Response to: Rethinking Human Development and the Shared Intentionality Hypothesis
- PDF / 183,066 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 50 Downloads / 152 Views
Response to: Rethinking Human Development and the Shared Intentionality Hypothesis Michael Tomasello 1,2 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract I respond to Moll, Nichols, and Mackey’s review of my book Becoming Human. I agree with many of their points, but have my own point of view on some others. It is extremely rare for me to read a review of one of my books that really gets it. I would therefore like to thank Moll, Nichols, and Mackey (MNM) for taking the time and putting in the effort to really understand Becoming Human; their review advances the argument in highly productive ways. I have two very small nits to pick, which I will do at the end, but, in general, the summarizing parts of the review are insightful and in all ways excellent, even highlighting for me some changes of theory I hadn’t even realized I had made. MNM proffer three important critiques. The first is the way that I applied the term second personal to children’s development. I based my account mainly on the work of Stephen Darwall (e.g., 2006) and, as a moral philosopher, he has a very demanding definition: second-personal agents are persons who hold one another accountable and so respect and are responsible to one another. I argue that children only become fully second-personal agents in this sense at 3 years of age, when they begin treating one another with a sense of respect and fairness and calling one another out for transgressions. But MNM rightly point out that in a more expansive concept of second personal agency, toddlers prior to 3 years of age qualify: they interact with others in joint attention, they address one another communicatively (second personally), and, in general, interact with others as intentional agents with whom one may share intentional states. My nod in this direction was to say, as MNM quote, that while 2-year-olds are not yet fully second-personal agents, “they are working on it”: they have some parts of the second-personal stance, as it is sometimes called, but perhaps not all parts. One fact that MNM do not highlight is relevant here. One- and two-year-old toddlers are engaging in all of these second-personal ways almost exclusively with adults, not * Michael Tomasello [email protected]
1
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC 27701, USA
2
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
Tomasello M.
with peers (a point that I emphasize in various parts of the book). If toddlers interacted with one another in all of these unique and interesting ways, this would signal a deeper (more adult-like) appreciation for this mode of interaction, since it would involve them applying it not to an all-powerful and all-knowing adult, but to a coequal peer. So let us compromise. I have no problem replacing my account that “they are working on it” with something a bit richer and more specific, for example, an account which says that 1- and 2-year-old toddlers are engaging with adults as second-personal agents when they participate with them in joint attention and co
Data Loading...
