The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition

From the last chapter of Michael Tomasello's book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999):

We are, as Wittgenstein (1953) and Vygotsky (1978) saw so clearly, fish in the water of culture. As adults investigating and reflecting on human existence, we cannot take off our cultural glasses to view the world aculturally—and so compare it to the world as we perceive it culturally. Human beings live in a world of language, mathematics, money, government, education, science, and religion—cultural institutions composed of cultural conventions. The sound 'tree' stands for what it does because, and only because, we think it does; men and women are married because, and only because, we think they are; I can obtain a car in exchange for a piece of paper because, and only because, we think the paper is worth as much as the car (Searle, 1996). These kinds of social institutions and conventions are created and maintained by certain ways of interacting and thinking among groups of human beings. Other animal species simply do not interact and think in these ways.

But the human cultural world is not thereby free of the biological world, and indeed human culture is a very recent evolutionary product, having existed in all likelihood for only a few hundred thousand years. The fact that culture is a product of evolution does not mean that each one of its specific features has its own dedicated genetic underpinnings; there has not been enough time for that. A more plausible scenario is that all human cultural institutions rest on the biologically inherited social-cognitive ability of all human individuals to create and use social conventions and symbols. However, these social conventions and symbols do not wave a magic wand and turn nonhuman primate cognition into human cognition on the spot. Modern adult cognition of the human kind is the product not only of genetic events taking over many millions of years in evolutionary time but also of cultural events taking place over many tens of thousands of years in historical time and personal events taking place over many tens of thousands of hours in ontogenetic time. The desire to avoid the hard empirical work necessary to follow out these intermediate processes that occur between the human genotype and phenotype is a strong one, and it leaeds to the kinds of facile genetic determinism that pervade large parts of the social, behavioral, and cognitive sciences today. Genes are an essential part of the story of human cognitive evolution, perhaps even from some points of view the most important part of the story since they are what got the ball rolling. But they are not the whole story, and the ball has rolled a long way since it got started. In all, the tired old philosophical categories of nature versus nurture, innate versus learned, and even genes versus environment are jut not up to the task—they are too static and categorical—if our goal is a dynamic Darwinian account of human cognition in its evolutionary, historical, and ontogenetic dimensions.

 

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Symbolism and Role Reversal

 Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, p. 107:

Overall, then, acquiring the conventional use of intersubjectively understood linguistic symbols requires a child to:

- understand others as intentional agents;

- participate in joint attentional scenes that set the social-cognitive ground for acts of symbolic, including linguistic, communication;

- understand not just intentions but communicative intentions in which someone intends for her to attend to something in the joint attentional scene; and

- reverse roles with adults in the cultural learning process and thereby use toward them what they have used toward her—which actually creates the intersubjectively understood communicative convention or symbol.

 

Learning linguistic symbols this way puts young children in a position to begin taking advantage of all kinds of social sills and knowledge preexisting in their local communities and cultures as a whole. But it does more than that. What makes linguistic symbols truly unique from a cognitive point of view is the fact that each symbol embodies a particular perspective on some entity or event: this object is simultaneously a rose, a lower, and a gift. The perspectival nature of linguistic symbols multiplies indefinitely the specificity with which they may be used to manipulate the attention of others, and this fact has profound implications of the nature of cognitive representation, which we will explore later.