A Theory of Normative Thinking
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Sharing our normative worlds: A theory of normative thinking A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Australian National University by Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera in August 2017 © Copyright by Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera 2017 All Rights Reserved Statement of Originality This thesis is solely the work of its author. No part of it has previously been submitted for any degree or is currently being submitted for any other degree. To the best of my knowledge, any help received in preparing this thesis, and all sources used, have been duly acknowledged. Parts of this thesis draw on earlier published work. Chapter 3 is taken, with some changes, from Gonzalez-Cabrera (forthcoming): On social tolerance and the evolution of human normative guidance. Sections 4.4 and 4.5 of this chapter are based on worked published in Tomasello and Gonzalez-Cabrera (2017): The role of ontogeny in the evolution of human cooperation. These sections have been modified to meet university guidelines. Signed, Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera i To my partner and friend, Ana. ii Acknowledgments This thesis represents the end of a long journey. The conception of the project started when I was a graduate student at the University of Tokyo. I am especially grateful to Tomoko Ishida, Ryota Morimoto, Senji Tanaka, Sohei Yajima, and all the members of the interdisciplinary group on evolutionary ethics and human ecology for their support during those early days. Thanks also to Yosaku Nishiwaki and Yoshiyuki Hirono for his encouragement to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy. That project crystallized only years later as a graduate student at the Australian National University (ANU). My decision to move to Canberra to gain further training in philosophy of psychology and biology is one of the best that I have made. It was the stimulating environment of the School of Philosophy at ANU that allowed the core ideas of this thesis to grow and flourish. I owe special thanks to my supervisor, Kim Sterelny. My decision to start working on human cognitive evolution is largely attributable to the profound impact that his impressive and insightful body of work has had on many philosophers of my generation. He was always supportive and generous in spirit. I am honored and enriched for having been one of his students. I learned from Kim’s students almost as much I learned from him. I am grateful to Rachael Brown, Heather Browning, Carl Brusse, Brett Calcott, Adrian Currie, Ben Fraser, Jessica Isserow, David Kalkman, Stephan Kubicki, Christopher Lean, Kim Shaw-Williams, and John Zerilli for their friendship and intellectual rigor. I am also glad to have met through them much of the PhilBio community in the Sydney area including Pierrick Bourrat, Paul Griffiths, Adam Hochman, Linus Huang, Richard Menary, Dominic Murphy, and Elena Walsh. I am also grateful to Lindell Bromham, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Russell Gray, Peter Hiscock, Mateo Mameli, Claudia Passos, Kyle Stanford, and Michael Weisberg for their kindness and patience as well as for bringing clarity out of my often confused ideas. My debts to the members of the ANU’s School of Philosophy are many, but a few of them deserve special mention. Thanks to Alma Barner and Daniel Gregory for their constant companionship and insight. Thanks also to Rachael Briggs, Justin Bruner, Zoe Drayson, Edward Elliott, Anya Farennikova, Liz Irvine, Colin Klein, Leon Leontyev, Hanti Lin, Gabriel Rabin, Paolo Santorio, Wolfgang Schwarz, and Julia Staffel. Many thanks to all the faculty members of the school but, in particular, to David Chalmers, Alan Hájek, Victoria McGeer, Daniel Nolan, Philip Pettit, Nicholas i Southwood, and Daniel Stoljar, which gave me crucial advice at some point or another during my time at ANU. I am also grateful to Cristina Bicchieri, Gilbert Harman, and Stephen Stich for allowing me to take part in the Penn-Princeton-Rutgers Graduate Seminar in Moral Psychology. I had the opportunity to discuss earlier versions of this work with them and their students who provided me with valuable feedback. Much of the material I worked out during those days did not make the cut to the final version of the thesis, but I was decisively encouraged by those discussions to do empirical research in moral psychology. Much of my recent work would not be as empirically oriented as it is now if it were not for them. I also owe a great debt to the Department of Comparative and Developmental Psychology at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, which for a long period of my Ph.D. was my second home. The influence of experimental psychology on my philosophical work is obvious, and my sincerest thanks go to Michael Tomasello, Josep Call, and Malinda Carpenter for taking me in and for providing me with unprecedented opportunities. During this period, I had the opportunity to work and discuss with biologist, psychologists, and philosophers alike. All of us were interested in mutually interconnected topics ranging from the ontogeny of human social cognition to language acquisition to primate cognition. I am especially in debt with Avi Benozio, Manuel Bohn, Shona Duguid, Jan Engelmann, Sebastian Grüneisen, Susanne Hardecker, Robert Hepach, África de las Heras Martínez, Bailey House, Margherita Isella, Patricia Kanngiesser, Cathal O’Madagain, Federico Rossano, Alex Sanchez, Martin Schmelz, Barbora Siposova, Gregor Stöber, and Margarita Svetlova. Although most of the experimental work I carried out during my time in Leipzig was not included in the thesis, I have to give special thanks to Jana Jurkat, Roger Mundry, Dairon Rodriguez, Marco Schmidt, and Christoph Völter for their collaboration, guidance, and support. I finish the writing of this dissertation in a heady six-month period in Vienna as a Writing-Up Fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research. I would not have been able to finish my Ph.D. without the unconditional support of Gerd Müller, Johannes Jäger, Isabella Sarto-Jackson, and Eva Lackner. Thanks also to all the fellows at the institute, Lee Altenberg, Wesley Herb Anderson, Argyris Arnellos, Lorenzo Baravalle, Riana Betzler, Daniel Brooks, James DiFrisco, Chiara Elettra Ferrario, Barbara Fischer, André Strauss, Wim Hordijk, George McGhee, Celeste Marina Pérez Ben, André Strauss, Zsóka Anna Vásárhelyi, and Berta Verd with whom I had the privilege to share the final version of this thesis. ii This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship. This project was also partially supported by a PhD Research Contract from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a KLI Writting-Up Fellowship from the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research. iii Abstract This thesis focuses on the evolution of human social norm psychology. More precisely, I want to show how the emergence of our distinctive capacity to follow social norms and make social normative judgments is connected to the lineage explanation of our capacity to form shared intentions, and how such capacity is related to a diverse cluster of prototypical moral judgments. I argue that in explaining the evolution of this form of normative cognition we also require an understanding of the developmental trajectory of this capacity. For this purpose, the thesis is organized as follow. In the first chapter, I make some methodological remarks and provide the general overview and plan for the dissertation. In the second chapter, I explain what my explanatory target is and why it matters. On the view I am defending, shared intentional psychology gives rise to a special form of psychology that enables us to engage in social normative thinking. These norms are represented as shared intentional states. Moral psychology, in contrast, is more diverse. For moral judgments define a quite heterogeneous class of mental states—although some moral judgments may involve the representation and execution of norms, certainly not all of them do. I show that although much of our distinctive social norm psychology can be explained within the framework of shared intentionality, moral judgments cannot be unified in the same way. In the third chapter, I provide the baseline of social-cognitive capacities that serve as starting point for my lineage explanation. I argue that hominin social cognition was for a very long period of our evolutionary history essentially a matter of low-level cognitive and motivational processes. On this picture, bottom-up affective processes regulated the social lives of early hominins without requiring any special top-down mechanism of normative thinking such as a capacity for understanding and representing social norms. In the fourth chapter, I argue that human-like social norm psychology evolved as a result of the selective pressures that gave rise to shared intentionality, especially the demands that came from collective hunting. Yet collective hunting was not the whole story of the evolution of shared intentionality, for our capacity to form shared intentional mental states emerged from the interplay between the selective pressures that led to cooperative breeding in humans as well as organized, goal-oriented, collective hunting. Thus, I propose an evo-devo account of shared intentionality and its normative dimension since I argue that explaining the evolution of this particular form of normative thinking crucially depends on information about the developmental trajectory of this capacity. Finally, in the fifth chapter, I focus on how social norms are acquired and how the way iv we learn