Tomasello — A Natural History of Human Thinking / Becoming Human
Michael Tomasello. A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard, 2014); Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (Harvard, 2019).
The Argument
Tomasello’s central claim: what makes humans cognitively unique is not raw intelligence, language, or tool use — it’s shared intentionality, the capacity to form “we-intentions.” Other great apes have sophisticated individual cognition. Only humans routinely form joint goals, joint attention, and joint commitments with mutual awareness that both parties understand the arrangement.
He traces a developmental sequence across both evolutionary and individual timescales:
- Individual intentionality — pursuing goals, making plans, using tools. Shared with other great apes.
- Joint intentionality — two individuals forming a shared goal (“we’re doing this together”), with mutual monitoring and role differentiation. Emerges in human children around 9–12 months (joint attention) and develops through early childhood.
- Collective intentionality — a group forming institutional norms, roles, and shared understandings that persist beyond any particular interaction (“this is how we do things”). Makes culture, institutions, and communities possible.
The transition from joint to collective intentionality is where things get interesting for the vault. Joint intentionality is dyadic — two people cooperating. Collective intentionality scales through cultural conventions: norms, roles, and institutions that carry shared understanding beyond face-to-face interaction. But these cultural structures are always at risk of reification — hardening from living shared practices into opaque external constraints. See Reification.
Key Concepts for the Vault
Shared intentionality as the cognitive foundation of community. The vault’s village problem is, in Tomasello’s terms, a shared intentionality problem: how do you develop genuine “we-intentions” among people who chose to move into the same development but may not share much else? See Shared Intentionality for the full treatment.
Common ground as prerequisite. You can’t form a “we” with someone whose model of the world you don’t understand. Common ground — shared knowledge, shared assumptions, mutual familiarity — has to be built before joint commitment is possible. This is why Incidental Contact matters: repeated low-stakes encounters build the familiarity that makes shared intentionality possible.
Mutual recognition vs. dominance. Tomasello distinguishes cooperative social organization (based on mutual recognition of partners) from dominance-based organization (based on hierarchy and coercion). Human shared intentionality requires mutual recognition — treating others as partners, not instruments. This aligns with the vault’s emphasis on Relational Accountability over enforcement hierarchy.
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (loosely). Children develop shared intentionality through the same sequence that Tomasello hypothesizes for human evolution: individual → joint → collective. This means the capacity for “we-thinking” is developmentally constructed, not innate in its mature form. Communities can support or hinder this development — relevant to how Wellspring thinks about families with children and intergenerational community design.
Connection to Relational Identity
Tomasello’s work provides the cognitive science underneath the ontological claims made by the cross-cultural philosophy notes. Mengzi and the Cultivation Problem argues persons are constituted by relationships. Ubuntu and Graduated Personhood argues personhood is achieved through community. Tomasello explains the mechanism: shared intentionality is how humans develop the cognitive capacities that make them distinctively human. The philosophical claim (identity is relational) and the cognitive claim (human cognition is structured by shared intentionality) are complementary descriptions of the same phenomenon. See Relational Identity.
Connection to Cooperation Before Humanity
Cooperation Before Humanity (Meijer) argues that cooperative community predates human language. Tomasello would partially agree — other animals cooperate — but insists that shared intentionality (with its mutual awareness, role differentiation, and joint commitment) is uniquely human. The two positions aren’t contradictory: animals cooperate through individual intentionality operating in social contexts; humans cooperate through genuine shared intentionality. Both are real. The question is whether the difference in mechanism matters for community design, or whether the continuity matters more.
Sources
- Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard University Press, 2014)
- Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (Harvard University Press, 2019)
- Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (MIT Press, 2009)