A Natural History of Human Thinking / / Michael Tomasello.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Harvard University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Tomasello, Michael,
• MitwirkendeR: Brandom, Robert,; Piaget, Jean,; Sellars, Wilfrid,; Vygotsky, Lev,; Wittgenstein, Ludwig,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Edition: Pilot project,eBook available to selected US libraries only
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (192 p.)

Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. 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. Tomasello maintains 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 and coordinate thoughts. A Natural History of Human Thinking is the most detailed scientific analysis to date of the connection between human sociality and cognition.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. The Shared Intentionality Hypothesis -- 2. Individual Intentionality -- 3. Joint Intentionality -- 4. Collective Intentionality -- 5. Human Th inking as Cooperation -- 6. Conclusion -- Notes -- References -- Index