EAN: 9780674986831

A NATURAL HISTORY OF HUMAN THINKING - MICHAEL T...

Tool-making or culture  language or religious belief: ever since Darwin  thinkers have
struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. In
this much-anticipated book  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. Once our ancestors learned to put their heads together with others
to pursue shared goals  humankind was on an evolutionary path all its own. Tomasello argues
that our prehuman ancestors  like today's great apes  were social beings who could solve
problems by thinking. But they were almost entirely competitive  aiming only at their
individual goals. As ecological changes forced them into more cooperative living arrangements 
early humans had to coordinate their actions and communicate their thoughts with collaborative
partners. Tomasello's shared intentionality hypothesis captures how these more socially complex
forms of life led to more conceptually complex forms of thinking. In order to survive  humans
had to learn to see the world from multiple social perspectives  to draw socially recursive
inferences  and to monitor their own thinking via the normative standards of the group. Even
language and culture arose from the preexisting need to work together. What differentiates us
most from other great apes  Tomasello proposes  are the new forms of thinking engendered by our
new forms of collaborative and communicative interaction. A Natural History of Human Thinking
is the most detailed scientific analysis to date of the connection between human sociality and
cognition.

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