Becoming Human Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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.”
― Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny