About the event
Richard Moore (University of Warwick) presents to the GoodAttention group on "Learning (to Learn) from Others: The Socialisation of Attention in Hominin History".
If you would like to attend this event virtually by Zoom, please contact Drew Johnson at Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas.
Abstract
I will start this talk by considering the question of when it is appropriate to assume that uniquely human cognitive traits are a product of adaptations in the hominin lineage, and when alternative, non-adaptationist explanations should preferred. I’ll argue that while adaptationism is a highly successful explanatory strategy in the biological sciences, often this strategy has been abused in studies of cognitive development. When this happens, appeals to adaptation are often less a way of explaining human origins than they are of avoiding giving explanations of cognitive development.
I illustrate my case with reference to two skills identified as central to human cognitive uniqueness - pointing and imitation. These are sometimes argued to be the result of independent adaptations in the recent hominin lineage (e.g. Tomasello 2020). I will suggest that there are relatively weak grounds for thinking that this proposal is true. Instead, I argue that the development of these abilities may result from a common underlying cause in human history. Specifically, both pointing comprehension and imitation likely resulted from an ecological change in our ancestral environment, which led our ancestors to attend to one another, rather than to their environment, as sources of information about the world. I'll explain why both ape emulation and pointing failure can be thought of as resulting from individualistic information gathering strategies, present empirical data that support this conclusion, and sketch a scenario that would have made such individualistic strategies non-viable. I’ll argue that once individualistic information gathering strategies because less viable, new forms of social attention and information sharing arose in phylogeny.
Finally I'll argue that since both pointing and imitation have been trained with enculturation, they should not – contra Tomasello – be assumed to result from biological adaptations in the hominin lineage (although they may be). I’ll finish by considering when adaptationist explanations of cognitive development should be preferred.