Quotes from Michael Tomasello

It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.

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.

Human culture is early human cooperation writ large.

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.

Disgust for things external to us thus provides the strongest possible contrast to the sacredness of things internal to our lifeways.

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.

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.

Cultural norms do not create morality, only collectivize and objectify it, and institutions may go a step further and sacralize it.

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.

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).

Infant great apes, like all mammals, form an early and strong attachment to their mothers.

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.

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.

Normal human ontogeny thus requires both the maturation of species-unique cognitive and social capacities and also individual experience in such things as collaborative and communicative interactions with others, structured by cultural artifacts such as linguistic conventions and social norms.

Finding a satisfactory balance between cooperation and competition is the basic challenge of a complex social life.

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.

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.

Joint attention and common ground, both personal and cultural, constitute the necessary intersubjective infrastructure for many other uniquely human activities.

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.

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.

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).

Conversations may thus be seen as a kind of "joint attention to mental content" (O'Madagain and Tomasello, forthcoming).

Genel olarak ?unu söyleyebiliriz: Duyguda?l?k saf i?birli?i iken, hakkaniyet birden fazla kat?l?mc?n?n çe?itli güdülerinden ileri gelen çok say?daki ve çat??an taleplere dengeli çözümlerin arand??? bir tür rekabet i?birli?idir.

Ortak seçimi demek, bir bireyi, muhtemelen en yetkin (örne?in bilgili ve hünerli) ve i?birli?ine en yatk?n (örne?in üzerine dü?en i?i yapmaya ve pay?na dü?en kadar?n? almaya e?ilimli) olan? i?birli?i orta?? olarak tercih etmek demektir. Zorunlu i?birli?ine dayal? avc?l?k-toplay?c?l?k ba?lam?nda hiç kimse taraf?ndan seçilmemek elbette ki?inin ölümüne yol açacakt?r.