Michael Tomasello

O projeto de Tomasello envolve mostrar como diferenças naturais entre humanos e outros animais permitem que o ser humano se desenvolva como um animal cultural, dotado de linguagem. E para isso, para descrever os resultados dessa psicologia evolutiva, onde pressões evolutivas causariam predisposições a serem selecionadas, nada melhor que comparar infantes com macacos, que tanto nos aparentam, não apenas fisicamente, mas cognitivamente, especialmente em relação a crianças de até 3 anos. E o que essas crianças desenvolvem de tão especial, e que pode ser defendido como independente da cultura? A predisposição à cooperação, a se colocar no lugar do outro, a ter intencionalidade coletiva, a construir uma visão moral e uma visada de um ponto de vista objetivo (da comunidade). Assim o livro, pacientemente, relatando experimentos comparativos e hipóteses, vai nos convencendo de algo que sooa simples, ao final: como nossa predisposição para a cooperação, desde bebês, vai permitindo comportamentos e desenvolvimentos cognitivos afinados ao social, de modo a permitirem a aculturação (a inclusão nas diferentes culturas), em um patamar completamente diferente do dos macacos.… (plus d'informations)

I thought developmental and comparative psychology professor Michael Tomasello's 2018 book 'Becoming Human: A Theory of Human Ontogeny' was brilliant and rigorously argued. Imagine my surprise to find the first three chapters of this short work (164 pages) practically insulting because of sloppy writing and terminological vagueness.

As a result, I decided to call it a day - even though, admittedly, the remaining chapters (about the agency of apes and humans) might play more into Tomasello's strengths. My loss, maybe, but I cannot but operate using inference if I read scientific books: if your base is brittle, I'm not going to risk dwelling in a superstructure that seems solid. It's a form a prejudice, yes, but my time is limited, and there's way too much else to read & learn.

A few examples/thoughts:

1. It starts with an unclear conception of 'agency' itself:

"Agency is thus not about all of the many and varied things that organisms do - from building anthills to caching nuts - but rather about how' they do them. Individuals acting as agents direct and control their won actions, whatever those actions may be specifically. The scientific challenge is to identify the underlying psychological organization that makes such individual direction and control possible."

It seems to me that the real scientific challenge is to identify the underlying neural pathways that guide our muscles to perform specific behavior. Tomasello is not clear at all about what "psychological" entails, and how that ties into neurology, biology & evolution. I would advice him to read 2019's 'The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness' of Simona Ginsburg & Eva Jablonka for an example of how a true scientific account of the evolution of agency could be written. It also struck me that Tomasello often names learning as crucial in his early chapters - thus confirming at least a part of Ginsburg & Jablonka's thesis - but not once does he engage in the biological pathways of learning, nor how these neural pathways might have evolved.

A bit later in the book agency turns out to be about the capability of "choosing to act or not to act, or among multiple possible actions, according to its continuous perceptual assessment of the situation as it unfolds over time (sometimes employing executive processes such as inhibition, as a further control process, during action execution)." This is equated with behaving in "psychologically agentive ways".

2. The book is full of modifiers like 'mostly' and 'to some degree', but then fails to conceptually zoom in on what this actually means for the theory at hand. E.g., page 6:

"Tomesello and Call (1997) explicitly stated that things such as spiders building spiderwebs are interesting and complex phenomena, but they are not psychological, precisely because they are mostly not under the individual spider's flexible control. The concept of agency thus, in a sense, represents the dividing line between biological and psychological approaches to behavior; it is the distinction between complex behaviors designed and controlled by Nature, as it were, versus those designed and controlled, at least to some degree, by the individual psychological agent."

Note the words & phrases "mostly", "in a sense", "at least to some degree" and "as it were". Tomesello never specifies these further. Surely it is conceptually very important in which way the individual spider does flexibly control its weaving, as is implied by the use of the word "mostly"? Again, the dividing line between biology and psychology might be clear to Tomesello himself, but he doesn't manage to make it clear to the reader. At one hand, it seems to be something binary, a dichotomy ("a dividing line") but at the same time it isn't (a matter of "degree").

Another example of this page, on the wormlike C. elegans, page 29: "However, it is unlikely that there is also a comparison with some kind of internal goal to create direction: their locomotion is mostly random or stimulus driven. And these organisms do not seem to exhibit anything that we would want to call behavioral control: they do not inhibit or otherwise control action execution, and what they learn is simply the location toward which to direct their hardwired movements."

For starters, again, "mostly"? I would like to know more on that. Second, if they learn to direct themselves to food, at least part of their movements is not "hardwired" anymore, but goal directed, I would say. Tomasello never goes into the nuts and bolts of the distinction between goal-directed behavior, and stimulus driven behavior. It seems to me an internal goal (possibly accompanied by a conscious mental representation, as sometimes in humans) is a stimulus too. The fact that it is a stimulus originating from the neural systems inside the body does not feel so conceptually different from a neural stimulus that originates outside the body, as it only matters for the onset of the stimulus, not the resulting neural paths inside the body, i.e. not for the processing of the signal. Again, as for stimuli and different kinds of learning, I'd rather read another tome that has the same rigorousness as Ginsburg & Jablonka, than this short, breezy book.

When Tomasello also admits that this worm also knows how to avoid noxious chemicals, doesn't it have some kind of "inhibition" too, and thus forms of action control? What's the difference with the "feedback control organization" he talks about on the next page?

By the way, is the phrase "we would want to call" (my italics) a telltale?

3. Tomasello seems to think that "psychologically agentive species" somehow escape mechanic (neurological) pathways. He seems to forget that everything that happens in the brain, the neural system and the body is the result of molecular movement & energetic signals. Is he a closet Vitalist?

4. It seems to me that behavioral flexibility has not so much to do with agency, as Tomasello has it, but with the capacity for learning. Again, see Ginsburg & Jablonka.

5. On lizards, Tomasello introduces the concept of "go-no-go decisions", p. 39:

"Nevertheless, despite functioning as flexible decision-makers, goal-directed agents can make only simple decisions. They do not survey and choose among multiple behavioral possibilities simultaneously but rather move sequentially from one go-no-go decision to the next. This is to be expected of an organism whose behavior emanates exclusively from the single psychological tier of perception and action, rather than from, in addition, an executive tier of decision-making and cognitive control that formulates multiple action plans and then decides among them before acting, as do more complex agents."

My question here is what happens when a lizard perceives two fat insects slowly hovering in place withing reach at about the same distance at the same time?

In the same chapter part of Tomasello's reasoning hinges on the fact that lizards might learn to eat a new insect because of "behavioral agency". It seems to me this kind of behavior has not a lot to do with agency at all. Why do lizards try to eat new insects? Simply because they resemble other insects. They have about the same size, they buzz, they have wings, they have six legs, etc. It seems to me that eating a new kind of insect is not new behavior at all, just the same behavior that operates on a slightly different kind of real world input (an hitherto unmet insect presents itself to the lizard), of which the slight difference does not matter to the lizard's internal decision process, more so, the lizard might not even register that slight difference. It's like certain geese that have been observed to roll back beer cans to their nests because they think the can is one of their eggs. Behavioral agency!

Because of examples like this, I decided to abandon the book 25% in. A go-no-go decision, or a form of inhibitory control? Either way, I'm pretty sure it wasn't a form agency: the decision kinda forced itself through my eyes into my brain.

More non-fiction review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It… (plus d'informations)

(...)

Tomasello’s scope is large. He ties the development of human cognition and human sociality together, resulting in synthesizing insights about social norms & moral identity. This in not only a comparative psychology book, but an important work on ethics too. Truly a tour de force, and the first theory I’ve come across that convincingly brings cognition, evolution and ethics together – not in a normative way, but by describing the pathways of how these things arise, starting with newborn babies.

(...)

At first, I was a bit suspicious of Tomasello’s claims: I have read quite a lot of Frans de Waal and the likes, and my intellectual stance the last decade or so had been to not overestimate human uniqueness – not in language skills, not in cognition, etc. I considered differences between humans and other animals basically a matter of degree.

To a certain extent this obviously still holds, but one of the merits of Tomasello is that he uses large sets of experimental data that clearly show there are two things that are unique in humans: “shared intentionality” and “collective intentionality”. Basically, the fact that we humans do things together, know that we do things together and have elaborate insights in other humans’ mental states that influence our own mental states. So it’s not only cooperation itself that is important, but the fact that it is a form of recursive cooperation.

Language obviously is important for all of this, and so this is not only an ethics book, but one that should interest linguists too. The same goes for the cultural transmission of knowledge: instructed learning basically doesn’t exist in the rest of the animal kingdom, so yes, pedagogy too.

Rather than try to summarize Tomasello’s theory, in the remainder of this review I’ll do two things: first I’ll list an extensive amount of the information I found particularly interesting – take a look I’d say, it’s the juice of this review – and I end with a short bit on the book as a book: a few words on my reading experience, not the theory itself, so that interested readers better know what to expect.

Please read the full review on Weighing A Pig… (plus d'informations)