Michael Tomasello > Quotes

“Altruism is not an improbable achievement against the individualizing forces of natural selection; rather, it is an integral part of the social lives of all beings that live with others interdependently—up to a (mathematical) point. Everyone helps and gets helped, up to a point, because everyone is important to someone in some way, up to a point.”
― Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality

“Thinking would seem to be a completely solitary activity. And so it is for the other animal species. But for humans, thinking is like a jazz musician improvising a novel riff in the privacy of his own room. It is a solitary activity all right, but on an instrument made by others for that general purpose, after years of playing with and learning from other practitioners, in a musical genre with a rich history of legendary riffs, for an imagined audience of jazz aficionados. Human thinking is individual improvisation enmeshed in a sociocultural matrix.”
― Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking

“Finding a satisfactory balance between cooperation and competition is the basic challenge of a complex social life.”
― Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality

“Since one's moral identity is socially constructed, one must always be prepared to justify -both to others and oneself- why one chose one course of action over another. Justification means showing that my actions actually emanated from values that we all share.”
― Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality

“Human culture is early human cooperation writ large.”
― Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking

“Modern humans' group.minded interdependence thus served to spread human sympathy and helping to all in the group, best characterized as a sense of loyalty to the group. As a consequence, there emerged in modern humans a distinctive in-group/out-group psychology.”
― Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality

“The medium through which this most often happens is cooperative, including linguistic, communication. Cooperative and linguistic communication are thus of crucial importance in children’s developing skills for jointly attending with others to external situations and to one another’s ideas—and for mentally coordinating within those shared realities. But cooperative and linguistic communication are interesting and important in their own right as well.”
― Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny

“For parents who think that their child must have skipped the naturally cooperative stage, let me quickly note that we are talking here about a behavior measured in relation to other primates. All viable organisms must have a selfish streak; they must be concerned about their own survival and well-being or they will not be leaving many offspring. Human cooperativeness and helpfulness are, as it were, laid on top of this self-interested foundation.”
― Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate

“is a typology of four types of learning and experience that play key roles—at different ages in diverse domains—in human cognitive and social ontogeny: (1) individual learning, (2) observational learning (imitation and so forth), (3) pedagogical or instructed learning, and (4) social co-construction (prototypically in peer collaboration).”
― Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny

“This process essentially constitutes the construction of a normative point of view as a self-regulating mechanism, arguably the capstone of the ontogeny of uniquely human cognition (normative rationality) and sociality (normative morality).”
― Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny

“Our specific proposal is that the ontogeny of human cognitive and social uniqueness is structured by the maturation of children’s capacities for shared intentionality.”
― Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny

“Infant great apes, like all mammals, form an early and strong attachment to their mothers. Great ape mothers are likewise attached, and they protect and care for their infants. But in the context of cooperative childcare, human infants developed other ways of soliciting attention and care from the many adults who cared for them: they socially bonded with them by aligning and sharing positive emotions. Humans have some important species-unique positive emotions and corresponding ways of expressing them—specifically, the positive social emotions expressed in social smiling and laughter, which tend to increase social bonds between individuals. Infants express these emotions as they interact with adults, even from a distance, whereas other great apes do not smile or laugh as they interact with others at all (that is, great apes do something similar to human smiling and laughing, but only when they are physically tickled in playful activities).”
― Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny

“Joint attention and common ground, both personal and cultural, constitute the necessary intersubjective infrastructure for many other uniquely human activities.”
― Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny

“And so we have the most basic structural framework of uniquely human cognition: socially shared realities and the ability to flexibly manipulate and coordinate different perspectives on aspects of those shared realities (mental coordination). This structural framework fundamentally transforms great ape cognition by turning straightforward cognitive representations into perspectival cognitive representations. Moreover,”
― Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny

“Genel olarak şunu söyleyebiliriz: Duygudaşlık saf işbirliği iken, hakkaniyet birden fazla katılımcının çeşitli güdülerinden ileri gelen çok sayıdaki ve çatışan taleplere dengeli çözümlerin arandığı bir tür rekabet işbirliğidir.”
― Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality

“In all, it is important to recognize the complexity and perhaps even unavoidable contradictions that reside within human morality. Its multiple sources and layers can never be applied consistently in all situations, given the messiness and unpredictability of human social life.”
― Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality

“İşbirliğinin evrimiyle ilgili neredeyse bütün formel kuramlar bireyi genlerini sonraki nesillere aktarma mücadelesi verirken türünün diğer bütün üyeleriyle sürekli rekabet hâlinde olan asosyal bir monad olarak kavramlaştırır. Fakat bu görüş bir bakıma geçerli de olsa, psikolojik mekanizmaları fazla dikkate almaması bir yana, bilişsel ve toplumsal açıdan karmaşık organizmalar söz konusu olduğunda ciddi şekilde eksiktir.”
― Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality

“Cultural norms do not create morality, only collectivize and objectify it, and institutions may go a step further and sacralize it.”
― Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality

“Finally, of special interest in the current context, children with autism have trouble with skills of joint attention and perspective-taking, so half of all these children acquire no serviceable language at all, and any language they do acquire is used in pragmatically odd ways. The fact that joint attention is a key problem is clear from a number of studies that have found that these two sets of skills are related to one another in autistic children in the same way they are in typically developing children (Loveland and Landry 1986; Mundy et al. 1990; Rollins and Snow 1998). Astoundingly, Siller and Sigman (2008) even found that”
― Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny

“Human beings today thus enter into each and every social interaction with me-motives, sympathetic you-motives, egalitarian motives, group minded we-motives, and a tendency to follow whatever cultural norms are in effect.”
― Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality

“Infant great apes, like all mammals, form an early and strong attachment to their mothers.”
― Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny

“İkinci şahıs sorumluluk ve ikinci şahıs suçluluk, insan türünün ilk toplumsal açıdan normatif tutumlarıydı ve muhtemelen güceniklik içeren ikinci şahıs itiraz sürecinin bir tür içselleştirilmesinden türedi. Ortak bağlılık vasıtasıyla oluşturduğu "biz"in temsilcisi olarak birey, başkalarına hak ettikleri gibi davranmadığı için kendine itiraz etti.”
― Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality

“We thus advocate a “transactional” causality: maturational capacities create the possibility of new kinds of experiences and learning, and then those learning experiences are the proximate causes of development.”
― Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny

“Modern humans' group-minded interdependence thus served to spread human sympathy and helping to all in the group, best characterized as a sense of loyalty to the group. As a consequence, there emerged in modern humans a distinctive in-group/out-group psychology.”
― Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality

“İnsanlar bireysel ontolojileri boyunca çeşitli beceriler, duygular, güdülenmeler, değerler ve tutumlar geliştirirler (kimi biyolojik olarak miras kalmıştır, kimi kültüreldir, kimi de bireysel olarak inşaa edilmiştir) ve bunlar ahlakî kararları üzerinde önemli etkilere sahiptir. Ama yine de bireylerin ne zaman nasıl hareket edeceğini ne biyolojileri ne de kültürleri belirler; aslında pek çok karmaşık durumda biyolojinin ya da kültürün önceden görmüş olabileceği optimal bir çözüm de bulunmaz. Hayır, insan birey için -biyolojik ve kültürel açıdan ister donanımlı ister donanımsız olsun- kendi ahlakî kararlarını vermekten başka seçenek yoktur; iyisiyle kötüsüyle.”
― Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality

“Word learning is thus not about putting labels on things but rather is about acquiring conventional means for coming to share attention with others in a variety of complex social contexts.”
― Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny

“Conversations may thus be seen as a kind of “joint attention to mental content” (O’Madagain and Tomasello, forthcoming).”
― Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny

“The second type of uniquely human executive regulation is what we may call social self-regulation. In this case, the individual appropriates the perspectives or values of others to use as a standard in the self-regulatory process.”
― Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny

“Disgust for things external to us thus provides the strongest possible contrast to the sacredness of things internal to our lifeways.”
― Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality

“We are concerned here with two basic types of uniquely human executive self-regulation. The first is executive self-regulation when the content is uniquely human forms of cognition or sociality, what we may call the individual self-regulation of unique content.”
― Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny