Abstract
This article concerns the co-evolution of hominin cooperation, communication and cognition. Certain hominin ecologies seem to have relied on cognitive foresight. The capacity of planning for future needs, combined with more developed cooperative skills, opened up the cognitive niche of cooperation towards future goals. Such cooperation requires complex intersubjectivity (theory of mind). We analyze five domains of intersubjectivity: emotion, desire, attention, intention, and belief; and argue that cooperation towards future goals requires, among other things, joint intentions (we-intentions). We scrutinize the cognitive and communicative conditions for reciprocal altruism, found in some species; and indirect reciprocity, a form of cooperation typical in the hominin line.
Sharing intentions and beliefs about the future requires communication about what is not present in the current environment. Symbols are efficient tools for this kind of communication, and we argue that the benefits of cooperation for the future selected for the evolution of symbolic communication. In line with recent models describing how indirect reciprocity might develop into an evolutionarily stable strategy, we emphasize the need for yet more complex intersubjectivity and symbolic communication, including a minimal syntax.
Our argumentation triangulates hominin cognition, cooperation, and communication, showing how these interdependent factors mutually reinforce each other over the course of evolution. The new take in this article is the combined analyses of cooperation and cognitive mechanisms. Finally, our theses are linked to archaeological evidence.
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- 1.
Our strategy is thus similar to that of Whiten (1999). However, we put more emphasis on analyzing the sub-components in the three domains.
- 2.
- 3.
Nevertheless, it is fairly safe to conclude that some sort of cuing takes place in the present situation: a cue in the physical or “mental” environment; if not, it would be the result of chance, just popping up in the brain.
- 4.
Which species used these stone tools is not fully established. It might have been several hominin species: for example, A. gahri, H. habilis, and later perhaps H. ergaster.
- 5.
We have not found any other researcher who grades what is involved in intersubjectivity in this way. Tomasello (1999, p. 179) distinguishes between three levels of a child’s development: seeing others as agents, seeing others as intentional agents, and seeing others as mental agents. His second and third levels correspond roughly to our capacities 4 and 5. Baron-Cohen (1994) proposes that “mind reading” has four components: an intentionality detector (ID), an eye-direction detector (EDD), a shared-attention mechanism (SAM), and a theory-of-mind mechanism (ToMM). Wellman and Liu (2004) write about a “scaling of theory-of-mind tasks” when they address the “sequence of understandings” in children’s developing intersubjectivity. They do a meta-analysis of studies of children’s understandings of different forms of intentions, emotions, desires, and knowledge. There is a considerable overlap with the capacities presented here. Stern (1985) and Brinck (2008a) distinguish between interaffectivity, interattentionality, and interintentionality without emphasizing the distinct roles of desires and beliefs.
- 6.
It is characteristic of facial signals, such as the play-face expressions of chimpanzees and gorillas, that they carry emotional rather than referential meaning.
- 7.
Understanding the desires of others does not require representing their beliefs: thinking “A wants X” does not require thinking “A believes that X is most desirable.”. Thus, desires need not be “value beliefs” as Flavell et al. (1990) maintain. Similarly, ascribing a desire to somebody does not entail an ascription of explicit intention: thinking “A wants X” does not require thinking “A intends to choose X.” As long as the desired object is present or a physical representation of it exists in the shared context, the agents’ behaviorally manifest attentional states reveal their intentions to act (Brinck, 2001, 2004).
- 8.
This question relates to the studies concerning other-regarding preferences presented in Section 10.2.3.
- 9.
A possible exception is revealed in a study by Warneken and Tomasello (2006). They let three human-raised juvenile chimpanzees watch while a human attempted, but failed, to achieve a succession of goals. Sometimes the chimpanzees helped the humans, mainly in situations where the human reached for objects but failed to grasp them. By contrast, Warneken and Tomasello (2006) showed that 18-month-old human infants did help an adult experimenter in a large majority of the cases involving various scenarios. See also Warneken, Hare, Melis, Hanus, and Tomasello (2007).
- 10.
Van Schaik, and Kappeler (2006, p. 15) write: “the three basic conditions for reputation are individual recognition, variation in personality traits, and curiosity about the outcome of interactions involving third parties.” In our opinion, these criteria are too weak, since they do not include that reputation is communicated and therefore requires flexible, referential communicative skills.
- 11.
Partly following Donald (1991), Zlatev, Persson, and Gärdenfors (2005) argue that, in addition to protolanguage and language with syntax, one can distinguish communication systems based on dyadic and triadic mimesis. They argue that untrained apes can communicate at least via dyadic mimesis: e.g., by gestures (see also Pika et al., 2003). However, the natural gestural communication of apes does not constitute a protolanguage because it is not conventionalized (and thus not symbolic) and has only limited compositionality. On the other hand, the communications of Kanzi, Koko, and other language-trained apes satisfy the criteria for protolanguage. Jackendoff (1999) likewise distinguishes several stages in the evolution of syntactic structures.
- 12.
Partly conventionalized compositional icons may be sufficient for many situations, although fully developed symbols are more efficient.
- 13.
Arp (2006) argues, albeit from a different perspective, that scene visualization is unique to the Homo line.
- 14.
This kind of local optimality is one of the four conditions that Dessalles (2007, pp. 173-174) presents for protolanguage.
- 15.
In this context, it should be noted that Nowak and Sigmund’s (2005) model considers only two kinds of interaction: “good” and “bad.” It goes without saying that, in real groups, communication about reputation builds on finer nuances.
- 16.
We wish to thank Miriam Haidle, Steven Mithen, and April Nowell for helpful discussions on these matters.
- 17.
Thieme (1999) writes: “equipped with outstanding technical talents for processing wood, they were already in this early period qualified to plan a future large game hunt with special weapons, to organize it, to coordinate it and to successfully accomplish it” (our translation).
- 18.
In agreement with our argument, Kuhn and Stiner (2008, p. 48) conclude: “if … beads and other forms of body ornamentation represent a new way of communicating, then it follows humans must already have been using symbols to communicate when ornaments first appeared in Paleolithic sites.”
- 19.
We wish to thank Ernst Fehr for this suggestion.
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Acknowledgments
Most of the work for this article was done as part of the EU project Stages in the Evolution and Development of Sign Use (SEDSU). We want to thank the participants of the project for helpful comments and ideas. Peter Gärdenfors gratefully acknowledges support as a Senior Individual Researcher from the Swedish Research Council as well as support from the Linnaeus project Thinking in Time: Cognition, Communication and Learning during the final stages of the work. The research of Ingar Brinck was financed by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation through the Centre for Cognitive Semiotics at Lund University.
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Gärdenfors, P., Brinck, I., Osvath, M. (2012). The Tripod Effect: Co-evolution of Cooperation, Cognition and Communication. In: Schilhab, T., Stjernfelt, F., Deacon, T. (eds) The Symbolic Species Evolved. Biosemiotics, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2336-8_10
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