Vygotskyâs Janus-Faced Theory of Language: A Reply to Drainâs âTomasello, Vygotsky, and the Phylogenesis of Mindâ

Philosophy

In his lucid and helpful reply, Chris Drain (2021) clarifies some of his views and aims and offers pertinent criticisms of my own. Drain refocuses my forays into Pittsburgh Hegelianism onto Vygotskyâs own thought. He rightly notes that Brandomâs account of deontic scorekeeping tells us nothing about phylogenesis. Sellars too has little to say about the origins of language and social practice and I would endorse the projects of those who turn to Tomasello to fill such gaps (Koons 2018). However, I still do not think Drain has got Vygotskyâs Hegel right. I do not think one can substitute âHegelianâ for âJanetianâ, and I hope to show why this matters.

          Drain also objects to my characterization of Tomasello as Cartesian. There is of course a long line of philosophers from Deleuze to Dennett charging all those who fall across their path with covert Cartesianism. I will not besmirch this venerable custom here. In my reply I contrast the Hegelian-Marxist approach to language of Vygotsky with the Cartesian approach of Tomasello. I conclude by suggesting some active research programmes which overcome this Cartesiansim while following the trajectories of Vygotskyâs own project.

http://social-epistemology.com ISSN: 2471-9560 Vygotsky's Janus-Faced Theory of Language: A Reply to Drain's "Tomasello, Vygotsky, and the Phylogenesis of Mind" Kyrill Potapov, University College London, email@example.com –––––––––––––––––– Potapov, Kyrill. 2021. "Vygotsky's Janus-Faced Theory of Language: A Reply to Drain's 'Tomasello, Vygotsky, and the Phylogenesis of Mind'." Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 10 (8): 17-29. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-64q. 17 10 (8): 17-29. 2021. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-64q In his lucid and helpful reply, Chris Drain (2021) clarifies some of his views and aims and offers pertinent criticisms of my own. Drain refocuses my forays into Pittsburgh Hegelianism onto Vygotsky's own thought. He rightly notes that Brandom's account of deontic scorekeeping tells us nothing about phylogenesis. Sellars too has little to say about the origins of language and social practice and I would endorse the projects of those who turn to Tomasello to fill such gaps (Koons 2018). However, I still do not think Drain has got Vygotsky's Hegel right. I do not think one can substitute "Hegelian" for "Janetian", and I hope to show why this matters. Drain also objects to my characterization of Tomasello as Cartesian. There is of course a long line of philosophers from Deleuze to Dennett charging all those who fall across their path with covert Cartesianism. I will not besmirch this venerable custom here. In my reply I contrast the Hegelian-Marxist approach to language of Vygotsky with the Cartesian approach of Tomasello. I conclude by suggesting some active research programmes which overcome this Cartesiansim while following the trajectories of Vygotsky's own project. A Brief Note on Hegel Drain shares a Vygotsky passage which I admit sounds like Kojève's Hegel. But here is one area where I would insist on the convergence between Vygotsky and the Pittsburgh Hegelians: for both, words only have the meanings they do because of their function in a wider system. It is true that Vygotsky refers to the "slave and overseer" and to "submission", but what else does he mean by these words? As I suggested in my last piece, I think these designations illustrate something about the structure of concept development. We can tell this is not a Nietzschean story of social oppression and resentment because it is the individual who is both the overseer and the slave-and through successive reconstructive iterations. I will try to lay out what this means for Vygotsky in subsequent sections. Is Vygotsky a Janetian? Following Van der Veer and Valsiner (1988) Drain suggests that there are significant parallels between the work of Vygotsky and Pierre Janet, particularly in terms of the latter's "command-origin" theory of language. I will use Van der Veer and Valsiner as a foil to unpack what is at stake here.1 Van der Veer and Valsiner suggest that Janet is the source for Vygotsky's general genetic law of development. Though Van der Veer and Valsiner concede that Vygotsky rarely cites Janet, they suggest that the only plausible explanations for the similarity in their descriptions of sociogenesis are: a) that Vygotsky was directly influenced by Janet, or b) that they shared a common influence in Baldwin or Royce. 1 While Van Der Veer and Valsiner try to promote Janet, I take it Drain views the links to Vygotsky as limitations. I am ultimately on Drain's side here. Anyone who wants to rehabilitate Janet has the corpus of Ian Hacking to contend with (Hacking 1998b, a). The reading of Janet I give in this reply is intended to be exegetical. K. Potapov 18 Van der Veer and Valsiner suggest there is no evidence for b) and that therefore a) is true. There are problems with this argument. First, here is Vygotsky (1997) in Volume 4 of his collected works: Initially, the sign is always a means of social connection, a means of affecting others, and only later does it become a means of affecting oneself. Many actual connections and dependences that are formed in this way have been explained in psychology. For example, we might point to the circumstance noted by J. Baldwin that has at present been developed in Piaget's studies. Research has demonstrated that there undoubtedly is a genetic connection between the child's argument; and his reflections. The very logic of the child confirms the basis of this. Conclusions appear initially in arguments among children and only later are they internalized by the child himself, linked to how his personality is manifested (103). Vygotsky makes this point again some pages later (196), stressing the importance of argument in Baldwin's understanding of this process. Argument and drama, as I tried to show in my last piece, are crucial to Vygotsky's understanding of concept development, and are not something he found in Janet. Second, if he had such a profound influence, why did Vygotsky extensively discuss Ribot, Freud and Piaget but not Janet? Vygotsky makes the genealogy of his thought clear in many of his writings and Janet hardly features there. Perhaps it is more of that sourly dissonant misanthropy and Vygotsky wanted to keep the close connection under wraps? But Vygotsky openly credits Janet as a source for his genetic law and yet, with the recent publication of Vygotsky's notebooks, Janet is still rarely mentioned. I suggest this is because Vygotsky liked Janet's formulation of this law but otherwise found his views of limited interest. Again, I'd emphasize that it is not about the words themselves but their function in a wider system. Van der Veer and Valsiner quote Janet: According to the law that I discussed with you... every individual repeats in himself the social conducts... The child creates his individuality because one always mentions him in the same way and because one's behavior towards him has a certain unity. And it's true, for Vygotsky too, the individual "repeats in himself the social conducts", but does Vygotsky think this is "because one always mentions him in the same way..."? It's clear Janet is talking about stimulus and response learning. As Van Der Veer and Valsiner quote: "Our actions are determined by those two great sources: the stimulations that come from the external word and the stimulations that come from society". I'd like to see where Vygotsky speaks of such behavioural conditioning. Here is a longer passage from Janet (1929): Social conduct is conduct which has its starting point in a kind of stimulation which is given by social objects. Social objects are living beings analogous to 19 10 (8): 17-29. 2021. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-64q us, which resemble us to a considerable extent... Social behaviours are therefore behaviours determined by particular living beings. These conduits are external conduits, just like the conduits towards a chair or towards a sidewalk. They are behaviours determined by objects (113). It is clear how we get from here to the "command-origin" account of language that worries Drain: speech here is a matter of direction towards affordances. But this is just Pavlov's theory of language as a "second signal system" (Windholz 1990). Indeed, Janet acknowledges his debt to Pavlov (op. cit, 46). This would be a short reply if we only needed to find critiques of Pavlov in Vygotsky. I'll just note one of Vygotsky's (1999) criticisms of Pavlov's disciples which could as easily apply to Janet's version of sociogenesis: The very significance of social experience in this case is understood exclusively from the point of view of the presence of adequate models that the child finds in his environment ... a series of stereotypic motor formulas, a series of motor patterns that the child uses in solving the problem (8). Such Pavlovian accounts completely miss the cultural-historical character of the social; they describe processes that are "mechanistic" and do not participate in the work of the intellect. So, while it is true that both Vygotsky and Janet have a theory of the "social", what they mean by this word is entirely different.2 Let's look at Vygotsky's (1997) general genetic law again: Every function in the cultural development of the child appears on the stage twice, in two planes, first, the social, then the psychological, first between people as an intermental category, then within the child as an intramental category (106, italics mine). Granted, initial material for Vygotsky's law came from Janet, but there are clear divergences in how Janet (1929) and Vygotsky understand and use this law: ... you start with others and then apply to yourself what you have thought about others. This is sometimes true, sometimes it is exaggerated. I think we can say more simply that the two things are done at the same time and in the same way, we build others and we build ourselves, simultaneously. Sometimes one precedes a little, sometimes the other precedes. We start by constructing some ideas in ourselves, then we apply them to others, or, conversely, we form a certain idea of others and we apply it to ourselves (138-139). 2 Janet also speaks of higher psychological functions but, following Condillac, it is feelings/sensations that constitute these for him. The social develops our personality because we come to share certain sensations; love being key among them. I am not sure Janet can be substituted for Machiavelli any more than Hegel. K. Potapov 20 Most of Janet's writings consist of descriptions of empirical findings and here as elsewhere he criticises philosophers like William James through his own common-sense observations rather than on any rigorous philosophical basis. Vygotsky (2012, 171) appropriates this passage but does not agree with its conclusion. Finally, what is strange about Van der Veer and Valsiner's article is that nowhere do they mention that Janet was preceded by Marx. Vygotsky found in Baldwin and Janet, expressed in psychological language, something already very familiar to him in the thought of Marx and Engels (1996): that "man first sees and recognises himself in other men." That is not to say that Janet's work is entirely without merit. Indeed, I will argue that it offers something that is missing in Tomasello. Not Janet, But Janus A fierce battle raged in French philosophy of the 1930s. On the one side was Hegel and on the other was Pierre Janet's close friend and confidante, Henri Bergson. Philosophers picked a side and developed their own views along these battle lines. Vygotsky was familiar with Minkowski's work showing the strong influence of Bergson on Janet and at one point Vygotsky refers to Janet as offering additional evidence for aspects of Bergson's philosophy (Zavershneva and van der Veer 2018, 137). Vygotsky thinks that Bergson and Janet were partially right about the role of "the word in volition" (118). In his notebooks, Vygotsky plays Bergson and Hegel off against each-other to explore dimensions of language use. I do not have the space to explain Bergson's theories and Vygotsky's engagement with them here, so, in Bergsonian fashion, I will instead provide an image. A cliff face can be said to contain memory of the sea. As each wave hits the cliff, the cliff face as an image of the sea is altered. It represents the sea waves not in linear sequence but in quality and intensity. The cliff face is an image of both the sea's past and of its future, as each new wave rushes into the crevices formed by past trysts of rock and water. Vygotsky suggests that if some aspects of Bergson's idealism were inverted, one could appreciate his attempts to naturalize concepts. Vygotsky agrees with Bergson that "word organizes a number of motor processes and elementary processes" (135) but criticizes Bergson for limiting his account to this kind of habituation. For Vygotsky, Bergson cannot distinguish between the effect of a word on thinking and the effect of hydrochloric acid on limestone (147); he does not appreciate the Hegelian dimensions of words, as intersubjective cultural-historical functions. Vygotsky uses a psychoanalytic example to criticize Bergson. A traumatic event can alter one's mind at the level of the unconscious and motor habits, in ways that can perhaps account for the repetition of the trauma in neurosis, but for me to experience "this" as an image of that traumatic event Vygotsky suggests we need language in its discursive form (137). This is a Hegelian argument against Bergson but could equally be a Freudian argument against Janet. According to Janet the unconscious is a personality disorder: a weakening of psychic energy causes parts of the personality to be sacrificed into the unconscious. This is 21 10 (8): 17-29. 2021. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-64q because for Janet the personality is a loose assemblage of multiplicities. Vygotsky thinks that Bergson and Janet are wrong to assume we intuit multiplicities of particulars and then generalize from them. For Vygotsky, we need to generalize before we can grasp particulars. Whatever his limitations, Janet was part of an important intellectual milieu which would give rise to thinkers like Merleau-Ponty. Bergson, Janet and James were among the first to bring to attention the role of proprioception, embodiment and volition to psychology. They were progenitors of what is today called enactivism (Gallagher 2020). Meanwhile, many contemporary enactivists have recruited Vygotsky to their cause (Baggs and Chemero 2019, van den Herik 2018, Shvarts and Abrahamson 2019). Di Paolo, Cuffari and De Jaegher draw on Vygotsky as well as Ilyenkov to provide a unique dialectical enactivist account of language development. They translate the kind of command and constraint structure that worries Drain into descriptions of dynamic biological systems:3 Our view of symbolizing is that of an operation that linguistic bodies perform that is at once concrete and often spontaneous as well as embedded in the sedimented repertoires of previous operations of symbolizing. Symbols act as jointly used and created constraints that bring forth virtual flows in participatory sense-making. Speaking in dynamical terms, symbols act as metastable emergent constraints that modulate the processes of social interaction and mutually interlock with other symbols. (Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher 2018, sec. 11.3) Vygotsky cannot be called a traditional enactivist because he does not think meaning is reducible to the affective-volitional plane. He believes consciousness is composed of "dynamic-semantic systems" (Zavershneva and van der Veer 2018, xvii). Vygotsky wants to see words as both natural objects in the world, embedded in habits and causes, and as a part of discursive practices. Words as natural objects reify affective-volitional relations to things in the world (489) but as discursive functions they allow us to find meaning and give justifications (183). Sellars (1979) calls this the "Janus-faced character of languagings as belonging to both the causal order and the order of reasons". For Vygotsky, while developmentally earlier functions can be characterized in terms of loops of perception and volition, the development of understanding depends on the capacity to be "oriented in the complex internal space that might be called a system of [sign] relations" (1997, 142). We can interpret this in terms of what Brandom and McDowell, following Sellars, have called "the space of reasons" (Derry 2013, 73). Reason and affect are never entirely separate, nor are they ever fully one-they are united in a dialectic of mutual subordination. 3 Though Vygotsky drops the term "command" after 1931, the account here is consistent with his broader Spinozist-Leninist conception of the recognition of necessity in self-determination (Derry 2013, 85-101). K. Potapov 22 Back to Baldwin In his magnum opus on the phylogenesis of language, Terrence Deacon traces a long path through biology, anthropology, and neuroscience, and ending with Vygotsky's general genetic law of development. Deacon follows this path not via Janet but Baldwin. According to Deacon (1998, 336), it is language itself which exerted the pressure necessary for humans to develop language capacities. Primitive language use (perhaps derived from ritual gestures) gave societies an evolutionary advantage, and this culturally transmitted advantage was eventually "centralized" in our biology. I do not have space to outline Baldwinian evolution here, but here is a good gloss on it: We began our research with a psychological analysis of several forms of behavior that are found, not frequently it is true, in everyday, common life and are thus known to everyone, but are also to a high degree complex, historical formations of the earliest epochs in the mental development of man. These techniques or methods of behavior, arising stereotypically in given situations, represent virtual, solidified, petrified, crystallized psychological forms that arose in remote times at the most primitive stages of cultural development of man and in a remarkable way were preserved in the form of historical survivors in a petrified and in a living state in the behavior of modern man (Vygotsky 1997, 38). For Deacon as for Vygotsky, the key to understanding the development of language is sign mediation. Far from having a simplistic Janetian theory of signs, Vygotsky has a multi-stage model. I will outline it using the Peircean categories used by Deacon.4 Iconic When a child is developing their ability to use signs, what is important is not the correlation between signifier and signified but the expression of a move in a broader activity or language game. [A] child wanted to show in a drawing how it gets dark when the curtains are closed and he made a forceful line down on the board as if he was drawing a window shade. The drawing movement did not signify a cord, but expressed specifically the movement of drawing a curtain (Vygotsky 1999, 134). The movement here is iconic i.e. it bears some spaciotemporal isomorphy with what it is meant to represent, though already refracted through social practice. Vygotsky suggests that even the drawing of a picture should first be understood in terms of discursive functions rather than representations. Indexical 4 Something like the categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness are also present in Vygotsky via his use of the Hegelian triad (Vygotsky 1997, 104). These help us to consider behaviour prior to symbolic activity. 23 10 (8): 17-29. 2021. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-64q As the child develops mastery in symbolic activity, she moves from expressing intentions in direct action to enacting a "plan of action", for example in assigning different household objects to function as different buildings of a town. A clock can represent a pharmacy for a child not because it looks like a pharmacy but because it is able to embody the child's intentions in pretend play e.g., she can walk the doll from the clock tower to the pharmacy or talk about different numbers on the clock as different medicines. At this stage, the plan is particular to and shaped through the situated activity (136). The child relies on indexical relations between the object of their activity and the mediating artifact. According to Deacon this is where we leave behind our primate neighbours (and, I'd argue, Janet). A vervet monkey barking in response to a leopard does not mean anything else by its call (Bickerton 2009) i.e. it does not subject itself to any further commitments or implications (Derry 2013, 60). Symbolic Finally, the plans of action are reified or crystalized in the object. In new situations the children can go and grab the clock to mean "pharmacy" though the connection to the concrete activity through which it was baptised a "pharmacy" may be forgotten. Here, the external sign is internalized, so that a stick acquires the seemingly inherent affordances that make it an appropriate horse in various role plays, even to new players. The objects of play, like words, are Janus-faced: "In play, real properties of the thing and its symbolic significance exhibit a complex structural interaction" (Vygotsky 1999, 9). Vygotsky suggests that this is also what happens in language learning. Words acquire functional roles for us through this multi-staged process of enculturation. As Sellars (1960) suggests, such practice-centred approaches avoid the Cartesian trap of having to account for the appearance of different "mental contents". There is nothing inherent either about objects or thoughts which makes them iconic rather than indexical or symbolic. Rather, the distinction depends on the interpretative activity in which the sign functions. What is unique about humans is the way in which social activity restructures all three levels of signification. So that, for a human child, the range of icons and indices on which symbols can rely (sic. intentionality) is indefinitely extended. Vygotsky suggests that embodied actions like the miming of drawing a curtain can be thought of as analogous to but developmentally earlier than full-fledged language use. Vygotsky does not agree with Bergson that a representation is something that appears to intuition and is then corrupted by language. That a picture of a doll is representing her doll is something Vygotsky suggests the child must learn; it is not given by the picture itself (op. cit., 135). Nelson Goodman (1976) gives another example. When ethnographers showed people living in cultures with no experience of photography a photograph of their own house or village, they could not recognise them in the photo. We do not start with representations on which we can introspect. K. Potapov 24 Enculturation allows a child to orient herself in her environment using icons and indices before she has full grasp of concepts that supervene on these icons in her society. The dynamic or affective-volitional plane is something we share with other animals, but behaviour on this plane is limited to iconic and indexical interpretation. Humans, meanwhile, are at home in the semantic plane, which is a unique aspect of the ecological niche we have constructed. Semantic activity depends on and is a species of affective-volitional activity, but semantic activity has no outer boundary, thus "the higher functions permeate the lower and reform all of them, even the deepest layers of behaviour" (Vygotsky 1999, 44). Is Tomasello a Cartesian? The few times Tomasello mentions the body in the book he sees as the culmination of his work, Becoming Human, it is generally to describe someone observing their own or an other's body (Tomasello 2019, 48, 279, 282). As Di Paolo, Cuffari and De Jaegher suggest, Tomasello has inherited the Cartesianism of traditional cognitivist psychology in thinking of language in purely informational terms: Tomasello does not seem to appreciate the ways in which the embodied materiality of language can shape human development in ontogenesis and phylogenesis, via the fragile dynamics of consciousness (Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher 2018, 200). Some of Tomasello's most important findings have arguably been on the role of joint attention in sociogenesis. But Tomasello also suggests that all joint attention relies on us having shared intentional states. It is here that I think he is most Cartesian (in ways that remind me of Searle). What are intentional states and how can we share them? Do we need another intentional state to know if we're sharing them correctly? Why not just say that when we see a chess piece on the board what we share is the knight right there in front of us, as it appears in our activity? As Hegel argued, we do not need to worry about the correlation between a noumenal realm and mental phenomena because we are already dealing with a world of publicly available things. Ilyenkov called this the ideal (Ilyenkov 1977). Like Sellars (Seibt 2009), Vygotsky thought that when we speak we are literally thinking out loud: our thoughts are in our words and we are sharing our thoughts in the conversation. When I play the trumpet, my thoughts and intentions are in the playing; as I play, I respond to the trumpet and perhaps to those I play with, not to intentional states in my head. What happens over our individual and collective history is that some signs are crystallized and function as habits. As humans we can also break off from the affordances affecting us to improvise and create something new (Zavershneva and van der Veer 2018, 386; Vygotsky 2004). Plans, shared or otherwise, are such crystallizations; play is their obverse. We can describe the transitions here in terms of higher and lower grade normativity (Seibt 2009). We do no not need to posit, along with Tomasello, that we come into this world hardwired Rawlsian Liberals (Tomasello 2019, 240): we do not have to attribute to toddlers abstract 25 10 (8): 17-29. 2021. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-64q concepts of mutual respect, equality and trust (191),5 there are lower grade more local and iconic/indexical responses that can follow the patterns of these higher grade rule systems (Beisecker 2013).6 I'd argue Tomasello rejects this option because he does not appreciate the Janus-faced character of signs. Considering whether iconicity plays a role in symbolic gestures, Tomasello (2009) concludes that "symbolic gestures are the same as spoken symbols ... in being only conventionally connected to their intended referents" (34-35). But why must these options be mutually exclusive? To exclusively privilege coherence with social convention leaves us, as McDowell memorably said of Davidson, with frictionless spinning in a void. The evidence Tomasello offers for this conclusion presupposes the intentional state framing. He suggests, "in experiments, 18-month-olds are unable to use iconicity to understand an adult's specific communicative intention"-but why assume they should? Secondly, he claims that "in the earliest stages, deaf children learning sign language are not helped by the iconicity of many sign language signs", and we may infer that "arbitrary gestures" would have done just as well. But this seems like a selective reading, overlooking the many ways in which sign language is clearly characterized by iconicity (Padden et al. 2013; Thompson et al. 2012). The Vygotsky-inspired experiments of the Zagorsk Children's Home for the Death and Blind show that we do not need to put conventions and intentions on one side and the resistance of matter on the other (Ilyenkov 2007). That signs and gestures are learned through enculturation does not mean that they are immaterial.7 If the Vygotskian account later expanded by Ilyenkov is right, the process by which a thing comes to stand for another thing relies not on prior mental abstraction but dynamic isomorphy with wider concrete activity systems. In the Beginning was the Deed By way of a conclusion, I come to the work of the developmental psychologists Racine and Carpendale. Racine and Carpendale tie up many of the trajectories I have sketched while actively reinterpreting Tomasello's findings (Racine and Carpendale 2007 a, b, c). Racine and Carpendale's central criticism of Tomasello can be summarized in their claim that his theorization of child development falls foul of Wittgenstein's private language argument. By presupposing intentional states prior to socialization, Tomasello is committed to a circular notion of inner labelling of mental contents. An intention exists "embedded in its situation": In their interactions with others, children do not observe a pattern of activity and then go about computing the underlying meaning; children instead come 5 As Alasdair Macintyre has argued, you cannot learn "good" in the abstract. Knowing what a good or fair number of cookies is presupposes knowing what cookies are at some level (MacIntyre 2013). 6 This is the picture of social practice Vygotsky gives in his concept of the zone of proximal development (Zaretsky 2021). 7 The complex dynamics here were explored in Marx's analysis of commodities (Ilyenkov 2008, 88) and Sellars' discussion of picturing and signifying (Seibt 2009). K. Potapov 26 to see psychological concepts directly in such patterns of activity (Racine and Carpendale 2007a). This conclusion is one we find in the work of Ilyenkov and others following in Vygotsky's footsteps (Ilyenkov 1974). It is a view Siyaves Azeri (2021) explores more fully in his last reply to Drain. As Racine and Carpendale (2007a) argue, "words derive their meanings from the role they play in patterns of human action and interaction; language is the refinement that gives us the ability to make finer distinctions." What Vygotsky's explorations help to bring into sharper relief is the Janus-faced nature of language development as involving affective-volitional systems entwined in our environment and their dialectical unity with cultural-historical systems constituting our conceptual space.8 This unity is embodied in the sign. There is a genetic, but not a logical, contradiction between the claim that higher mental functions, an inseparable part of which is the use of signs, arise in the process of cooperation and social intercourse, and the other claim that these functions develop from primitive roots on a base of lower or elementary functions, that is, a contradiction between the sociogenesis of higher functions and their natural history (Vygotsky 1999, 10). Final Thoughts One decidedly Hegelian-Marxist aspect of Vygotsky's work is his approach to reading. Playing off a plethora of thinkers against each-other, he reads each seriously and finds what is valuable to the problem at hand, synthesizing their ideas into a qualitatively new form. In his reply Drain characterized Vygotsky as "Janetian", only then to reject both. I have argued that this attempt to poison the well is unwarranted. The advantage of aligning Vygotsky with Baldwin instead of Janet is not just that Baldwin is a more coherent thinker, but that Baldwinian evolution is more resonant with the explicit Marxist orientation of Vygotsky and his followers. The reading of Baldwinian evolution advanced by Deacon brings this work within reach of Engels and the theory of human nature so important to Vygotsky.9 While both Deacon and Tomasello describe the ratchetting effect of human culture, for Deacon it is shared symbols and not shared intentions that are key here. In our phylogenesis, it is not beliefs and intentions that make a difference but customs and practices. If I am born in a culture with certain marriage customs, it is not that I share intentions with others in my 8 I'd argue that Vygotsky coined the term "word-meaning" to signal this dialectic. 9 Deacon, personal communication. He also suggests external constrains help to solve problems of downward causation (Deacon 2011, 161). 27 10 (8): 17-29. 2021. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-64q culture but that this is what marriage actually is as an object in my world, about which I may then form beliefs (Lipatov, Brown, and Feldman 2011). As Racine & Carpendale have argued, we can appreciate Tomasello's many innovations while rejecting some of his mentalistic language and giving due emphasis to embodiment. There is much I agree with and many points I've not done justice to in Drain's critique, but I am thankful for the stimulating dialogue. References Azeri, Siyaves. 2021. "On Reality of Thinking: A Response to Chris Drain's 'Ideality and Cognitive Development'." 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Philosophy

23 Biology & Philosophy ISSN 0169-3867 Biol Philos DOI 10.1007/s10539-015-9512-0 Human thinking, shared intentionality, and egocentric biases Uwe Peters 1 23 Your article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution license which allows users to read, copy, distribute and make derivative works, as long as the author of the original work is cited. You may selfarchive this article on your own website, an institutional repository or funder's repository and make it publicly available immediately. REVIEW ESSAY Human thinking, shared intentionality, and egocentric biases Uwe Peters1 Received: 28 October 2015 / Accepted: 12 November 2015  The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract The paper briefly summarises and critiques Tomasello's (2014) A Natural History of Human Thinking. After offering an overview of the book, the paper focusses on one particular part of Tomasello's proposal on the evolution of uniquely human thinking and raises two points of criticism against it. One of them concerns his notion of thinking. The other pertains to empirical findings on egocentric biases in communication. Keywords Human thinking  Shared intentionality  Explicit versus implicit  Egocentric bias There is evidence that a number of non-human animals, ranging from corvids, domestic pigs, and dolphins to great apes, are capable of high-level thinking that is in many ways familiar from that in our own species (see, e.g. Taylor 2014; Marino and Colvin 2015; Herzing and Johnson 2015; Osvath and Martin-Ordas 2014). If that is so, what makes human thinking unique and what explains its origin? In his recent book A Natural History of Human Thinking, Michael Tomasello sets out to offer answers to these questions. In what follows, I briefly summarise and critique the book. I begin by clarifying what Tomasello means by 'human thinking' (''The notion of human thinking'' section), before outlining the overall argument of the book (''Overview of A Natural History of Human Thinking'' section). After that, I hone in on one particular part of Tomasello's proposal on the evolution of uniquely human thinking and raise two points of criticism against it (''Critical discussion'' section). One of them concerns his notion of thinking. The other pertains to empirical findings on egocentric biases in communication. & Uwe Peters email@example.com 1 King's College London, London, UK 123 Biol Philos DOI 10.1007/s10539-015-9512-0 The notion of human thinking In A Natural History of Human Thinking, Tomasello's goal is to offer an account of the unique nature and origin of human thinking. To specify what he means by 'thinking', Tomasello appeals to dual-process theory. He writes that although humans and other animals solve many problems and make many decisions based on evolved intuitive heuristics (so-called system 1 processes), humans and at least some other animals also solve some problems and make some decisions by thinking (system 2 processes; e.g. Kahneman 2011). (2014: 4) In Kahneman's (2011) dual-process account, which Tomasello here endorses, system 1 processes are inter alia automatic and unconscious, i.e. working-memory independent processes, whereas system 2 processes are inter alia subject-controlled and conscious, i.e. working-memory dependent in nature (see Kahneman 2011: 18, 22, 25, 308). Given this, for Tomasello, thinking is a subject-controlled, conscious process. More specifically, he holds that thinking is a single such process with three key components: ''(1) the ability to cognitively represent experiences to oneself 'offline'; (2) the ability to simulate or make inferences transforming these representations causally, intentionally and/or logically; and (3) the ability to self-monitor and evaluate how these simulated experiences might lead to specific behavioural outcomes'' (2014: 4). Turning from thinking in general to human thinking, in particular, Tomasello holds that with respect to (1) to (3), unlike other animals, ''only humans'' are able to (i) cognitively represent and conceptualise identical situations or entities under ''differing, possibly conflicting social perspectives (leading ultimately to a notion of 'objectivity')'', (ii) ''make socially recursive and self-reflective inferences about others' or their own intentional states'', and (iii) ''self-monitor and evaluate their own thinking with respect to the normative perspectives and standards ('reasons') of others or the group'' (ibid). Tomasello calls the uniquely human thinking characterised by (i)-(iii) ''objective-reflective-normative thinking'' (ibid). His aim in A Natural History of Human Thinking is to offer an evolutionary explanation of how objective-reflectivenormative thinking could emerge from the kind of thinking that humans share with non-human animals. Overview of A Natural History of Human Thinking Tomasello calls the thinking that we share with non-human animals ''individual intentionality'' (2014: 4). Individual intentionality is what an animal exhibits if it cognitively represents experiences to itself 'off-line', simulates or makes inferences involving these representations, and self-monitors and assesses how these simulated experiences might lead to specific results so as to make an instrumentally rational decision on what to do to satisfy its own desires (Tomasello 2014: 9). U. Peters 123 Tomasello mentions a number of studies that show that, e.g. great apes display individual intentionality. They are able to use cognitive representations of their physical surrounding for causal inferences, represent another agent's intentional states, and employ the representation to make inferences pertaining to how the individual will act given the mental state she is in. Great apes also monitor their own cognition: based on their certainty about what they know, they assess their chances of success at a task and make decisions accordingly. Great ape thinking, which Tomasello takes to correspond to the thinking in our last non-human ancestors from 5 to 6 million years ago, is hence already relatively sophisticated. It is, however, only geared toward the satisfaction of the animal's own individualistic needs when it is competing with group mates for valued resources, Tomasello writes. He holds that great apes' individual intentionality is only selffocussed ''cognition for competition'' of typically lone-acting creatures (2014: 31). According to the ''shared intentionality hypothesis'' that Tomasello sets out to defend in A Natural History of Human Thinking, uniquely human thinking evolved from this self-focussed, individual intentionality as an adaptation for ''dealing with problems of social coordination, specifically, problems presented by individuals' attempts to collaborate and communicate with others'' (2014: 4). He write that this evolution happened in two steps, one leading from individual to ''joint intentionality'' and the other from joint intentionality to ''collective intentionality'', both of which are for Tomasello instances of human-unique ''shared intentionality'' (2014: 5–6). The first evolutionary step occurred about 400,000 years ago, in early humans (the Homo heidelbergensis). Tomasello write that while humans' great ape ancestors lived, just as contemporary great apes, mostly individualistic and competitive lives in which individual intentionality served them just fine, early humans could no longer survive without collaborating with each other in dyadic units when out foraging. The result was a species-unique selection for and evolution of skills and motivations to engage in cooperative activities, which relied on a ''dual-level structure'' consisting of ''joint goals'' i.e. goals that both interactants shared and knew they shared with each other-and ''joint attention'' i.e. both interactants were attending to the same thing and knew they both did-forming a ''joint intentionality'' of the moment (Tomasello 2014: 33, 38). Since the different individuals involved in cooperative activities with this structure still retained different perspectives and had to play different roles for both to achieve success in joint tasks, the need for early humans to coordinate their actions and attention referentially on external situations and entities arose. Tomasello argues that this initiated the evolution of new forms of communication such as pointing, pantomiming, and iconic gestures via which interactants now started to inform the other of aspects of the environment relevant for her/him to achieve the joint goal. These new forms of communication and collaboration in turn led to new forms of thinking. For instance, in early humans' cooperative communication, both the communicator of a message and the recipient had to ''anticipate'', Tomasello writes, the ''perspective of their partner, which required socially recursive inferences that embedded the intentional states of one partner within those of the other'' (2014: 72). Human thinking, shared intentionality, and egocentric... 123 Individuals had to ''think about their communicative partner thinking about their thinking'' because the communicator had to determine how best to convey to the recipient her intention, and the recipient had to reconstruct the communicator's intention by appealing to what she wanted him to know, Tomasello maintains (2014: 59). Furthermore, early humans' collaborative activities involved partner choice. This meant that each individual developed an interest in being viewed as a good collaborator, for bad collaborators weren't chosen as partners in foraging activities and hence ultimately faced starvation. Tomasello holds that each individual thus began to monitor and control her own acting and thinking with the other's perspectives and evaluations in mind. Still, early humans' thinking was socially normative only in the sense that they were concerned with how their particular collaborative partner, rather than the group as a whole, assessed their cooperation and understood their communicative acts. Early humans didn't yet subject themselves to any 'objective' normative standard of the group as a whole. Their thinking was thus ''perspectival-recursivesocially monitored thinking'', but not yet objective-reflective-normative thinking (Tomasello 2014: 79). For the latter to enter the scene, second-personal, joint intentionality had to become ''collective intentionality'', Tomasello writes (ibid). In his account of the transition, the social groups that early humans formed were only loose pools of individuals for ad hoc dyadic collaborations. Two demographic factors changed this. First, competition with other human groups emerged. In order to protect their way of life from invaders, the unsteady social pools of early humans were thus forced to become uniform collaborator groups with the shared goal of group survival. Second, when human populations grew, smaller groupings that were still part of a culture separated from the rest. As a result, members of a particular group now encountered the problem of identifying individuals belonging to them. Tomasello holds that in response to these two problems, modern humans started developing a group identity, demarcating the 'we' from the 'them', the competitor groups (2014: 82f). In order to enable the recognition of and coordination with ingroup strangers with whom one had no personal common ground, local practices were conventionalised and became to function as shibboleths via which members of the group could be easily identified. Conventionalised practices as well as social norms and institutions to which each group member conformed and expected all others to conform then constituted a cultural common ground that provided the basis for collaboration with in-group strangers. To further strengthen conformity and facilitate collaborations within the group, early humans' iconic gestures became substituted with linguistic conventions, which, unlike early humans' gestures, supported arbitrary connections between signs and referents allowing for abstract conceptualisations, Tomasello writes. Since the linguistic conventions were passed on to the next generation, the children of the group didn't have to reinvent conceptualisations but inherited from their social environment various different ways of classifying the world for themselves and others. They learned to view the same situation and entity simultaneously under different guises, e.g. as an antelope by the tree, as an animal by the tree, as food by the tree, etc. This knowledge, accumulated over time in the social environment via U. Peters 123 reliable teaching and learning mechanisms, introduced inter alia the possibility for formal inferences as opposed to merely causal ones, for subjects could now think that given that there is, say, an antelope by the tree, there is an animal (or food) by the tree. In addition, to be a good partner in collaborations, cooperative argumentation, and shared decision-making, which was vital for survival, individuals now also often had to make explicit in language their own attitudes toward particular contents (e.g. whether they were certain or doubtful about a proposition) and the reasons for their claims. To ensure the intelligibility and rationality of those linguistic acts and reasons, modern humans needed to simulate in advance the cultural group's normative judgments of the intelligibility and rationality of the communicative acts and reasons in order to align them with the group's standards. In their self-reflection and self-monitoring, humans now referred to the normative perspective of all users of the linguistic conventions. For each of them took it that to be a member of the group, one must behave as the group as a whole does, i.e. follow the norms to which all are committed, or else be ostracised. Modern humans thus referred in their thinking and action planning to the ''agent-neutral'', '''objective' perspective engendered'' by their ''cultural world'' that then ''justified personal judgments of true and false, right and wrong'' (2014: 115). The collaboration and communication in modern humans were hence characterised by collective rather than merely second-personal, joint intentionality. They led to the evolution of reflective, 'objective', and normative, i.e. uniquely human thinking, Tomasello writes. He ends the main discussion in his book by emphasising that skills of shared intentionality, e.g. the ability to engage in joint attention and form joint goals, are not innate but biological adaptations that come into being during ontogeny as the individual uses them to collaborate and communicate with others. This means that without social interactions during childhood, and without collectively created and transmitted cultural environments, including adults and all their cultural equipment (e.g. language), joint and collective intentionality won't develop. As a result, uniquely human thinking won't emerge either, Tomasello concludes. Critical discussion The central argument of Tomasello's book that uniquely human thinking evolved from individual intentionality in two steps that crucially involved a human-unique form of cooperation is illuminating and plausible. Overall A Natural History of Human Thinking is clearly written and a rewarding reading for anyone interested in the evolution of human cognition. The book fills an important gap in the literature by offering an empirically and theoretically well-supported account of the evolution of a very specific aspect of human cognition, i.e. objective-reflective-normative thinking, and its link to uniquely human cooperation. While I'm largely sympathetic to Tomasello's shared intentionality proposal, I have reservations about some of the details. I will focus only on his story about the evolution of one particular component of ''objective-reflective-normative thinking'', Human thinking, shared intentionality, and egocentric... 123 namely subjects' ''socially recursive and self-reflective inferences about others' or their own intentional states'' (2014: 4). I will ignore the objective and normative aspects that Tomasello takes to be part of uniquely human thinking. Explicit versus implicit thinking It is a common view that reading other people's minds and engaging in socially recursive thinking evolved in competitive social worlds for Machiavellian purposes, i.e. for the purpose of or for guarding against deception and manipulation (Byrne and Whiten 1988, 1997). Tomasello argues for a different proposal. He claims that socially recursive thinking evolved because it was required for cooperative communication. One kind of study that he mentions to support this involves the object-choice task (see Behne et al. 2005, 2012). For instance, if in interacting with a chimpanzee, the experimenter points to food on the ground, the chimp will follow the pointing and take the food. If the food is hidden in one of two buckets, however, and the experimenter then points to either of them, the chimp will look to the bucket but won't make the inference that this is where the food is. Chimpanzees hence fail in the object-choice task to find the food. In contrast, in the same kind of setting, already 12-months old human infants immediately comprehend the informative motive underlying the adult's pointing, and know that the pointed-to bucket is the one containing the sought-after object (Tomasello 2014: 52). How are they able to know this? Tomasello argues that in the successful performance ''in the object choice task [...] the recipient [of the message] infers that the communicator intends that she know that the food is in the bucket-a socially recursive inference that great apes apparently do not make''1 (2014: 57). The inference at issue, Tomasello writes, ''requires in all cases an abductive leap'' such as: ''his pointing in the direction of that otherwise boring bucket would make sense (i.e. would be consistent with common ground, relevance, and newness) if it is the case that he intends that I know where the reward is'' (ibid).2 This abductive socially recursive inference enables already human infants to comprehend the experimenter's pointing in the object-choice task and find the sought-after object, Tomasello claims. He holds that in the task, in ''human cooperative communication'' in general, individuals ''must'' engage in such inferences (2014: 59). Suppose that early humans were indeed, as Tomasello suggests, forced to cooperatively communicate. If subjects need to engage in socially recursive thinking in order to cooperatively communicate (e.g. in the object-choice task), then Tomasello's proposal that such thinking evolved in early humans for enabling cooperative communication seems plausible. 1 The italics in the quotes of this paper are original. 2 The reasoning from a general principle to what another subject intends that Tomasello here takes to be ''required in all cases'' in which subjects work out what someone else wants them to know seems to suggest that he advocates a theory–theory view of social cognition. In other places in the book, however, his use of the term 'simulation' suggests he favors a simulationist account (see also Tomasello 1999: 70), or a theory-theory/simulationist hybrid. In the following discussion, not much hinges on whether he endorses a theory-theory, simulationist, or hybrid view. U. Peters 123 There is, however, reason to be sceptical about the claim that socially recursive thinking is required for this purpose. For instance, Tomasello holds that in the object-choice task, in order to grasp the communicated message, the recipient needs to infer that the communicator intends that she know that the sought-after object is in the bucket. Since the recipient of the message in the developmental psychology study that Tomasello cites is a 12-months-old infant (2014: 52), in his view, a 12-months-old infers that the adult pointing her to the bucket ''intends that she know'' that the sought-after object is in the bucket (2014: 57). This proposal lacks psychological plausibility, however. An understanding of the intention that S knows that p requires the possession of some concept of knowledge because the propositional content of the intention explicitly refers to knowledge. Yet, there is no evidence that children acquire the concept of knowledge before the concept of belief (Butterfill 2013), which is thought to happen at around 3–4 years of age (Wellman et al. 2001). Recent studies involving the violation-of-expectation paradigm and gaze tracking do indicate that infants as young as 7–15 months are able to register other subjects' false beliefs (Onishi and Baillargeon 2005; Surian et al. 2007; Kovács et al. 2010). But, on the basis of further experimental results, it is widely accepted that this early understanding of mental states is at best implicit, i.e. automatic and unconscious in nature (see, e.g. Low and Perner 2012; Schneider et al. 2015). No one so far claims that these infants form explicit representations of other's mental states, i.e. representations that figure in subject-controlled and conscious processing (Pacherie 2013). Since that is so, it is fair to say that the 12-months-olds in the object-choice task also don't engage in explicit socially recursive thinking. If they don't do so, however, then, against Tomasello's claim, such thinking isn't required for cooperative communication. For, as he grants, these infants do engage in cooperative communication in, e.g. the object-choice task. Indeed, suppose that the child involved in the task makes the default assumption that in general an adult subject S will help her achieve her goals. When she is searching for the hidden object, and sees S point to one of the buckets, she will then infer from S's behaviour that the object she is currently looking for is in the pointedto bucket. To draw this inference, the child might simply treat S as a mindless machine that has the function to assist her in her projects and point her to the location of objects that she is looking for. That is, the child doesn't need to represent, explicitly or implicitly, any mental states, let alone engage in socially recursive thinking in order to find what she is looking for. Similarly, if S makes the default assumption that making eye contact with the child and then pointing to an object will help her find the object, then S will be able to successfully communicate to her where the object is without any kind of meta-representational processing. Neither the infant nor S needs to engage in such processing to cooperatively communicate. Furthermore, even if subjects had to start, e.g. implicit socially recursive thinking in order to cooperatively communicate, this still wouldn't help Tomasello with his project in A Natural History of Human Thinking, for the socially recursive thinking whose evolutionary origin he wishes to explain requires explicit representations of Human thinking, shared intentionality, and egocentric... 123 mental states. It requires explicit representations because, as mentioned above, for Tomasello, instances of ''thinking'', including socially recursive thinking, are ''system 2 processes'' (2014 4). And system 2 processes are in Kahneman's (2011) dual-system account, which Tomasello endorses (2014: 4), explicit, subjectcontrolled and conscious in nature.3 Finally, since Tomasello's avowed focus is on system 2, i.e. explicit thinking, his proposal that socially recursive thinking evolved because it is required for cooperative communication becomes also questionable from a phenomenological point of view. For it is often noted in the literature on social cognition that if the inferences involved in producing mental state attributions were ''explicit, they should show up in our experience'', but ''they rarely do'' (Gallagher and Hutto 2008: 18). Typically, in social interactions, including cooperative communication, we aren't aware of any mental states or inferences about what others or we intend or think. Whatever meta-representational processing might be involved, it clearly doesn't need to be conscious but normally remains unconscious (Apperly 2010). There is no reason to believe that things were any different in early humans. That is, early humans too will presumably have been able to engage in cooperative communication without explicit, conscious meta-representational processing. But if that is so, then Tomasello's claim that ''human cooperative communication is evolutionarily new'' in that individuals ''must think [...] about their communicative partner thinking [...] about their thinking [emphasis added]'' (2014: 59), where thinking is understood as a ''system 2 process'' (2014: 4), is false.4 3 This point also holds with respect to the following proposal that Tomasello mentioned in personal communication. He writes: in their cooperative communication human infants are not tracking others beliefs (or knowledge based on beliefs) but merely what others have perceived and so are familiar with. The studies by Moll and Liebal that I cite show infants' amazing ability to keep track of what they have experienced with specific other individuals and what they have not, and it is this-functionally equivalent to [the] implicit [mental state] understanding [infants exhibit in violation-of expectation tasks]-that infants are using at the early stages. If infants' ability to keep track of what others have experienced is implicit or 'functionally equivalent' to implicit processing about mental states, then the data Tomasello mentions yield little support for claims about S2, i.e., explicit, conscious meta-representational thinking and its evolution. That is, the data lend little support to his project. If, alternatively, one wishes to claim that this ability involves in fact explicit meta-representational processing, then further arguments or, better, evidence are needed than those that Tomasello provides in his book. 4 In his discussion of collective intentionality, Tomasello offers a second proposal on why conscious meta-representational thinking evolved. He holds that in discourse, to be a good collaborator, one often needs to provide others with an insight into one's own propositional attitudes toward the contents that one communicates. Tomasello suggests that this requires making one's attitudes explicit in language, which in turn only works if one can consciously think about them first (2014: 102f, 117, 139). However, there is reason to doubt Tomasello's proposal, for one can often convey one's mental states to others by expressing (rather than reporting) them, which doesn't require meta-representations of them to be conscious, see Rosenthal (2012). U. Peters 123 Socially recursive inferences and egocentric biases There is another reason for being sceptical about Tomasello's proposal even if we ignore the distinction between implicit and explicit thinking. It relates to a particular kind of bias in communication. I will say a bit more about the bias first before returning to Tomasello's view. A number of studies show that in communication interactants tend to exhibit an ''egocentric bias'': they have the tendency to take their own perspective to be automatically shared by the other (see, e.g. Nickerson 1999; Royzman et al. 2003; Epley et al. 2004; Keysar 2007; Birch and Bloom 2007; Lin et al. 2010; Apperly et al. 2010). Interestingly, this effect is particularly pronounced in interactions with close others. For example, Savitsky et al. (2011) investigated whether listeners are more egocentric in communication with a friend than a stranger. They used a task in which a 'director' gives an addressee instruction to move items in an array, some of which are only seen by the addressee but not by the director. So, for instance, the director might tell the addressee to 'move the mouse'-referring to a mutually visible computer mouse –, and to comply, the addressee then has to exclude a toy mouse that she can see but that she knows that the director can't see. Savitsky et al. found that subjects who were given directions by a friend made more egocentric mistakes, i.e. they looked at and reached for an object only they could see, than those who followed directions provided by a stranger. Similarly, in a second study, subjects who tried to convey particular ''meanings with ambiguous phrases overestimated their success more when communicating with a friend or spouse than with strangers'' (Savitsky et al. 2011: 69). These results suggest that subjects engage in ''active monitoring of strangers' divergent perspectives because they know they must, but [...] they 'let down their guard' and rely more on their own perspective when they communicate with a friend'' (ibid). These findings5 challenge Tomasello's proposal. On his view, there was a trend toward and selection of perspective taking and socially recursive thinking when early humans became interdependent, cooperative, and lived in ''small-scale'' groups in which each one knew the other (2014: 82f). Yet, the data suggest that perspective taking and socially recursive thinking in fact decrease in interactions with cooperative people with whom one is familiar and interdependent, e.g. spouses and friends, rather than strangers. In these situations, subjects seem to take their own perspective to be automatically shared by the other, and there is a trend away from perspective taking. Prima facie, this is puzzling, for an egocentric bias threatens cooperative communication and increases the potential for miscommunication. Why do subjects nonetheless exhibit such a bias especially when interacting with close others? The following proposal seems plausible. When interactants share the same environment and jointly attend to the same thing, what is accessible and salient to the communicator will usually be equally accessible and salient to the recipient. As 5 There is more evidence for the point that egocentrism is stronger in interactions with close others, leading inter alia to a felt transparency of one's own mind to them; see, e.g., Vorauer and Cameron (2002), and Cameron and Vorauer (2008). Human thinking, shared intentionality, and egocentric... 123 a result, in these situations, an egocentric approach will support successful communication without requiring communicators and recipients to model each other's perspective or mental states (Pickering and Garrod 2004; Barr and Keysar 2005; Lin et al. 2010). Recipients of a message can then anchor interpretation in their own perspective, and, if need be (e.g. in the case of a misunderstanding), employ information about the communicator's perspective to incrementally adjust away from the anchor (Nickerson 1999; Epley and Gilovich 2001; Epley et al. 2004; Tamir and Mitchell 2013). Does the recipient's subsequent adjustment to the perspective of the communicator rely on representing his perspective? It is well known that simultaneously forming and entertaining distinct mental models is difficult (see, e.g. Johnson-Laird 1983; Pickering and Garrod 2004). Perhaps a more realistic proposal is thus that in cooperative communication, subjects ''externalise'' computations about each other's perspective and thinking (Pickering and Garrod 2004: 12, 21). That is, even though communicator and recipient could directly compute each other's perspective, in cooperative groups, they both will receive plenty of feedback from each other on their performance. This will allow them to update their semantic representations on the basis of individual successes or failures to convey and comprehend messages without having to compute each other's perspectives and knowledge states themselves. Social feedback mechanisms thus allow the interactants to 'off-load' cognitive work, i.e. computations pertaining to each other's perspective, onto their social environment (Young 1998; Barr 2004). There is evidence that such an externalisation of computations does indeed occur. Studies show, for instance, that listeners often ask speakers to clarify the reference of a term despite the fact that if they adopted the speaker's perspective, they would find that their mutual knowledge uniquely defines the referent (Keysar et al. 2000; Keysar 2007). That is, ''even when addressees are presented with clear cues to what is mutually known, they often opt to resolve ambiguity by engaging in an epistemic exchange [e.g. asking clarification questions and providing feedback] rather than computing the referent themselves'' (Barr and Keysar 2005: 33). Note that once the referent has been fixed interactively, and a precedent has been set, the subsequent use and comprehension of the communicative act won't require mutual perspective taking or socially recursive thinking either. For interactants may then on each occasion refer back to the precedent. Empirical work supports this view. Studies show, for instance, that listeners tend to interpret a referential expression according to naming precedents set by a previous speaker even when they are aware that the current speaker was not in fact present at the time when the precedents were established (Barr and Keysar 2002; Malt and Sloman 2004). In these cases, with anyone who was, just as the listener, present when the precedent was set, the listener will subsequently be able to successfully cooperatively communicate about the referent at issue without socially recursive thinking and perspective taking. The data hence speak against Tomasello's view that in cooperative communication subjects ''must'' adopt the other's perspective (2014: 59). More generally, given the way Tomasello characterises early humans' social life, one would expect that particularly the kind of early humans that he envisages U. Peters 123 externalised computations about each other's mental states and exploited the feedback mechanism involved in their interactions. For, as noted, he holds that early humans lived in ''small'' groups and were ''interdependent with one another in an especially urgent way'' (2014: 137). Further, early humans were cooperative, assumed that the other too ''had cooperative motives'', and were ''each trying to help the other'' to achieve the ''joint goal of recipient comprehension'' (Tomasello 2014: 73). Now, in social interactions in which participants are interdependent, mutually assume that the other is cooperative, and mutually make an effort to ensure communicative success, communicators will evidently refrain from ambiguous and deceptive communicative acts. Furthermore, they will aim to make information transmission as efficient as possible, because this will, given their interdependence, benefit both interactants. Since perspective taking and thinking about thinking are computationally complex and cognitively effortful processes for both parties (Apperly et al. 2006; Epley and Caruso 2009; Lin et al. 2010), and since in cooperative communication interactive feedback tends to lead to effectively the same result without requiring the computational complexity and effort (Young 1998; Pickering and Garrod 2004; Barr 2004), one would expect that the early humans that Tomasello has in mind relied on each other's feedback rather than socially recursive inferences in order to settle the meaning of communicative acts and ensure communicative success. Unlike Tomasello's view, this proposal manages to accommodate the data on a stronger egocentrism in cooperative communication with close others. For, assuming that Tomasello is right about his characterisation of early humans' social environments, then due to the interdependence of early humans and the small size of the groups in which they lived, early human communicators and recipientswill have received copious feedback from each other on their performance. These aspects of early humans' social environments will have allowed early humans to be more egocentric and assume by default that close others share their own perspective. Since an egocentric bias will for them also have made their cognitive processing in cooperative communication with close others computationally more economical and tractable, it seems likely that this is why the bias evolved and is still present in contemporary humans. In sum, then, the preceding points suggest that cooperative communication doesn't necessarily require simulating what the other is thinking about one's own thinking. They cast doubts on Tomasello's proposal that socially recursive thinking evolved in groups of highly interdependent and cooperative individuals for enabling cooperative communication. It is more probable that the early humans that he considers evolved the disposition to anchor their interpretation of each other's communicative acts onto their own egocentric perspective6 and then, in the case of a 6 Goldman (2006) holds that when S exhibits an egocentric bias, this is the result of a ''quarantine failure'': in the simulation process, the subject fails to isolate her own perspective from that of the other, and so the former seeps into the latter (165). That is, on his view, when S is in communication egocentrically biased, then she still engages in perspective taking or simulation. However, note that even Goldman acknowledges that such a case is a ''limiting case'' of simulation in which ''the simulation element is null'' (41). Given this, there is no reason to accept that simulation takes place at all, rather than a direct attribution, see also Wallin (2011). Human thinking, shared intentionality, and egocentric... 123 misunderstanding, adjusted away from it, off-loading meta-representational processing pertaining to each other's perspective onto their social interactions. Since early humans arguably did not need to simulate the other's thinking about their own thinking to cooperatively communicate, and since there is empirical evidence that cooperative communication can proceed without perspective taking (Barr and Keysar 2002; Malt and Sloman 2004), Tomasello's proposal about the evolution of socially recursive thinking can be rejected.7 But why then did socially recursive thinking evolve? While this isn't the place for a detailed answer, the early development of meta-representational capacities in infants, who aren't typically confronted with uncooperative interactants, suggests that these capacities, including socially recursive thinking, evolved not so much for enabling cooperative communication, as Tomasello suggest, but rather for allowing infants to deal with another pressing problem they face, namely social learning.8 Social learning frequently requires that the learner ''understand that a performance is stylised, that a crucial step has been slowed down, exaggerated, or repeated to make it more overt'' (Sterelny 2012: 146). To ensure reliable knowledge transmission and acquisition, both the learner and the teacher ''need to read each other'' in that each ''monitors the other and their joint focus of attention and intention'' (ibid). That is, both need to engage in mutual perspective taking and socially recursive thinking. Given the important role of social learning in human infants, there is good reason to assume that socially recursive thinking evolved as an adaptation for it. Conclusion Tomasello's new book A Natural History of Human Thinking makes a plausible case for the view that the apparent uniqueness of our thinking is ultimately grounded in our species-specific dispositions and abilities to engage in collaboration and cooperative communication with each other. His overall argument would have benefitted if attention had been paid to the distinction between explicit and implicit thinking, and if the data on egocentric biases in communication had been considered. Having said that, Tomasello's ideas on what makes human thought unique and what explains its origin are intriguing and likely to shape future debates on theses issues.9 7 It is worth noting that there are various ways in which cooperative communication might appear to rely on perspective taking even though no perspective-taking abilities but other processes are involved, see, e.g., Barr (2014) for an interesting discussion and a list of ''impostors'' of perspective taking. 8 Tomasello (1999) himself proposes that socially recursive thinking evolved for social learning. Curiously, in A Natural History of Human Thinking, he doesn't consider the view. 9 I would like to thank Nick Shea, Kim Sterelny, and Michael Tomasello for very helpful comments and clarifications on a previous draft of the paper. U. 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