Why We Cooperate

摘要

Based on the 2008 Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Why We Cooperate is Michael Tomasello's answer to the perennial question: What makes humans special? A psychologist with interests that span from anthropology to philosophy, Tomasello is one of the most influential voices in the contemporary field of cooperation studies. Based on threefold research in primate cognition, developmental social cognition and language acquisition, over the last two decades he has devised a theory of sociality that falls, broadly, into the area of empirical social ontology. His approach draws on the conceptual resources of collective, or shared, intentionality theory - one of philosophers' most fruitful recent contributions to the study of cooperation - to interpret the results of a battery of ingenious experiments with infants and our nearest primate relatives, such as chimpanzees. Tomasello is thus the first scientist who tries to explicate human sociality using the resources of the shared intentionality paradigm.