Michael Tomasello

En este trabajo nos proponemos abordar el tópico concerniente a la dicotomía naturaleza/cultura y la relación de ésta con la cuestión de la diferencia antropológica. Reconstruiremos algunos de los puntos centrales del debate reciente en torno a estas nociones, para luego adentrarnos en las consecuencias filosóficas que, según entendemos, pueden desprenderse de las investigaciones del psicólogo evolutivo contemporáneo Michael Tomasello. Pondremos el énfasis en la reconstrucción de sus argumentos acerca de la estrecha relación que se da entre la cognición humana y la cultura, delimitando la especificidad de estas con respecto a las de los primates no humanos. Lo que se propone es, a grandes rasgos, una mirada acerca de la relación entre cultura y cognición. Palabras clave Dicotomía naturaleza/cultura-Diferencia antropológica-Cognición primate-Michael Tomasello N º 38, V o l. XVIII, 2 0 1 8, www.agoraphilosophica.com 143

Our cognitive abilities make us, humans, a unique phenomenon in the animal kingdom. But what engendered this kind of abilities, allowing us to create such a complex and advanced culture that distinguishes our species from other great apes? According to developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello ("The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition", 1999), the answer to that is social interaction. He argues that this cognitive perfection is a result of our collective intentionality, which enables us to cooperate in complex ways with our conspecifics. This quality led to cumulative cultural learning based on continuous cooperation along many generations, what Tomasello calls "the ratchet effect". However, many of the cognitive skills require time to mature during the lifetime of an individual. In particular, Tomasello emphasizes the significance of discourse interactions with other people during the early development of the child.
In this paper I connect this approach with the fact that many of the discourse interactions in the 21st century, including those of infants and children, are slowly replaced with digital interactions. Face-to-face dialogues are frequently replaced with "one-person dialogues" with her cellular phone or tablet device. I argue that the decrease in dialogue opportunities may have negative effects on certain aspects of the cognitive development in children (beyond language skills). Therefore, I suggest a possible solution, arguing that initiated events of dialogue should be held in schools. I present an example of a curriculum that creates this type of opportunities in school, and show how some of the aspects of the dialogue it promotes are consistent with those considered by Tomasello as crucial for the child's cognitive development.

La condivisione emotiva è un processo antropogenetico, tanto che esiste un nesso molto preciso fra condivisione emotiva e formazione umana. In che rapporto si pone il processo di singolarizzazione con le pratiche di sharing emotions? Che cosa succederebbe se, all'improvviso, un bambino di pochi anni si trovasse a vivere immerso nella natura e privato della possibilità di condividere emozioni con i suoi simili? Avrebbe la possibilità di diventare quell'homme naturel frutto dello stato di natura tanto decantato da Rousseau in quanto preservato da ogni contatto con la corrotta civilisation? Oppure, semplicemente, perirebbe?

PENULTIMATE PROOFS: please do not quote.
To quote or cite, please see to http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hop0000105
History of Psychology, Vol 22(2), May 2019, 113-129

A common view among ancient historians about Roman attentiveness to children's psychological development needs reconsideration. The view holds that Romans ignored children's cognitive ontogeny, perceiving early childhood as a largely undifferentiated life stage. A separate but related issue is the problematic claim that Roman childhood was entirely a matter of social construction. I present evidence from over four hundred years of Roman writing to make three points against Roman neglect of children and radical social construction. First, a consensus (granted our limited number of sources) about "developmental psychology" prevailed from the late republic to late antiquity. Second, this consensus is consistent with modern findings and theories. In particular, the Roman material maps onto a developmental timeline featuring a "2-month revolution," when the infant engages in dyadic protoconversations with adults, and a "9-month revolution," when the infant shares attention triadically with adults toward third objects. In the Roman consensus, both dyadic protoconversations and triadic joint attention were central to cultural learning. Third, when the Roman consensus about children's minds did change, it was because of the Christian doctrine of original sin, according to which even newborns were psychologically corrupt. Nonetheless , I argue, this rupture in the Roman consensus does not entail that we should suppose childhood to have been entirely a social construction or merely a projection of a religious or other ideology. Rather, any construction of childhood-even the late-antique Christian one-will necessarily rest upon a foundation of, and thus be constrained by, certain inescapable biological and psychological "givens."

E se la singolarità prendesse forma nel trasgredire, nel deviare, nel trascendere, nell’esprimersi? E se all’origine ci fosse la necessità di far fronte all’imprevisto, all’esperienza di una crisi radicale che porta a uscire al di fuori di sé, fino ad arrivare a viversi come una sorpresa? Con «singolarità» Cusinato intende il risultato d’un processo creativo d’individuazione che si concretizza in una forma espressiva unica e irripetibile. Ciò che caratterizza la singolarità non è dunque l’identità d’una sostanza, ma l’unicità d’un percorso espressivo. E tale unicità si costituisce in una conversione periagogica del posizionamento nel mondo che porta a far breccia sugli orizzonti del senso comune, fino a inaugurare un nuovo inizio. Una singolarità può essere un’opera d’arte, un libro, una poesia, un gesto, un evento, una persona.
È a partire da questo intreccio fra singolarità, crisi e autotrascendimento (non dal mondo, ma come diverso modo di posizionarsi nel mondo) che Cusinato delinea una nuova fenomenologia della persona: la persona non è un «centro spirituale» che s’incarna in un corpo e neppure una continuità di stati della coscienza o un’unità assembleare. La persona è piuttosto un ordine del sentire unico e inconfondibile che facendosi contagiare dalla testimonianza maieutica di un'alterità viola la propria chiusura operativa. È un sistema non autopoietico che opera sostituendo il paradigma immunitario con quello del prendersi cura del mondo. La crisi del proprio orizzonte d’intrascendenza non è un evento patologico da neutralizzare, ma ciò che permette l’apertura al mondo. Nella persona la fame di nascere (la fame propria di un vivente che non finisce mai di nascere) si fonde così con la germinazione del desiderio, dal latino "de-sidera" inteso come de-costellazione del destino, che dà forma alla propria entratura excentricità nel mondo.

This paper reconstructs Michael Tomasello's account of the evolution of morality and discusses it in the context of the philosophical debates on human nature and the concept of morality. The aim is to show that Tomasello presupposes a particular understanding of what morality is. He takes cooperation and fairness to be constitutive elements of human moral psychology and takes these to be dispositions that enable egalitarian interaction within a group. That these dispositions are what is central to the evolution of human morality is not justified through the causal-historical reconstruction that Tomasello offers. Moreover, his understanding of morality is not without alternatives. This is particularly problematic because accounts of the evolution of human features have normative implications.

In Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the androids are the bioengineered mimesis of a human yet designed to lack empathy so as to serve more effectively as slaves. Drawing on the anthropological studies of Michael Tomasello, René Girard, and Eric Gans, this essay shows that mimesis as psychological identification is the root of empathy-humans imitate the attention of others to their joy and sorrow-and the novel identifies empathy as the defining characteristic of humans. But the androids are capable of imitating humans and becoming both independent and empathetic, just as infants imitate those around them in order to learn language and develop self-consciousness. Psychological mimesis blurs the boundary between self and other, which, in various forms, is the most common topos of Philip K. Dick's novels. The androids' status as doubles of the humans is uniquely motivated; they are a mirror that offers unrivaled insight into what it means to be human. The uncanny androids reflect the ambivalence of mimesis, which is the source of empathy but also rivalry leading to violence. The fear of the androids expresses the fear that humans are simply mechanical creatures controlled by the mimetic drive and the biological imperative to survive and reproduce.

I argue that "discursive intentionality" -- the kind of intelligibility at work in meanings structured by reason-giving -- is a form of embodied coping and not a rupture with it.  I develop this view in terms of the Dreyfus-McDowell debate, and argue that Dreyfus is basically right about "sentience" whereas McDowell is basically right about "sapience". The question is how to accept both of those claims. Joe Rouse (2015) argues that we should recognize both that conceptual capacities are realized in discursive practices and that discursive practices are forms of embodied coping. Though Rouse’s account has much to recommend it, it can be nevertheless strengthened in significant ways that undermine Dreyfus’s stark contrast between the space of reasons and the space of motivations replacing it with a distinction between sapient intentionality and sentient intentionality.

The field of preschool social education may be analyzed from a variety of perspectives, all of which offer deep insights into children’s experiences. The acquisition of social skills is a lifelong process that relies on one’s social initiative in interacting with others. Since quantitative methods fail to produce satisfactory results, those researchers who diagnose social skills in children must have reliable knowledge concerning the latter’s development, and be willing to develop interpretations of the behaviour of children in particular social situations. This paper sets out to consider whether preschool teachers are capable of diagnosing social skills in children as part of the „preschool diagnostic assessment” recommended by the Polish Ministry of National Education in its Common Core for Preschool Educators. It is pointed out that the document is vague in its description of how to define the aims of social education. Some theoretical premises are presented, with the aim of furnishing criteria for diagnosing social skills in preschool children – criteria somewhat broader than those recommended in the Common Core. Several concepts are proposed in order to help explain the phenomenon of „children’s community formation”, where this is achieved through learning collaborative skills or in response to the need to create forms of shared intentionality when interacting with others (Bruner, Schaffer, Tomasello). The process of gathering knowledge about children’s social skills requires that teachers select suitable methods for identifying the position of particular children in the children’s community, where the latter is different from the community of adults and so follows its own quite distinct rules. The paper also makes suggestions for teachers about how to work to identify and interpret children’s relationships with their peers in naturally occurring situations, such as during spontaneous games, peer tutoring, or peer collaboration, and in prearranged educational situations such as group learning through collaboration.

In Middlemarch, George Eliot scrive: " We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves". La stupidità morale è una specie di impostazione predefinita con cui nasciamo, una sorta di esagerata auto-percezione che distorce le nostre percezioni. Quindi l'auto-sviluppo morale, il progresso morale, è la sua cura e l’unica via d’uscita da questa condizione. Se Eliot ha ragione e il "sé supremo" è d'intralcio, allora la cura per la stupidità morale sta nel dominare il sé supremo. 
La mia tesi è che la moral stupidity sta al centro di tutte le errate percezioni che l’essere umano ha di sé stesso e del suo posto nel mondo, e che la moral stupidity sia collegata a percezioni distorte della nostra natura umana e del rapporto che abbiamo con l’Altro, specialmente riguardo forme di discriminazione all’interno della nostra stessa specie ma anche riguardo il nostro rapporto con il non umano.
Il rapporto con l’Altro è un frutto delle nostre speciali capacità cognitive, che ci differenziano dalle altre specie animali. Queste capacità cognitive però, si sono nel tempo così sofisticate, costruendo da esse una concezione morale oggettivista e discontinuista nei confronti dell’Altro al punto da farci dimenticare le origini della nostra moralità, che stanno nelle virtù cooperative e nell’altruismo.

Handeln, Denken und Identität sind von Grund auf sozial. Menschliche Individuen sind motivational auf Sozialität hin ausgerichtet; ihre Identität wird in Sozialität ausgebildet und revitalisiert; ihr Handeln und Denken wird durch Sozialität strukturiert. Diese These einer konstitutiven Sozialität des Handelns findet sich im klassischen Pragmatismus konsequent ausformuliert. Frithjof Nungesser analysiert die konflikt- und folgenreichen Entstehungsbedingungen sowie die inneren Zusammenhänge und Spannungen dieser Theorieposition. Darauf aufbauend reformuliert er sie im Rückgriff auf aktuelle lebenswissenschaftliche Befunde – insbesondere aus Primatologie, Linguistik, Kultur- und Entwicklungspsychologie. So wird der Pragmatismus als eine Sozialtheorie sichtbar, die Evolution, Handeln und kulturelle Entwicklung in nicht-reduktionistischer, innovativer und empirisch haltbarer Weise verknüpft.

In his social theory, G. H. Mead argues that the development of human agency is linked to the emergence of the human-specific capacity of perspective-taking in the course of social evolution. With his conception of perspective-taking, he knits together three key innovations of pragmatist theory: a non-deterministic understanding of evolution, the notion of organism-environment-interaction, and the idea of the social self. In order to retain Mead's transdisciplinary orientation, it is essential to reevaluate his claims in light of current empirical results - not only from the social sciences but also from the life sciences. Against this background, the paper pursues a threefold objective: First, it aims at a reconstruction of Mead's view on the evolution of sociality, perspective-taking, and agency. Second, the paper contrasts Mead's arguments with Michael Tomasello's seminal contribution to the understanding of human evolution. By drawing on Tomasello's studies, it becomes possible to avoid two major shortcomings of Mead's approach: Tomasello's account of great ape sociality and cognition helps to overcome Mead's dichotomous juxtaposition of animals and humans; moreover, Tomasello's reconstruction of hominin evolution allows to resolve contradictions between Mead's phylogenetic and ontogenetic lines of argument. Finally, the paper proposes a refined conception of perspective-taking. The results of the Mead-Tomasello-comparison, I argue, suggest not only that three levels of perspective-taking should be systematically distinguished but also that the consecutive emergence of these three levels of perspective-taking structure(ed) both the evolutionary and the ontogenetic development of human agency.

The work "Les faits sociaux ne sont pas de choses" (1946) written by Jules Monnerot a former member of the Collège de Sociologie seems to be the first synopsis of the theories developed in this group of "intellectuals". It also comprises important building blocks for a theory of social change which puts into question a too sever distinction between religious and political phenomena. The author as well as his work have been neglected by almos all contemporary researchers dealing with the Collège de Sociology.

Evoluzione biologica ed evoluzione culturale sono processi tra loro simili e hanno un comune denominatore di fondamentale importanza: la variabilità. Vedremo come le variazioni che permettono l'evoluzione degli artefatti culturali siano le principali responsabili della quantità e della diversità delle culture umane ed il ruolo che l'effetto “dente d'arresto” di Michael Tomasello sia ciò che ha permesso l'innescarsi di un circolo virtuoso di innovazioni e trasmissioni culturali che è alla base dell'evoluzione culturale cumulativa.

Many studies measure normative behavior. This work examines whether they make a conceptual confusion and conflate norms as a social phenomenon and norm psychology – the putative cognitive mechanisms that undergird social norms. An increasing segment of the research on norms in recent years is dedicated to norm psychology, highlighting the intrinsic motivation and emotional aspects associated with social norms. Nevertheless, existing research that purports to measure norm governed behavior and attitudes toward social norms mainly focuses on cross-cultural variation in the norms themselves. This work aims to explore possible implications of norm measurement methodologies for understanding the commitment to norms. In this context, commitment to norms is the extent to which one is intrinsically motivated to comply with norms. By analyzing existing studies that measure norm governed behavior and attitudes toward social norms, the current work tries to characterize commitment to norms – whether it is a general psychological property that relates equally to all norms, or rather depends on the specific content of norms, and whether it is mainly a characteristic of individuals or groups.
Drawing on several theoretical approaches to norms and the cultural evolution of norms, this work provides a broad, multidisciplinary analysis of three studies that use varying measuring methodologies, including economic games and questionnaires. This evaluation shows that the data support different interpretations to commitment to norms, and are therefore unable to characterize this notion definitively. Of special importance would be the plausible possibility of providing evidence of cross-cultural variation in general commitment to norms. Such evidence would support the existence and evolution of norm psychology as either a genetic or, more likely, cultural trait. Further research is however needed to design and test methodologies for measuring variation in the general commitment to norms.

Scheler’s theory that emotional sharing underlies social ontology, which was already presented in the first edition of Sympathiebuch in 1913, made a comeback in Formalismus. Sharing one’s feelings and emotions is the reason behind various “forms of being-with-one-another [Miteinandersein] and co-living-with-one-another [Miteinaderleben], in which the corresponding forms of social unit constitute themselves” [GW II, 515, my translation]. Scheler thus lays the foundation for a general theory of social ontology: There is a theory of all the possible social essential units [Wesenseinheiten]. To develop it and to apply it for the comprehension of real, existing social units (marriage, family, people, nation etc.) constitutes the fundamental problem of a philosophical sociology and the premise of any social ethics [GW II, 515, my translation] . According to this hypothesis, we can outline four major correlations between forms of emotional sharing and forms of social unit. 1) “The social unit that constitutes itself (simultaneously) through so-called contagion without comprehension and involuntary imitation. It is called ‘herd’ for animals and ‘mass’ if it occurs with the human being.” [GW II, 515, my translation]; 2) “The social unit that constitutes itself in [...] co-experiencing [Miterleben] or re-experiencing [Nacherleben] (co-feeling [Mitfühlen], co-striving [Mitstreben], co-thinking [Mitdenken], co-judging [Miturteilen] etc.)” [GW II, 515, my translation]. This type of social unit is called “vital community” (Lebensgemeinschaft) [GW II, 516, my translation]; 3) Society, unlike the vital community, is “a unit made up of adult and self-conscious single persons” [GW II, 518, my translation]. In society, individuals are not considered in relation to the difference of their irreplaceable singularity; in fact, “differences in society and differences in value between its elements come about only through different values of accomplishment of the individuals in the value-direction of the agreeable and the useful, the value-correlates of society.” [GW II, 519, my translation]. This efficientistic and individualistic logic entails an ability to share the Other’s emotions qua emotions of the Other, based on the clear and conscious distinction between I and You. However, it also entails the absence of any form of “original co-responsibility [Mitverantwortlichkeit] since every form of responsibility that is assumed towards the Other is founded on a unilateral self-responsibility [Selbstverantwortlichkeit] instead” [GW II, 518, my translation]. 4) The “personal community” is established according to a solidaristic form of sharing responsibility, or “co-responsibility” (Mitverantwortlichkeit), based on the principle of “irreplaceable solidarity” [GW II, 523]. Already in the second edition of Sympathiebuch (1923), Scheler felt the need to offer a modified version of the four ways of sharing feelings and emotions: 1) Unconscious sharing through unipathy (Einsfühlung, “feeling as one”, a term that appeared neither in the 1913 edition nor in Formalismus) or affective contamination (Gefühlsanstekung); 2) Sharing through empathy, which Scheler calls Nachfühlung, to distance himself from Lipps’ theory of empathy (Einfühlung); 3) Conscious sharing through sympathy or “affective co-feeling” (Mitgefühl) according to the logic of social recognition; 4) Solidaristic sharing that leads to love or hate. Scheler also institutes a foundational law according to which unipathy is the foundation of empathy, empathy is that of sympathy, and sympathy is the basis of the forms of love and hate [GW VII, 105].

The relationship between action and sociality is one of the fundamental prob-lems in social theory and philosophy. In this paper I strive to contribute to an action theo-retical approach that conceives of individual action and sociality as intrinsically related. I will do so by drawing on two distinct strands of cultural and social theory: the sociologi-cal pragmatism of Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead, and the cognitive cultural psychology of Michael Tomasello. Since the work of Tomasello is – at least in detail – relatively unknown to philosophers or social scientists, the primary focus will be on his seminal studies in comparative and developmental cognitive psychology. By means of a detailed analysis I will delineate a cognitive, motivational and cultural dimension of the sociality of action in Tomasello. The results of this discussion will then be compared with the central tenets of sociological pragmatism. In the end, it will become clear why cognitive scientists like Tomasello can help us to reformulate pragmatist social theory against the background of recent findings in the human sciences. By doing this, we can remain true to the transdisciplinary approach of pragmatist thought that has long been ne-glected in social theory. Conversely, such a comparison may reveal some of the limits of Tomasello‘s account with regard to social theory.

In questo estratto di tesi magistrale vengono illustrate quelle caratteristiche dell'intenzionalità husserliana che hanno giocato un ruolo nella riflessione più recente sull'intenzionalità, in particolare nei lavori di Searle, Bratman e Tomasello.

Kooperation, Sozialität und Kultur
Michael Tomasellos Arbeiten in der soziologischen Diskussion. 3. Sonderband der »ZTS«

Die Beiträge des Bandes fragen aus soziologischer Sicht nach der Bedeutung der anthropologischen Forschungen Michael Tomasellos für das Verständnis menschlicher Kooperation, Sozialität und Kultur.

Die anthropologischen Forschungen von Michael Tomasello haben in den letzten Jahren eine erhebliche wissenschaftliche Bedeutung erlangt. Obwohl sie auch eine breite soziologische Relevanz besitzen, fehlte bisher in der Soziologie eine konzentrierte und gründliche Auseinandersetzung mit ihnen. Im vorliegenden Sammelband werden Tomasellos Arbeiten nun von renommierten Soziologinnen und Soziologen, die ein breites Spektrum von aktuellen theoretischen Perspektiven vertreten, im Hinblick auf die Genese und die Strukturen menschlicher Kooperation, sozialer Beziehungen und kultureller Ordnungen diskutiert.

In order to adequately understand the foundations of human social interaction, we need to provide an explanation of our specific mode of living based on linguistic activity and the cultural practices with which it is interwoven. To this end, we need to make explicit the constitutive conditions for the emergence of the phenomena which relate to language and joint activity starting from their operational-relational matrix. The approach presented here challenges the inadequacy of mentalist models to explain the relation between language and interaction. Recent empirical studies concerning joint attention and language acquisition have led scholars such as Tomasello and his colleagues to postulate the existence of a universal human “sociocognitive infrastructure” that drives joint social activities and is biologically inherited. This infrastructure would include the skill of precocious intention-reading, and is meant to explain human linguistic development and cultural learning. However, the cognitivist and functionalist assumptions on which this model relies have resulted in controversial hypotheses (i.e., intention-reading as the ontogenetic precursor of language) which take a contentious conception of mind and language for granted. By challenging this model, I will show that we should instead turn ourselves towards a constitutive explanation of language within a “bio-logical” understanding of interactivity. This is possible only by abandoning the cognitivist conception of organism and traditional views of language. An epistemological shift must therefore be proposed, based on embodied, enactive and distributed approaches, and on Maturana’s work in particular. The notions of languaging and observing that will be discussed in this article will allow for a bio-logically grounded, theoretically parsimonious alternative to mentalist and spectatorial approaches, and will guide us towards a wider understanding of our sociocultural mode of living.

From a subjective point of view, we take the existence of integrated entities, i.e., ourselves as the most unproblematic given, and blithely project such integrity onto untold many "entities" far and wide. However, from a naturalistic perspective, accounting for anything more integral than the attachments and attractions that are explicable in terms of the four fundamental forces of physics has been anything but straightforward. If we take it that the universe begins as an integral unity (the singularity referred to as "the cosmic egg") and explodes into progressive stages of internal detachment, then we can also fathom the idea that eddies of relative detachment becoming increasingly integral. Helmuth Plessner made a powerful case for the onset of "positionality" constituting one of the major transitions in nature. Surely, the emergence of "entities" (i.e., life-forms) that position themselves in relation to their surround marks a decisive transition in relative levels of detachment and some would say "autonomy." It would follow, with no less force, that where and when entities can be seen to be normatively integrated, and indeed to be the agents of their own normativity, that another threshold of detachment has been crossed. The paper introduces and explores the idea that normativity, embedded in a wide-ranging theory of natural detachment, can be considered an emergent force of nature that is requisite to accounting for levels of integration beyond that which is explicable in terms of the four fundamental forces of physics. Following this line of enquiry, we argue that the first expression of a fully, normatively-integrated life-form is neither a spoken language user nor for that matter an individual but rather the neoteny-based, Homo erectus Group. In so doing we claim to have made an inroad into embedding the force of normativity into a wide-ranging naturalist framework, to have provided philosophical anthropology with a new (post-individualist) point of departure, and at least playfully, to have given some naturalistic grist to Hegel's proclamation that spirit (Geist) is the truth of nature.

Social accounts of objective content, like the one advanced by Tomasello (2014), are traditionally challenged by an 'essential tension' (Hutto /Satne 2015). The tension is the following: while sociality is deemed to be at the basis of thinking, in order to explain sociality, some form of thinking seems to be necessarily presupposed. In this contribution I analyse Tomasello's two-step theory of the evolution of human thinking vis-à-vis this challenge. While his theory is in principle suited to address it, I claim that the specifics of the first step and the notion of perspective that infuse it are problematic in this regard. I end by briefly sketching an alternative.
Keywords: Collective Intentionality – Joint Intentionality – Objective Content – Tomasello-Natural History

Abstract Paul Horwich:
The goal here is to demystify the relation of aboutness that associates thoughts and their linguistic expression with particular features of the world. It is argued that the main obstacle to providing a naturalistic account of this relation is a misguided ('inflationary') view of truth. A deflationary perspective, on the other hand, enables us to see how the basic use of a mental or physical term establishes its referent, thereby determining what the sentences containing it are about.

Abstract response:
My disagreement with the deflationist treatment of truth affects my attitude to Paul Horwich’s approach to meaning and intentionality. In my response I summarize objections to the deflationist account of truth developed in some detail in chapters 2, 7, and 12, and argue that the notion of intentionality should be treated naturalistically in a broader context than the context of the referential import of the locution “means that”.

Fyodor Dostoevsky is renowned as one of the greatest psychologists in world literature, but what we know about the origins and the workings of the human mind has changed drastically since the late nineteenth century. If Dostoevsky was such a sensitive reader of the human condition, do his insights hold up to modern research? To judge just by the issue of the psychology of confession, the answer appears to be: yes. The work of Michael Tomasello indicates that the human conscience evolved in order to make people obey group norms. From this I draw the proposition that confession should be best directed to the group as a whole, and not to an individual. Judging by Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and an assortment of characters in The Brothers Karamazov, this appears to be exactly how confession works in Dostoevsky’s novels: sin is against all, so forgiveness must be from all.

El propósito de este trabajo es doble: 1) criticar la autosuficiencia del lenguaje humano entendido como sistema convencional de signos, mostrando paralelamente su raigambre vital; 2) explorar la " infraestructura " sobre la que se apoya el lenguaje hu-mano convencional. Para el primer punto, se presenta y discute las posiciones de George Herbert Mead y de Jürgen Habermas, quienes pretenden dar cuenta de la conformación del lenguaje.

Abstract
This paper aims at 1) criticizing the self-sufficiency of human
language taken as a conventional system of signs and showing
its vital roots; 2) exploring the “infrastructure” that supports the
conventional human language. The first point focuses on the
ideas of George Hebert Mead and Jürgen Habermas, who affirm
that conventional language arises from a natural context. It is
argued that both authors assume an unjustified breach between
natural and conventional communication which leads them to
the presupposition that human conventional communication is
self-sufficient. The second point discusses the proposal of Michael
Tomassello, who bases linguistic meaning on a pre-linguistic
structure shared to a large extent with our primate relatives.

Alasdair MacIntyre has developed a theory of virtue ethics that is closely integrated with sociology and organization studies. While rejecting reductive views of the virtues, MacIntyre appeals to their functional role in facilitating collaboration as a basis for justifying their normative requirements. This raises the question of how agents within cooperative contexts come to appreciate their intrinsic value. I argue that MacIntyre’s account of the virtues is undergirded by an implicit personalist moral psychology. To make this evident, I draw upon the account of moral psychology developed by Michael Tomasello, who argues that a sense of moral obligation is generated when persons engage in collective action. Tomasello’s account complements MacIntyre’s by explaining how participation in social practices generates a sense of moral obligation but it does not address the problem of relativism. As a result, it does not fully explain how and why participants in practices come to see themselves as bound by moral norms since the threat of relativism undermines the idea that moral norms are binding. This limitation further illustrates the role of a personalist moral psychology in MacIntyre’s work: through the experience of cultural breakdown persons are able to view themselves as engaged in a shared inquiry concerning the good that transcends any specific culture. This provides the basis for a self-conscious sense of moral obligation that is not threatened by relativism.

According to the shared intentionality hypothesis proposed by Michael Tomasello, two cognitive upgrades — joint
and collective intentionality respectively — make human thinking unique. Joint intentionality is supposed to account
for our early and species-specific capacity to think, reason and act in cooperative ways. To elucidate its mechanisms
Tomasello draws on standard philosophical accounts of shared or collective intentionality. I argue that appealing to
such cognitively demanding accounts is problematic, if his ambition is, among other things, to show that and how
prelinguistic capacities for joint action contribute to the development of higher cognitive capacities such as fullblooded
mindreading.

This paper summarizes, contrasts, and reviews recent accounts of cultural evolution in our species offered by Cecilia Heyes in Cognitive Gadgets, Kevin Laland in Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony, and Michael Tomasello in Becoming Human. Our critical discussion focuses on the authors’ accounts of social learning, and the relationship each hypothesizes between cultural evolutionary and biological evolutionary processes. We find that both Laland and Tomasello seek to explain cultural evolution in humans as reliant upon processes of joint attention and shared intentionality (the development of which is largely the focus of Tomasello’s book). Heyes’ account of social learning, in which no particular role is assigned to human intersubjectivity and the same basic associative learning mechanisms of nonsocial learning are also invoked to explain social learning, stands apart. As to the relation of cultural and biological evolution, Laland offers readers a thorough account of the two with detailed analyses of social learning across various non-primate species, and uniquely, among these authors, attends to the influence of genes on social learning. For his part, Tomasello provides readers with a richly detailed experimental accounting of human-unique forms of social learning using Great Apes as points of contrast.