied in the other available linguistic symbols that they might have chosen, but did not. Linguistic symbols thus free human cognition from the immediate perceptual situation not simply by enabling reference to things outside this situation ("displacement"; Hockett,1960), but rather by enabling multiple simultaneous representations of each and every, indeed all possible, perceptual situations. Later, as children become more skillful with their native language, additional possibilities for construing things in different ways open up. For example, natural languages contain cognitive resources for partitioning the world into such things as events and their participants—who may play many and various roles in these events—and for forming abstract categories of event and participant types. Moreover, natural languages also contain cogniÜve resources for construing whole events or situations in terms of one another, that is, for creating the various kinds of analogies and metaphors that are so important in adult cognition—such as seeing the atom as a solar system, love as a journey, or anger as heat (Lakoff, 1987; Gentner and Markman, 1997; see Chapter 5). Also, children's growing skills of linguistic communication enable them to participate in complex discourse interactions in which the explicitly symbolized perspectives of interactants clash and so must be negotiated and resolved. These kinds of interactions may lead children to begin to construct something like a theory of mind of their communicative partners, and, in some special cases of pedagogical discourse, to internalize adult instructions and so begin to self In this book—for which the foregoing may be seen as a kind of precis—I attempt to spell out this general line of argumentation in some detail. That is, my specific hypothesis is that human cognition has the species • Phylogenetically: modern human beings evolved the ability to "identify" with conspecifics, which led to an understanding of them as intentional and mental beings like the self. Historically: this enabled new forms of cultural learning and sociogenesis, which led to cultural artifacts and behavioral traditions that accumulate modifications over historical time. Onfogenetically: human children grow up in the midst of these socially and historically constituted artifacts and traditions, which enables them to (a) benefit from the accumulated knowledge and skills of theIr social groups; (b) acquire and use perspectivally based cognitive representations in the form of linguistic symbols (and analogies and metaphors constructed from these symbols); and (c) intemalize certain types of discourse interactions into skills of metacognition, representational redescription, and dialogic thinking. I should emphasize at the outset that my focus is only on the species My account here simply presupposes them, and then focuses in Vygotskian fashion on the kinds of evolutionary, historical, and ontogenetic processes that might have transformed these fundamental skills into the special version of primate cognition that is human cognition. I should also emphasize tbat I will deal with the biological and historical processes involved in the evolution of human cognition only .; briefly and somewhat indirectly—mainly because the events of interest took place deep in the evolutionary and historical past and our information about them is very poor (Chapter 2). On the other hand, I will focus m some detail on human cognitive ontogeny—about which we know a good deal through several decades of direct observation and experimentation—and the processes by which human children actively exploit and make use of both their biological and cultural inheritances (Chapters 3 6). Unfortunately, in today's intellectual climate my argument may be taken by some theorists to be an essentially genetic one: the social

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