A Few Reasons Why We Don't Share Tomasello Et Al.'s Intuitions about Sharing

Tomasello et al.'s two prerequisites, we argue, are not sufficient to explain the emergence of Joint Collaboration. An adequate account must include the human-specific capacity to communicate relevant information (that may have initially evolved to ensure efficient cultural learning). This, together with understanding intentional actions, does provide sufficient preconditions for Joint Collaboration without the need to postulate a primary human motive to share others' psychological states Tomasello et al. propose two basic prerequisites for Joint Collaborative Activities: (1) understanding intentional actions of others and (2) a primary motivation to share psychological states of others. They argue that, whereas apes have the basics of prerequisite 1, they can't collaborate, because they lack prerequisite 2, the species-unique adaptation allowing humans to share goals and create Joint Collaborative Activities. In our view, however, without a third prerequisite, the ability to communicate relevant information (Csibra & Gergely, in press; Sperber & Wilson 1986), Joint Collaborative Activities could neither be formed nor realized, even if both of Tomasello et al.'s preconditions were available. That the ability to communicate relevant information is necessary for Joint Collaborative Activities is clearly realized by the authors as apparent from their discussion of the "coordination problem" that permeates Joint Collaborative Activities. Participants must negotiate and coordinate at all levels of Joint Collaborative Activities by means of communicating relevant information: when agreeing on a goal to share, planning the sequence of intended means, allocating complementary roles, or scheduling complementary action plans. Neither could Joint Collaborative Activities be performed without communicating relevant information. Participants must monitor online their own and the other's actions, exchanging relevant information while comparing them to the planned sequence represented in their Joint Collaborative Activity. They also need to monitor the environment for unforeseen blocking conditions and be ready to communicate such relevant information to each other, and renegotiate how to modify the Joint Collaborative Activity online, changing complementary roles or action sequencing, if necessary. One wonders why, having granted that the ability to communicate relevant information is necessary for Joint Collaborative Activities, the authors haven't included it as a third prerequisite in their magic formula producing cooperative intentionality in evolution and ontogeny. It's as if they considered the ability to communicate relevant information as derivable from the (more basic) capacity and motivation to share the psychological states of others. It's unclear to us, however, why (and in what sense) a motivation to share