Abstract
Abstract Joint action among human beings is characterized by using elaborate cognitive feats, such as representing the mental states of others about a certain state of affairs. It is still debated how these capacities evolved in the hominid lineage. I suggest that the consolidation of a shared practice over time can foster the predictability of other’s behavior. This might facilitate the evolutionary passage from inferring what others might know by simply seeing them and what they are viewing towards a mutual awareness of each other’s beliefs. I will examine the case for cooperative hunting in one chimpanzee community and argue that it is evidence that they have the potential to achieve common ground, suggesting that the consolidation of a practice might have supported the evolution of higher social cognition in the hominid lineage.
Highlights
Cooperation and joint action are pervasive in everyday life
I will examine the case for cooperative hunting in one chimpanzee community and argue that it is evidence that they have the potential to achieve common ground, suggesting that the consolidation of a practice might have supported the evolution of higher social cognition in the hominid lineage
Joint action is generally considered to be made possible by advanced cognitive abilities that only humans have: Searle (1995), Bratman (1992, 2009) and Tomasello (Fahy et al 2012; Tomasello 2014) share the belief that cooperation is enabled by collective intentionality, understood as the intention to perform an action φ knowing that other agents are taking part in φ
Summary
Cooperation and joint action are pervasive in everyday life. Human beings engage in daily cooperation, from modest cases such as walking together to much more complex practices: human communication, exceptional in the animal kingdom for the use of language, is a form of coordinated action. Human beings are capable of performing complex cooperative activities thanks to having collective intentionality This means that while carrying out a cooperative action, must the individuals be aware of the shared collective goal and of the state of affairs wherein the action takes place, but they need to mentally represent the intentions of others. There is somewhat of an explanatory gap between our hominid ancestors’ (presumably) unsophisticated cognitive abilities and the complex capacity to represent others’ intentions of human beings This problem stands in the way of explaining the evolution of cooperation in general (Koren 2016) and especially the evolution of communication (Geurts 2019a, 2019b), which is extremely important for human beings and incomparable to other animals’ when it comes to sophistication. I will propose that the consolidation of a practice can favor the development of more complex cognitive abilities and can fill the explanatory gap in theories of the evolution of cooperation (and, among examples of cooperation, communication) that rely on the development of complex social cognition
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