A Natural History of Human Thinking

1. Human thinking evolved through cooperation and shared intentionality

Human thinking is individual improvisation enmeshed in a sociocultural matrix.

Evolutionary perspective: The shared intentionality hypothesis proposes that human thinking evolved in response to the need for social coordination. This process occurred in two key steps:

1. Joint intentionality: Early humans developed the ability to form joint goals and shared attention with specific partners.
2. Collective intentionality: Modern humans created group-wide conventions, norms, and institutions.

These adaptations led to new forms of cognitive representation, inference, and self-monitoring, transforming ape-like individual intentionality into uniquely human ways of thinking. The evolution of human cognition is thus inseparable from the evolution of human sociality and cooperation.

2. Great apes possess sophisticated individual cognition and social understanding

Great ape cognition and thinking are adapted to this social, but not very cooperative, way of life.

Individual intentionality: Great apes demonstrate advanced cognitive abilities in three key areas:

1. Cognitive representation: They use imagistic and schematic models to understand their environment.
2. Causal and intentional inferences: Apes can make logical inferences about physical and social events.
3. Behavioral self-monitoring: They evaluate their own decision-making processes.

However, great ape cognition is primarily adapted for competition rather than cooperation. They understand others as intentional agents but do not engage in shared intentionality or cooperative communication in the way humans do.

3. Early humans developed joint intentionality for collaborative activities

Early humans' joint intentionality and second-personal thinking represented a radical break, a new type of relation between sociality and thinking.

Collaborative problem-solving: Joint intentionality emerged as early humans faced new ecological challenges that required cooperation for survival. This led to:

• Formation of joint goals with individual roles
• Development of joint attention with individual perspectives
• Creation of a dual-level structure of simultaneous sharing and individuality

These adaptations allowed early humans to coordinate their actions and attention more effectively, leading to new forms of collaborative problem-solving and social interaction. This "second-personal" engagement laid the foundation for more complex forms of human sociality and cognition.

4. Cooperative communication emerged to coordinate actions and perspectives

Humans, but not other primates, thus collaborate in their communication to make it easier for the other to take their perspective and even to manipulate it if they so desire.

Gestural communication: Early humans developed new forms of cooperative communication, primarily through pointing and pantomiming. This required:

• Taking the perspective of others
• Making socially recursive inferences
• Engaging in social self-monitoring

Cooperative communication allowed early humans to coordinate their actions and share information more effectively. It also led to new cognitive abilities, such as the capacity for symbolic representation and the ability to reason about others' mental states.

5. Modern humans created collective intentionality through cultural practices

Modern humans did not start from scratch but started from early human cooperation.

Group-mindedness: The transition to modern human cognition involved:

• Development of group identity and cultural common ground
• Creation of conventional cultural practices and norms
• Emergence of social institutions with collectively accepted roles and statuses

This collective intentionality allowed humans to coordinate with strangers and create large-scale societies. It also led to the development of "objective" perspectives and normative thinking, as individuals internalized the group's standards and expectations.

6. Conventional language enabled new forms of reasoning and reflection

Conventional linguistic communication provided developing children with a preexisting representational system of alternative means of conceptualization, and everyone knew together in cultural common ground the available alternatives.

Linguistic innovations: The development of conventional language brought several key cognitive advancements:

• Creation of abstract linguistic constructions and propositional content
• Ability to express complex ideas, including mental states and logical operations
• Development of formal and pragmatic inferences
• Facilitation of reflective thinking and internal dialogue

Language allowed humans to communicate more complex ideas and engage in new forms of reasoning. It also provided a shared representational system that could be used for both communication and individual thought.

7. Human thinking is fundamentally shaped by social and cultural interactions

Humans biologically inherit their basic capacities for constructing uniquely human cognitive representations, forms of inference, and self-monitoring, from out of their collaborative and communicative interactions with other social beings.

Social cognition: The development of human thinking is deeply intertwined with social and cultural experiences:

• Cognitive skills emerge through collaborative activities and communication
• Cultural practices and artifacts scaffold individual learning and development
• Social interactions shape the way individuals represent and reason about the world

This perspective emphasizes that human cognition is not simply a product of individual brain development, but is fundamentally shaped by social and cultural interactions throughout life.

8. Objective and normative thinking arose from group-minded perspectives

Human reasoning, even when it is done internally with the self, is therefore shot through and through with a kind of collective normativity in which the individual regulates her actions and thinking based on the group's normative conventions and standards.

Normative self-governance: The emergence of objective and normative thinking involved:

• Development of agent-neutral, "objective" perspectives
• Internalization of social norms and group standards
• Creation of shared criteria for rationality and truth

This process allowed humans to reason about abstract concepts and engage in complex forms of argumentation and decision-making. It also led to the development of cultural institutions like science, law, and philosophy.

9. Ontogeny plays a crucial role in the development of human cognition

Absent a social environment, these capacities would wither away from disuse, like the capacity for vision in a person born and raised completely in darkness.

Developmental perspective: The ontogenetic development of human cognition involves:

• Interaction with caregivers and peers from early infancy
• Exposure to cultural artifacts, practices, and language
• Gradual internalization of social and cultural norms

This developmental process is crucial for the emergence of uniquely human cognitive abilities. Without appropriate social and cultural input during development, individuals would not develop the full range of human cognitive capacities, highlighting the essential role of social interaction in human cognition.

Last updated: November 20, 2024