Yesterday I discussed some concepts of C. S. Peirce's philosophy as it related to Tomasello. I want to push that a little further. The one controversial point I made (and which no one commented on) was the claim that Tomasello ties abstraction to the ability to see others as intentional beings. (What we've called empathy, for lack of a better term) I said that this was wrong and that we should instead reverse this. The suggestion I offered was vague and I want to fill it in a bit. Basically I think that the fundamental ability was the ability to think in terms of triads rather than dyads. (Tomasello himself uses this terminology in various places like page 62, where he also uses the triangle metaphor)
The problem is that Tomasello is frustratingly inconsistent in this. So I'm not entirely sure my critique is apt. For instance probably the best example of this Thirdness is on page 24. There Tomasello gives the following examples requiring three terms.
Wind -> Limb Shakes ->Fruit Falls
Human Climbs On -> Limb Shakes -> Fruit Falls
Self Manipulates -> Limb Shakes -> Fruit Falls
Now Tomasello suggests that humans can discern an abstract "force" behind the second term. Thus this mediating term is abstracted out. The human (or quasi-human) can then recognize that whatever can cause a limb to shake will make the fruit fall. Contrast this with an ape where that abstraction of "limb shakes" can never be found. Rather at best the ape could experience manipulating the limb to make the fruit fall. But "manipulate the limb" is treated as a single term rather than two terms. That is it is dyadic rather than triadic.
So clearly Tomasello allows more than just intentional recognition, despite his first chapter. On this page he even says, "mediating intentional/causal forces." But he gives short shift in the rest of the book to causal forces, tending to privilege intentionality. As I said, he's inconsistent on this point. But more important, this concept of mediation is fundamental to what we might call abduction. That is, the ability to make a guess or hypothesize some abstraction behind some phenomena. A law-like structure common to many individual phenomena.
Tomasello allows lawlike discussions (see for instance his discussion of infants Newtonian forces on page 75). However he argues that such judgments are just, "...infants [making] some of these same kinds of simulations [of intents], perhaps somewhat inappropriately, to inanimate objects, and that this is the source of their understandings of how some physical events 'force' others to happen: the first billiard ball is pushing the second with the same kind of force that I feel when I push it." (75) In other words rather than there being a true recognition of mediation, law, or abstraction, we simply have animism.
Now I call this mediation Thirdness and I'll use that term. But what I want to bring out is that if we allow for this development from apes in terms of Thirdness, we don't have to ascribe it to a single ability. Tomasello wants something like a single ability - the ability to recognize intents. But with a general principle of Thirdness we can have different cognitive subsystems in the brain developing Thirdness independently. This would also explain why some apes seem to be able to think cognitively with what we'd term Thirdness, if only to a limited ability. (Something I mentioned in many creatures the other day; and something Tomasello tries to explain away in this second chapter.)
To see why multiple cognitive systems each having either dyadic or triadic capabilities rather than a single "intent assigning" faculty makes more sense, consider Tomasello's discussion of language on page 43. There he notes claims about how language evolves. So we move from will in "I will it to happen" to "It will happen." Now Tomasello argues this is treating the entity as if it had intents and this becomes reflected in language.
But consider for a moment the evidence that different parts of the brain deal with different aspects of language. Thus narrowly targeted brain damage may, for instance, remove ones ability to use verbs properly at all. What if each of those sections, dealing with nouns, tense and so forth also worked in dyadic or triadic terms. All of Tomasello's examples here could perhaps better be seen as the ability to move from dydic terms to triadic terms with these features of language. Thus "I will it to happen" to "It will happen" is not ascribing intents to some event. Rather it is just recognizing that the dyadic term "I will -> happen" can become the triadic "I -> will -> happen." Will becomes not something I do, but an abstraction on its own.
I know this is controversial, and not being a cognitive scientist, I don't know if it has been dealt with. But I want to use it to explain the dating problem Tomasello faces. If this ability of ascribing intents arrives around 200,000 BC then I just don't see how culture shouldn't evolve fairly fast. Why not space shuttles by 150,000 BC? Yet if we have multiple systems in the brain, with some evolving by chance the ability to function triadically, it makes sense. There will be a slow continual development of abilities. Humans might have a lot of the abilities we have now, but be missing the crucial ones to develop modern abstract thought, mathematics, science, and writing. Those crucial final evolutionary changes may very well only have happened tens of thousands of years ago.
The advantage of this goes back to Peirce and his notion of continuity. Should we assume this huge abrupt change or a more continuum of changes. (I don't want to say gradual, since the notion of a continuum doesn't imply a constant temporal change - some mutations could change rather rapidly) So I think this theory is more in keeping with what I understand of evolution as well as making a bit more sense in terms of brain function. At least in my opinion from my admittedly limited knowledge.
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.
Just to add to the above. I think this also resolves some of the complaints readers had about autism. Rather than autism being a single cause - a degree of loss of the ability to accredit intents - it is made up of multiple causes. Perhaps many of those causes are just subsystems in the brain losing the ability to function triadically.
This would explain why autistics can often function very well with some abstractions (such as mathematics) and not others (social ques) It seems to me that the variety and degrees of autism undermine Tomasello's view but my view might potentially explain them.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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