Re: "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello

On 06/04/2024 11:53, Burkhard wrote:

Arkalen wrote:
 

Hello all,

 hello too! It's so nice to have you back!!

Thanks :)

Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?

 

I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how I think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not sure though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things for the first time that are actually already well-known, or if the book is plain wrong and if so on what.

 I haven't read this one (but on the reading list now), I knew his work
mainly from the debate he had with Chomsky, and his rejection of the
idea of an innate universal grammar in favour of a social learning
model. I thought at the time that while the idea of shared intentionality
was very appealing and plausible, and explains a lot, on its own
I could not see how it overcomes the "poverty of the stimulus problem"
(but this was ages ago that I read it tbh)
What I also found really interesting, for my day job,  was his discussion
on third-party punishment (which he claims is uniquely human)
 

Was that debate live/recorded or written ? I'd be interested in seeing it. I'm honestly surprised to hear he was rejecting innate universal grammar in favor of social learning because I'd have thought the first is a more logical outgrowth from what he presents "The Evolution of Agency". For example I'm pretty sure he presents aspects of human cooperation like basic altruism, coordinating via eye movements and pointing etc as specific adaptations we have and chimpanzees don't or much less so. I'd have thought "innate universal grammar" fit comfortably in there. But I'm also not familiar enough with the debate to be sure all the terms mean what I think they mean.
That reminds me though, I was thinking about the issues of teaching animals language shortly after reading the book and this hypothesis kind of fits with that too. Plenty of animals seem fine associating symbols with things and expressing themselves that way but the resulting speech lacks pronouns ("Koko want birkin bag; jealousy professor" not "I want a birkin bag; you're jealous") and differentiating things like actor/acted upon (we know Koko wants the birkin bag because the opposite doesn't make sense but she could have ordered those words any which way to express that meaning, with no way of lifting the ambiguity if context didn't allow us to guess who's doing what).
And those differences seem pretty critical to the task of *coordinating roles within a collaboration*. There's really no way to disambiguate [Sally/John/Timmy/Jane/get groceries/pick up/mow/pool/lawn] into "I'll get the groceries & you'll pick up Timmy at the pool, Jane can mow the lawn" without true grammar!

 

I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might if motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough that someone else might actually have read it and have takes.