I had originally wanted to read the text through entirely before writing any commentary or questions about the book. Unfortunately that didn't happen and I've only read about 1/3 of it thus far. However after reading that far I'm very glad that we picked this book. First off it is very interesting with far more argumentation than I've found in similar books. That is Tomasello isn't just presenting only his view but also engaging with alternative perspectives in a fairly refreshing manner. In particular he seems quite open with regards to flaws in his evidence as well as presenting alternatives. It's quite a refreshing approach that is sometimes rarer than it ought be. Not being that well versed in the field, I'll confess that perhaps I'm making that judgement a tad hastily. Hopefully before we're through with the book I'll get up to speed with some of the criticisms.
The first thing that struck me with the book was how open to a Peircean reading it is. I'll get to some of those parallels in the next chapter where I think Peirce may offer some interesting insights to Tomasello's approach. However even in his introductory first paragraph Tomasello opens with a quote from Peirce.
All the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the power of unaided individuals
The emphasis seems to be on Peirce's notion of the community of inquirers. I think what one could see Tomasello doing is asking how the human community is different from the ape community. Now in one sense evolution has always dealt with communities. Evolution is never just about the individual but about groups in which individuals pass on certain genes and so forth. Yet at the same time this is a very limited sense of community. What Tomasello wishes to do is to in effect expand the notion of evolution from just that genetic community to one that includes discovery, communication, refinement and so forth. In other words to show how one can move from apes to what I'd call a Peircean sense of community.
Now I'll probably have a ton to say about this in the posts dealing with the second chapter. But since this initial chapter is just an introduction to the problem and an overview of the approach I'll leave that topic for now.
The basic "solution" Tomasello suggests is the ability to consider other people as people like oneself. Now there is an old philosophical problem called the problem of other minds. Basically we all recognize that we have a subjective sense of things and at least the perception that we choose and are free actors. Put in more Cartesian terms, we have a mind. However what about all other other humanoid bodies out there. Do they have minds? We all assume they do. But justifying that philosophically can be problematic. Some might say that a lot of science is premised on the assumption that we can do away not just with other minds but with our own minds. That is, we can discuss minds as if they were just "stuff." I've no idea if Tomasello deals with that. I suspect not. But it certainly forms an important cultural background to his work. That is because he sees the fundamental change between apes and humans as the recognition that others are like us. That is, we intuitively assume other people have minds like us.
Now I should caution that Tomasello is being much more careful than I am in that paragraph. However he brings up the issue of autism wherein people have difficulty making that kind of relation to others. Now I understand why he brings this up. However it also was the part of the introduction most problematic to me. While clearly autistic people have trouble both communicating and "reading" others, I'm not sure it fits Tomasello's thesis to the degree he wishes. That's because autistic people often have amazing abstract abilities. Certainly there are some surprising ways in which autistic people seem to reason more like animals. And that's a topic that's been in the news a fair bit this year. But at the same time Tomasello's point, especially in the next chapter, deals with a certain abstraction ability arising out of this ability to relate to others. It seems that the surprising skills of autistic people, especially relative to language and mathematics, is something Tomasello needs to deal with. (Perhaps he does. I've not finished the book yet)
The other important thing Tomasello mentions is that many complex cognitive capabilities can arise from cognitive abilities we share with apes. It is just that those abilities are given a much larger reach once the new ability is brought forth. That is, I think, an important point. This isn't some ability that enables all other capabilities. Rather it is all our abilities together that enable what humans are capable of.
The most important point Tomasello makes though isn't this ability to treat others as oneself. (What he calls conspecifics ) Rather it is how within this newly enabled community ideas, practices and skills can be transmitted, refined, and evolve. Yeah, that's a bad word since we're not talking about evolution proper. Nor are we really talking about social darwinism. (I suspect that's a charge Tomasello will have to deal with) Rather we are dealing with the ability because we can abstract the notion of others to take what they do, apply it ourselves and change it. As we change it others can copy us with some changes and so forth. The details of this will be important. Indeed that's probably an understatement.
Now on to the more nitpicky points.
First the index largely sucks. Man, why can't people do good indexes? We have computers now. Why are they always so short?
Second vocabulary. Not that big a deal and I suppose his target audience is familiar with the terms. However I had to look up ontogeny, for instance. When he talks about human cognitive ontogeny he basically just means the development of cognitive abilities in children. But reading it away from my computer I was a tad puzzled. There are a lot more in the next chapter. So have wikipedia handy as you read.
Thirdly Tomasello has this weird tendency to sometimes talk about himself in third person like those old jokes about Bob Dole. Yet at other times he speaks in first person. This is kind of annoying stylistically. Part of it is just as a way to try to blend in his end note style into the text's narrative. Of course that's partially why I hate end notes as opposed to footnotes. (Further footnotes let one put in asides regarding ones references without disturbing the narrative flow) But I know that's basically the way one has to write in science nowdays. Can't say I like it though.
Finally the questions. I hesitate raising them here since this is just an introduction. But they set up how I read the rest of the text.
First off is the problem of time that Tomasello starts with. What his problem will be is to explain how this new ability could arise without humans socially evolving too fast. Once these abilities occur, it seems to me that the social development of language, tools, social structures and so forth ought happen fairly quickly. Even if the development of this ability to empathize with cospecifics took hundreds of thousands of years to really get into place, that development still seems like it would go fast. Just look how fast humans went from writing to spaceships. The history of humanity is very short. Even if we conceive of a million years moving from chimp like cognitive abilities to various levels of autistic like creatures, the point I raised about autistic people remains. They have a lot of abilities. Even a slow rate of development seems fast compared to hundreds of thousands of years. I'm curious to see how he addresses this.
Second up is the issue of language development. Even with these new abilities if the proto-humans didn't have language it would severely limit transmission of ideas. It would thus be a significant check on social development. Obviously this is tied to my prior point and I'll wager a guess that Tomasello gets to this. But then we have the issue of how language develops. Can Tomasello limit his views to just this one ability or will he have to address language separately? That is, is language entailed by this new ability over apes. If is, then the time problem arises again. If it isn't, then that undermines the presentation Tomasello gives in his introduction.
That's probably enough for now. The second chapter I'll probably do in a few sections and focus more on a critique and assume readers have also read the chapter.
Just a note that I have up a page listing all the blog posts that are part of the reading club. It's also in my right sidebar in the archive area as Reading Tomasello. If you aren't a member of the club but have a post at your blog on this book, please post a note there with a link.
Hey Clark, this is great! Could you post a link to it to the yahoo group? I think your questions, especially the one about the time it takes for these things to develop culturally, can spark a lot of discussion.
Indexes usually suck because the authors themselves usually don't produce the index. The author pays an indexing fee for the publisher to do the actual index. The publisher hires an uninformed person at low wages to index the book, resulting in poor indexes, see here look for "A fee for indexing."
Oops, I guess the index question maybe was rhetorical since you do indexers as part of your company.
Well book indexes and computer indexes are very different beasts. Computer indexes are what Google, eBay or the like do. (They don't use us, although Adobe Acrobat does) The software to auto-generate an index would be fairly trivial to write. I'd expect most DP software does it as well. It's typically just laziness on the part of the publishers with many books still having no index at all.
I use indexes a lot. Not so much to necessarily look up subjects, but to quickly find passages I'd read earlier.
Of course since the Tomasello book is temporarily available in an online PDF, that's less of an issue.
Chris, I'll post that right now. I just didn't have the address handy at home. Plus I wrote the above at 11:30 at night - much to my wife's dismay.
Just to add, the Peirce quote is from his paper "Evolutionary Love." CP 6.315 (Thanks to Gary Richmond for finding the source for me) The context is somewhat interesting.
The agapastic development of thought should, if it exists, be distinguished by its purposive character, this purpose being the development of an idea. We should have a direct agapic or sympathetic comprehension and recognition of it by virtue of the continuity of thought. I here take it for granted that such continuity of thought has been sufficiently proved by the arguments used in my paper on the "Law of Mind" in The Monist of last July [Chapter 5]. Even if those arguments are not quite convincing in themselves, yet if they are reënforced by an apparent agapasm in the history of thought, the two propositions will lend one another mutual aid. The reader will, I trust, be too well grounded in logic to mistake such mutual support for a vicious circle in reasoning. If it could be shown directly that there is such an entity as the "spirit of an age" or of a people, and that mere individual intelligence will not account for all the phenomena, this would be proof enough at once of agapasticism and of synechism. I must acknowledge that I am unable to produce a cogent demonstration of this; but I am, I believe, able to adduce such arguments as will serve to confirm those which have been drawn from other facts. I believe that all the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the powers of unaided individuals; and I find, apart from the support this opinion receives from synechistic considerations, and from the purposive character of many great movements, direct reason for so thinking in the sublimity of the ideas and in their occurring simultaneously and independently to a number of individuals of no extraordinary general powers. The pointed Gothic architecture in several of its developments appears to me to be of such a character. All attempts to imitate it by modern architects of the greatest learning and genius appear flat and tame, and are felt by their authors to be so. Yet at the time the style was living, there was quite an abundance of men capable of producing works of this kind of gigantic sublimity and power. In more than one case, extant documents show that the cathedral chapters, in the selection of architects, treated high artistic genius as a secondary consideration, as if there were no lack of persons able to supply that; and the results justify their confidence. Were individuals in general, then, in those ages possessed of such lofty natures and high intellect? Such an opinion would break down under the first examination.
Just a thought. Some of that terminology may be odd. Peirce's semiotics conceived of what he termed "agapastic evolution."
Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us: evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution by creative love. We may term them tychastic evolution, or tychasm, anancastic evolution, or anancasm, and agapastic evolution, or agapasm. The doctrines which represent these as severally of principal importance we may term tychasticism, anancasticism, and agapasticism. On the other hand the mere propositions that absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love are severally operative in the cosmos may receive the names of tychism, anancism, and agapism.
Probably bringing in "love" will seem odd and even controversial. However Peirce, while definitely bringing in religious overtones, means it more in the sense of altruism in a very broad sense.
The gospel of Christ says that progress comes from every individual merging his individuality in sympathy with his neighbors. On the other side, the conviction of the nineteenth century is that progress takes place by virtue of every individual's striving for himself with all his might and trampling his neighbor under foot whenever he gets a chance to do so. This may accurately be called the Gospel of Greed.
Once again while Peirce intends the religious overtones, I think one can strip them of their prejudicial form. The basic idea is competition vs. co-operation as they function in an overall evolutionary structure. Typically only competition is focused in on, even in the 19th century when Darwinistic ideas were being entertained. Peirce wants to invoke co-operation into evolution which has obvious parallels to what Tomasello is doing.
The other two Peircean terms are tychism and synchrism. They just mean "chance" and "continuity." Peirce's thought it infused with the necessity of both. As I'll comment on the second chapter of Tomasello, there are some important parallels with Peirce's synechism.
Those interested can read Peirce's full paper "Evolutionary Love".
The standard way to refer to an article or book in the text is by referring to the author(s) and year of the source -- for example, King and Wilson, 1975. Many of Tomasello's references are to his own work, but what he does is definitely better than switching to the first person whenever he cites a paper he authored or co-authored -- "read me (1997) for more information."
It seems that the key question driving the book is "How did we get from animal cognition to human cognition?" So naturally we have to compare human cognition to animal cognition, particularly the cognition of our close genetic relatives, to see what the differences are; and then we need to think about how the evolution of cognitive capabilities works.
In Chapter 1, Tomasello describes his solution to the "How did we get from animal cognition to human cognition" question -- humans developed the ability to empathize (via biological evolution) and this in turn allowed the species to develop mentally in ways that no other species ever had, because empathy permits crucial cultural developments. In particular, the ability for individuals to understand as others as "beings like themselves who have intentional and mental lives all their own" allows for imitative learning, instructed learning, and collaborative learning. He also thinks that his approach solves the time problem of so much human development in so little time.
Regarding your questions:
#1 Autism -- I haven't gone very far in the book so I don't know how Tomasello actually address this. I would suspect that Tomasello's idea is that if everyone were autistic, human culture couldn't get off the ground, but autistic people have sufficient abilities to benefit from the advancements of human culture. Nevertheless, this is a good example of what makes me intuitively uncomfortable with Tomasello's thesis -- it just seems to over-stress empathy as a fundamental human ability. I can see that empathy is necessary for cultural evolution, but he seems to suggest that it is nearly sufficient. I would think that there are other human abilities, such as "flexible abstract thinking" and "understanding cause and effect" that also play a crucial role in separating us from other primates, and these don't seem fundamentally tied to having a sense of empathy. Of course, I could very easily be wrong about that.
Of course that brings up a very useful question -- "What exactly are the cognitive abilities of nonhuman animals, particularly primates?" Tomasello addresses this question in Chapter 2, but I found some of his statements rather surprising and non-intuitive. I suspect that he might be over-stating his case, but then again I know very little about animal cognition. For example:
"In the social domain, primates, but not other mammals, understand something of the third-party social relationships that hold among other individuals; for example, they understand such things as the kinship and dominance relations that third parties have with one another." (page 17) Is this really a primate-only understanding -- do all other mammals really have no idea about social relationships that they are not directly involved in? I find that very surprising.
Tomasello also says in Chapter 2 that nonhuman primates "do not understand the world in intentional and causal terms" (page 19). I do know that he has backed off this statement a little bit; in a paper from 2003, he described studies where submissive chimpanzees pursued food based on whether or not a dominant chimpanzee saw it or not, clearly indicating that one chimp could understand what another chimp saw. At any rate, this chapter seems crucial in that it maps out the key differences between human and non-human cognition, and I find many of his statements surprising. I would be interested in further information about this particular subject.
(Regarding your second question about language -- there seem to be a couple of chapters about language coming up later in the book. Chris of Mixing Memory also seemed to suggest that Tomasello has some interesting out-of-the-mainstream ideas about the evolution of language.)
Well yes, it is the standard way. Although it didn't always use to be. I have lots of books on my shelves that use more traditional footnotes. Certainly if in a narrative way you have to refer, one typically refers to the author. But I think the way it is typically done now is awkward. It's just a pet peeve of the way scholastic publications have developed. I enjoy in many ways reading older texts to newer ones. I'd say that the main benefit of newer texts to old ones is a good index. But sadly that isn't even true. And we don't even have the excuses they did 40 years ago!
Regarding the relationship between "empathy" and causal relations and abstractions, I actually think he does deal with this well in the second chapter. So I'll get to that later. I definitely want to return to Peirce there as I think he either consciously or unconsciously develops Peirce's notions of secondness and thirdness. Once you look at it in that fashion I think a lot of the rest develops naturally. But I don't want to give away my thoughts just yet (nor bias those who've not read the second chapter yet)
Regarding the cognitive abilities of apes, I think I'll address that as well in the second chapter. But I think he's at least up front about where he disagrees with the accepted view and why. I confess I found him persuasive. Although given my limited background that doesn't say much.
I actually have read some relatively recent papers of both Tomasella and Chomsky on the evolution of language. I'll confess I don't remember them that well though. So I'm intrigued by how Tomasella moves.
I have to reread the chapter before I get 'round to commenting on the content, but I'll join in the stylistic nitpicking...
Despite their frequent disagreements, I've noticed that Daniel Dennett and Stephen Jay Gould both knew how to do notes and references. References to cited texts are always author(s) and date in parentheses, and actual notes are footnotes. Tomasello seems to be dispensing with notes altogether, but he could alleviate the 1st/3rd-person awkwardness by always sticking his citations in parentheses. Like so: "I found that chimps do such-and-such (Tomasello 1994)"
I agree with you as well, Clark, on the vocabulary issue. While the book's not written in the, um, fun style of better known science popularizers, it does seem like Tomasello is writing not just for people in his field, but for interested outsiders as well. I remembered having seen "ontogeny" before, but shouldn't have had to go elsewhere to refresh my memory of what it means. Similarly with "conspecific," which I noticed you took to be a usage of Tomasello's coining. It just means members of the same species, but he uses it so often that it seems as though it has a technical meaning specific to his argument.
Hopefully, I'll finish setting up my blog soon and join the discussion of the actual ideas before we've all read the book. Thanks for kicking it off, Clark.
That's interesting. I did assume conspecific was tied into his notion that everyone seems to be labeling "empathy" for lack of a better term. (I don't recall Tomasello really picking a term for it) The problem with this use of conspecific as a way of describing the phenomena in question is the problem of not just anthropomorphizing animals but the opposite. Not only do we attribute human emotions, aims, and understanding to apes, dogs, cats and even cars, we look at animals and seek to emulate them. Thus early flight attempts which were largely looking at say birds and saying, "I could do that." So it probably is a poor choice.
On the other hand perhaps Tomasello would say that while we can anthropomorphize dogs and horses, we don't form communities with them. Yet dogs were domesticated about 10,000 years ago and appear to enter in and function as a part of a community. If we are speaking about community knowledge and evolution then perhaps we shouldn't use the word conspecific at all?
Of course the era he's talking about (which as I mentioned is controversial) would be before these sorts of concerns arise. Further as a practical matter I suppose such quibbles don't matter.
Some more terminological nit-picking: isn't what folks label "empathy" actually "theory of mind" that Chris mentioned in his introductory post for the reading group. That is, we're using it to discuss "the basic capacities that allow us to infer the thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and intentions of other human beings," right?
Perhaps Tomasello is talking about conspecifics because he's fairly confident that it's only our attempts to infer the intentions (&c.) of other people that has driven the human-specific developments in cognition that he'll bring up in the book. Seems reasonable to me. I certainly use theory of mind to attribute intentions/feelings/thoughts to my dog and cat, and occasionally assorted other animals. But I think I do it less frequently and less automatically than with people.
And when we look to emulate animals in our technology, I think we've thought about how they do things (say, flying), but not about how the animals themselves figured out how to do it. So there's not much theory of mind in that respect (unless you view the evolutionary process or (ugh) the Intelligent Designer as the mind to theorize about). With the cultural evolution by modification of human artifacts, on the other hand, modifiers wind up using theory of mind about conspecifics to think about their predecessors' problem-solving processes..
I think there are some interesting implications in the second chapter on this. I think it is a bit more than just that. But I agree empathy isn't necessarily the best word. But I don't think theory of mind is either. Both seem tied to the problem of other minds. But the capability seems to be much more than that.
However I do think Tomasello tends to limit it to other minds. As I mentioned above though I find that problematic. I think it gets even more problematic when you look at what Tomasello says about it. Although perhaps he's just limiting things so as to not get beyond the theme of his book. Plus by limiting it to minds it is much less controversial.
With regards to anthropomophism, I'm not sure I buy the distinction you raise. But it gets at the heart of my criticism. What does it mean to know how others do things versus how others feel about it. You say instead how they figured out how to do it, but I'd note that Tomasello is careful there, especially in the second chapter. I think figuring out how to do things may require this "empathy" but it need not require anything beyond what apes are able to do.
Just a brief note, as I am rereading the first few chapters in light of these remarks - I, too, am finding the vocabulary to be an issue. I have no problem with learning new words, but it would be nice if there were a glossary. Some terms (e.g., affordance) can be figured out from the context; others (e.g., decalage) just make me feel dumb.
Maybe we should put up a page with words and a brief dictionary entry for them. Was decolage in the first chapter? I don't recall it there. It's definitely a jargon word, not in dictionaries.
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