Tomasello, What is it like to be a chimpanzee?

Not the kind of normative rationality with which humans operate..

May 28, 2024

MH: Attentive readers may rightly conclude I have now returned to Type 1. This is good news — it means Types 1 to 9 have been found to cohere sufficiently well to sustain the initial hypothesis of my great ‘society’ project. Loose ends must be tidied up and lingering conflicts reconciled. Chronological flow of exhibits will henceforth be disjointed while my post-chimp-but-still-mammalian brain goes about imposing instrumental order on the chaos of history. A benefit to readers may be that week-to-week thematic and historical evolutionary variation will add cerebral spice to life.

The punchline of the article exhibit below:

Mammals think and make decisions via an instrumental rationality; great apes think and make decisions via a reflective rationality; humans think and make decisions via a normative rationality. …

The Source:

Michael Tomasello, ‘What is it like to be a chimpanzee?’, Synthese (April 2022) 200:102 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03574-5

[MH: It is a long article. To fit the email I omit the initial philosophical excursus pertaining Thomas Nagel’s 1974 question ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’. I also omit almost all examples of chimpanzee behaviour. To compare Tomasello’s position with works in the SSF ARCHIVE by R. Dunbar, J.H. Turner, de Waal, J. Goodall, et al. — I recommend Tomasello’s 2019 book Becoming Human : A Theory of Ontogeny.]

Abstract:

Chimpanzees and humans are close evolutionary relatives who behave in many of the same ways based on a similar type of agentive organization. To what degree do they experience the world in similar ways as well? Using contemporary research in evolutionarily biology and animal cognition, I explicitly compare the kinds of experience the two species of capable of having. I conclude that chimpanzees’ experience of the world, their experiential niche as I call it, is: (i) intentional in basically the same way as humans’; (ii) rational in the sense that it is self-critical and operates with logically structured causal and intentional inferences; but (iii) not normative at all in that it does not operate with “objective” evaluative standards. Scientific data do not answer philosophical questions, but they provide rich raw material for scientists and philosophers alike to reflect on and clarify fundamental psychological concepts.

The Article:

… [My] claim will be that chimpanzees’ experience of the world is intentional in basically the same way as humans’, rational in some ways but not others, but not (socially) normative at all. …

1 Agency and experience

I begin with two assumptions, one theoretical and one methodological. First, my theoretical assumption is that organisms are built by natural selection to experience just what they need to experience in order to act effectively in the environment. Nature selects for effective action production, and the underlying psychology involved – including how the organism experiences the world as a way of directing its actions – evolves in, and only in, this action-structured context. …

If each species lives in its own ecological niche as determined by what it needs to do to survive and thrive, and if experience is structured by action, then we may also say that each animal species lives in its own experiential niche: those parts and aspects of the environment that it is perceptually and cognitively equipped to experience so that it can do what it needs to do to survive and thrive. Thus, one species of bird perceives and attends to the likely habitats of worms in tree bark while another does not, and of course the worms themselves live in a completely different experiential niche. …

… Beyond straightforward action and perception, an organism’s ability to understand more general things about its environment cognitively and to make inferences about those things in acts of thinking, broadly construed, are also attuned to what it needs to do behaviorally. How this is done differs across species. … My hypothesis is … that, beyond simple perceptual and action capabilities, the type of agentive organization characteristic of a species determines the types of experience it is capable of having.

… Complex organisms are not passive reactors to stimuli, but rather they actively pursue goals (or other pro-attitudes) and use perceptual feedback of the results of their actions to make ongoing adjustments as necessary. …

Second, my methodological assumption reflects an about-face that has occurred in the study of animal behavior and cognition in past several decades. In [the 1970s] the implicit assumption was that nonhuman animals are very different from humans psychologically, and the burden of proof was on those who wished to show similarity.

But now, based on evolutionary theory and research, the implicit assumption has shifted poles, at least for most researchers, and the common assumption is that species who share a relatively recent evolutionary ancestor should be similar in many ways, including in their psychological capacities. Although this may not apply to species who do similar things as humans but who do not share a recent evolutionary ancestor – for example, octopi — close evolutionary relatives should, all things being equal, also share general forms of experience, justifying meaningful comparisons.

In the case of humans and chimpanzees, in particular, we now know that six million years ago there was only one species: the last common ancestor to chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans. Since this is not such a long time ago evolutionarily, and since genetic transmission is a conservative process (in the absence of natural selection or transcription error), many psychological processes are essentially the same in the three species—underlain by the same conserved genes—suggesting that their experience of the world is in many ways the same as well (this is dubbed by de Waal [as] the continuity assumption). Thus, since humans and chimpanzees have basically the same eyes and ears and react behaviorally in similar ways to many sights and sounds, it is likely that we humans can accurately comprehend and even imagine how a chimpanzee sees a rock or hears a bird’s chirping. Needless to say, of course, continuity does not mean identity; the continuity assumption is a default assumption only, ready to be overturned with empirical evidence.

My working hypothesis, then, is that the behavioral organization characteristic of a species – in particular, the type of agentive processes with which it generates its actions – determines the structure of its experiential niche. This enables us to use behavioral experiments, in which an organism must perceive or understand the world in a certain way in order to act effectively in it, to make inferences about its experience. Of course, in principle the organism could be acting based on experience of the world very different from that of its human investigators and we would never know for sure … But that is where the continuity assumption fills in the gap: when a species is closely related to its human investigators, and then in an experiment individuals of that species behave in the same basic way as humans, we assume that the two species are experiencing the situation in similar ways. From this starting point, in what follows I attempt to characterize the general nature of chimpanzee experience by contrasting it first with that of mammals in general and then with that of humans.

2 Intentional agency and experience

… [The] empirical evidence suggests that mammals are intentional agents who operate with something like instrumental rationality aimed at goal success. They do this by simulating and choosing among action plans on an executive tier of functioning that outputs not an action but an intention to act, which might possibly be inhibited or altered before execution. For scholars who have not switched to the default assumption of species continuity, this may seem too rich an interpretation of the behavior of rats and squirrels and other mammals. One difficulty for these scholars, especially prevalent in some strains of philosophy, is the belief that thinking requires language. While it is of course true that humans can engage in some forms of thinking not available to other creatures – precisely because of their use of language and its propositional format – it is also plausible to propose that the most basic form of thinking is not language-based but rather perception-based. Thinking in its most basic form is simply off-line perception, or imagining, with the representational format being iconic, including categorical generalizations of iconic representations.

The psychological organization of intentional agents generates complex forms of experience. Intentional organization leads individuals to experience not just stimuli or objects, but rather situations in the world that are relevant for their goals. And their executive tier of supervision and control leads them to experience not only situations in the world, but also their own operational tier of goal-directed action; that is, from an executive tier of planning and decision-making they attend to their own goals, actions, and environmental results (enabling instrumental learning). What we call conscious experience – attending to one’s own psychological functioning—is thus created by an executive tier of oversight and control. This view of conscious experience is broadly consistent with neuroscientifically based, two-level theories of consciousness … in which consciousness is conceptualized as the organism’s cognitive model of its attention to the world, what he calls “the attention schema”. Presumably, from a pragmatic point of view, the function of an executive tier of operation is to facilitate behavioral decision-making, as the individual attends from this executive tier to whatever is relevant to its effective behavioral functioning, including not only relevant environmental situations but also its own goals, actions, and caused results.

We may thus hypothesize that, beyond simple sentience of the external world, all mammals … very likely have conscious experience via executive attention to the constituents of their own goal-directed actions.

If we now wanted to imagine what it is like to be one or another kind of mammal, we could do this in a very general way because we humans too pursue valued goal situations and attend to relevant facts, and also attend to our own goal pursuit from an executive level with which we plan and make either-or decisions before acting. That is to say, humans operate in similar ways to all other mammals and so have similar experiences in some contexts. These would be very basic contexts of goal-directed action, perhaps especially those not involving the manipulation of objects (since mammals do not engage in much of this). Good examples might be attention-absorbing things like climbing a tree or swimming across a lake or running to escape a predator that do not involve … language … or self-consciousness. In such cases, the human individual is engaged in planning and making decisions and performing sensorimotor actions based on attention to relevant opportunities and obstacles in their immediate environment, as well as to their own behavioral functioning. We of course cannot know what it is like to be like a …mammal in particular to the extent that the content of their experience is different from human experience based on different perceptual or cognitive processes. But to the extent that the perception and attention of all mammals is similar – and we are defaulting to that assumption – then we can, at least to some degree, imagine the basic form of their experience.

3 Rational agency and experience

Mammals thus function as intentional agents who selectively attend both to relevant situations in the environment and to the constituents of their own goal-directed actions so that they can make the best behavioral decisions. We may thus say that mammals are instrumentally rational not only in the minimal sense that they intelligently pursue their goals … but also in the further experiential sense that they know what they are doing.

A number of philosophers have addressed the issue of animal rationality … None of them believes that any nonhuman animal is rational in the human sense – requiring adherence to socially constituted rational norms and the ability to provide explicit reasons for one’s actions – but many scholars attribute to one or another species at least some capacity for rationality involving either actions or decision-making.

The proposal I defend here is that chimpanzees and other great apes … are reflectively rational in their agentive decision-making – in a way that other mammals are not—and this leads to some novel ways of experiencing the world.

Specifically, as chimpanzee agents are deciding what to do: (i) they attend to underlying causal and intentional relations in the world, organized into logical paradigms of implication, which brings rational coherence to how things work; and (ii) they rationally reflect on their own process of decision-making (via a second-order tier of executive monitoring and control, a.k.a., metacognition) that enables them to diagnose problems in their first-order executive decision-making and to intervene in them. These two features are connected in the sense that reflecting on one’s own process of decision-making makes available the concepts necessary for attributing causal and intentional relations to entities and events the external world.

3.1 Understanding the logic of causes and intentions

Organisms that understand causality do not just understand what is happening, but also, to some extent, why it is happening, which creates the agentive possibility of manipulating the cause in order to produce the effect. Thus, in experiments involving a completely novel problem, chimpanzees are able to choose a tool that is causally appropriate, and, moreover, to take control of the causal process and make new tools that will work in the new context.

But beyond exploiting tool properties as enabling causes, chimpanzees can also understand causal forces that operate totally independent of their own actions. …

…. Great apes’ causal understanding generates creative inferences organized into logical paradigms. For instance, in the experiments on tool choice, apes infer such things as “if a tool with property A is used, then B must happen”. Then, actually using the tool completes the inference: (i) if A is used, then B happens; (ii) A is used; (iii) therefore B should happen. In other experiments, apes can make backward-facing inferences from effect to cause, in this case using exclusion based on a simple kind of negation (what logicians call contraries). …

… Causality operates differently in the animate world. To understand an agent’s actions, one must understand that its behavior is generated by the goals toward which it is aiming and the perception/knowledge it has about how to achieve those goals in the situation. Knowledge of an agent’s goals and perceptions in a situation then enables prediction of its behavior. Thus, for example, when a subordinate chimpanzee is competing for food with a dominant, it can take into account whether or not that dominant sees a potentially contested piece of food (because of judiciously placed barriers). And it even can tell if the dominant has seen the food in that location in the immediate past and so knows it is there (even though at the moment it cannot see it).

… Chimpanzees thus understand how competitors work as agents – that is, in terms of their goals and perceptions—and can use this understanding in novel contexts to predict their behavior. In addition, at least some chimpanzees seem to understand even more about an agent’s decision-making process. In particular, human-raised chimpanzees do not imitate a human performing a strange action, such as turning on a light with his foot, when he has no other choice since his hands are otherwise occupied: he is not freely choosing to use his foot and so I should not imitate him since I have a free choice and so can use my hand, as normal. But chimpanzees do imitate a human when he has freely chosen that same strange action in the absence of constraints (since he and they are similarly unconstrained). This process has been called “rational imitation” because the social learner is comparing its own process of situation-sensitive decision-making to that of another agent. …

… Chimpanzees thus seem to understand the underlying causal and intentional structure of their physical and social worlds – why things happen as they do—in ways that other mammals do not. And they see these causal and intentional relations as logically interrelated; their physical and social worlds make rational sense.

3.2 Reflective planning and decision-making

Like all mammals, great apes plan their actions. But, in addition, they can plan for a future goal that they do not at the moment actually have. Thus, when they are sent out of a room in which they have previously chosen and used a tool successfully, they will take with them the tool that they can anticipate they will need in the future, assuming that the problem situation recurs. Planning for a future imagined goal in this way would seem to require some new executive, that is reflective, cognitive skills. Such skills would also seem to be required when chimpanzees are able to perceive and resolve a goal conflict by comparing how the means to achieve different simultaneously present goals are incompatible but could be made compatible.

Chimpanzees’ ability to reflect on their executive functioning is on full display in experiments on their decision-making. …

… [They] diagnosed that they were missing a specific piece of information and then determined how to acquire it. This would seem to require reflecting not just on one’s behavioral functioning but on one’s process of decision-making. Attempting to causally diagnose problematic decisions before they are behaviorally executed fulfills a standard criterion for rationality: self-critical reflection on one’s own decision-making. Such behavior also indicates that they are employing a kind of “computational rationality” [ref.] in the sense that they must decide if the potentially available information is worth the effort needed to gather it.

In a variation on this theme, chimpanzees seem to reflect on their decision after they have made it to see if they have made a mistake. … Many apes … actively sought more information to resolve the discrepancy between their original belief and the new information, by looking … from another angle to double-check their initial judgment (so as to make the best decision). The apes in these cases were self-monitoring and controlling their executive decision-making after they had made an initial decision; they were reflecting on the decision in the light of newly obtained information and discerning the need to possibly revise that decision. …

… This suggests that not only do they have an executive tier of functioning in the manner of all mammals, but, on top of this they operate with a second-order reflective tier of executive supervision and control, relying on what have been called metacognitive skills. … chimpanzees monitor and control not only their goal-directed actions, but also the cognitive processes involved in their own executive functioning. Mammals attend to what they are doing, but chimpanzees, in addition, attend to what they are thinking …

3.3 Second-order executive (reflective) functioning

Importantly, the reflective tier of agentive organization was crucially important in the evolution of chimpanzees’ unique cognitive skills for understanding logically interconnected causal and intentional relations in the external world. Specifically, chimpanzees’ understanding of causality and intentionality resulted from an attribution to external events of some of their own decision-making processes that they were now able to consciously access from their new second-order reflective tier of functioning, which also provided the common workspace and representational format necessary for comparing and aligning internal (1st person) and external (3rd person) events in the attribution process. The way this worked was similar but slightly different for intentionality and causality.

Beginning with the “easier” case, chimpanzees understand others as intentional agents acting and making decisions toward goals as guided by perceptions. The proposal is that this understanding originates evolutionarily with self-experience, a variant of so-called simulation theory. The point is a conceptual one. If a Martian came down to earth and informed us that without any obvious organs it could still “see” things, how could we understand this except through our own experience of seeing. …

… Several studies demonstrate chimpanzees’ ability to understand the experience of others in terms of their own experience. …

… Evidence for this [omitted] proposal comes from the fact that chimpanzees structure their causal understanding into paradigms of logical inferences, as described above. If they know that event X causes event Y, then they know that if X happened then Y did also, and also that if Y did not happen then X did not either.

Such logically structured inferential paradigms constitute evidence for a self-based hypothesis for the origins of causal attribution because they almost certainly derive from the causal logic of the agent’s own actions. Thus, the kind of causal understanding of one’s own action that rats possess yields such inferences as: if I act, there will be a result; if I do not act, there will not be a result; if there is no result, then I did not act causally effectively; if only one of two ways can cause a result, and the first one is not causally effective, then the other one will be causally effective; and so on. These kinds of inferences are made on the first-order executive tier aimed at one’s own actions and their effects.

Then, from the second-order reflective tier, chimpanzees (as tool-using manipulators of the external environment) attribute these internal causal inferences about self-action to external events that seem self-generated (e.g., objects that spontaneously fall or are blocked). …

Beyond the intentional agency and instrumental rationality of mammals in general, then, chimpanzees are rational agents who can reflect on their thinking and decision-making metacognitively, using a second-order executive tier of functioning, which also empowers them to experience logically organized causal and intentional relations in the external world.

And so, if we humans wish to imagine ourselves as chimpanzees, we might engage in an act of tool use or tool making, for example, employing our causal understanding in preparing and using a stick to pry off the bark off a tree. Or perhaps we might engage in an act of predicting what another person will do when we are competing with them in a concrete situation or just observing them from afar as they go about concrete goal-directed activities.

Invoking the continuity assumption, I see no reason to think that our experience would be substantively different from theirs in these situations, assuming, that is, that we can ignore those aspects of our human experience that are not available to chimpanzees. And so let me now be more explicit in specifying exactly what must be ignored.

4 Shared agency and objective and normative experience

Behaviorally, the most important differences between chimpanzees and humans lie in their very different social lives.

From hunter-gatherers to contemporary urban dwellers, humans live in much more cooperative social groups than do other apes. Moreover, to function in these especially cooperative social groups, humans have evolved capacities for forming with one another shared agencies to accomplish things that no individual could accomplish on its own, either a joint agency with another individual or a collective agency with the … group at large …

By the heyday of early modern humans some 100,000 years ago, human social groups constituted full-fledged cultures, comprising species-unique cooperative structures such as conventions (including linguistic conventions), norms, and institutions. Coming to maturity in this kind of cooperatively structured environment leads humans to experience the world both objectively and normatively in ways that other apes do not.

To imagine the chimpanzee experiential niche from our human experiential niche, then, we must specify what is involved in viewing the world objectively and normatively as humans but not chimpanzees do. Of course we can never efface this dimension of human experience from all aspects of our lives, but, I will argue, there are activities in which we engage for which it is not operative.

4.1 Objectivity

Chimpanzees do not understand their world in terms of the contrast between subjective points of view and objective reality; they simply experience the world as it appears to them and act accordingly. So how is it that humans have come to view the world in terms of a contrast between subjective and objective perspectives?

The first step, that is, both evolutionarily and ontogenetically, is that individuals collaborate with one another in a new way: they form with one another a joint agency that acts toward a joint goal employing processes of joint attention. In doing so, they do not lose their individuality, but rather it is incorporated into a novel dual-level social structure. On the shared level is the joint goal and the joint attention that the collaborative partners share on situations that are relevant to their pursuit of that joint goal (e.g., an antelope jointly spied in the meadow would be an opportunity for hunting). On the individual level are the individual behavioral roles and perspectives of the partners (e.g., I view the antelope on my side of a river, whereas you view it as across the river). The jointness or sharedness is necessary for the notion of role or perspective – we see “the same thing” just from different perspectives—because without the sharedness we just see different things. Creatures that do not form joint agencies with joint goals and joint attention (capacities for joint intentionality) do not operate with the notion of different perspectives on the same shared thing (they are incapable of triangulation).

The notion of perspective is so important for humans that they have built systems of communication around it. Initially, at this first step, there are the species-unique gestures of pointing and pantomiming. To communicate effectively using such natural gestures individuals have to take one another’s perspective as they seek to align their perspectives in joint attention: I see that you are not attending to something and I wish you to join me in attending to it, or, conversely, I try to discover what you are apparently inviting me to attend to jointly with you (because you are addressing your gesture to me with respect to it). Chimpanzees do not communicate triangularly in this way. They simply act toward another to get him to do what they want him to do directly; there is no joint attention and no individual perspectives involved. Human communication of this type thus relies on (and facilitates) cognitive skills of mental coordination: individuals must simulate one another’s perspectives as they attempt to align perspectives in joint attention to relevant situations. Importantly, this uniquely human form of communication involves recursive mental coordination—she intends for me to know that there is a mango in this tree – a skill of which chimpanzees are not capable.

The second step, both evolutionarily and ontogenetically, involves adaptations not just to collaborative partners but to the cultural group (i.e., capacities for collective intentionality). Here the sharedness involves the cultural common ground shared among all members of the group as manifest in its conventions, norms, and institutions. Communicatively, this means conventional forms of communication, a.k.a., linguistic communication, which enable individuals to communicate effectively with anyone in the cultural group, even if they have never before met one another. And communicating in a conventional language enables us to jointly attend to mental contents that either of us express in the conventional language. For example, if I suggest a joint plan to forage for honey, you may critique the plan, and I may critique your critique; we are jointly attending to, and communicating about, my plan for us. When the topic of our disagreements is my assertion about the world – I assert that the cat is on the mat and you disagree—“space is created” [ref.] for an understanding that we both cannot be right with regard to the objective situation: one must be objectively right and the other objectively wrong.

In human development, children at around 4 to 5 years of age generalize the notion of perspective into the concept of belief, which contrasts with an objective perspective on things. Before this age human infants, like chimpanzees, can track the epistemic states of others, but they do not conceptualize these as perspectives on the same thing that may differ from one another.

But at this age children in various experimental paradigms begin to distinguish beliefs from the objective situation, appearance from reality, and different linguistic aspects, all key constituents of the human experiential niche. Moreover, once children understand – and know that others understand – that individual perspectives or beliefs contrast with the objective situation, there arises the need to justify one’s expressed belief with reasons. And so young children begin at around this same age to engage in reason-giving discourse in which they negotiate between their own belief and the belief of a discourse partner so as to arrive at an objective perspective on the situation. For acts of reason-giving to be dispositive in this discourse, the reason must make contact with something in the partners’ common ground beliefs about the world: the cat must be on the mat because she was on it a few minutes ago and we can still hear her sleeping there. Reasons thus anchor assertions in common ground beliefs about the world that partners share, and this gives the reasons their normative force: we both should accept the reason on pain of some kind of contradiction.

And so human capacities for collaboration and cultural participation, a.k.a., shared intentionality, create for humans a new experiential niche in which subjective beliefs are distinguished from objective situations, and arguments about which beliefs are objectively the case are buttressed by the expression of reasons as anchored in our common ground beliefs about the world. That is to say, human objective and normative rationality operates within a shared space of reasons employing “common standards of correctness and relevance, which relate what I do think to what anyone ought to think” [ref.]. Chimpanzees do not operate in this way because they did not evolve to make their living by collaborating and communicating with others in their cultural group, and so they have no conception of individual perspectives as contrasted with an objective perspective, buttressed by shared reasons.

4.2 Normativity

Chimpanzees also do not understand their world in terms of the contrast between personal preferences and normative standards. They have personal preferences and understand that others do as well, but there is no sense of supra-individual normative standards that carry a kind of objective force. So how is it that humans have come to view the world in terms of this fundamental contrast?

Again, the first step involves individuals collaborating with one another via skills of joint intentionality. To do so individuals must develop especially cooperative ways of relating to others because without a cooperative attitude others will reject them as collaborative partners, and, indeed, they will lose their own sense of cooperative and moral identity. Thus, if you and I are collaborating to catch fish, with you chasing them toward the shore and I netting them, then to be a good collaborative partner each of us must play our role in the way that we mutually understand is needed for us to be successful in reaching our joint goal. We thus have in our personal common ground the ideal way in which each role must be played for collaborative success, these role ideals constituting the most basic and concrete form of socially shared normative standard.

Importantly, the standards are not just instrumental – based on success – but also normative, or even moral, as each partner comes to view the other as equally deserving of respect and resources. The basis for this respect is the sense of equality that develops between collaborative partners: we are both equal causal forces in producing the result and the ideal role standards apply impartially to whoever fulfills the role, even if we were to switch roles. This sense of self-other equivalence underlies a basic sense of recognition respect that generates a sense of responsibility to one’s partner as equally deserving, and thus a sense of fairness in dividing the spoils of any collaborative efforts. If a partner violates the mutual sense of respect and fairness, the other will object and both will see the objection as legitimate. Partners thus often form a joint commitment in which they, essentially, agree ahead of time that if either partner acts non-cooperatively, the other will call her out and they will then agree further that that rebuke is legitimate and deserved by the transgressor, even if it is the self who is the transgressor. Internalizing this interactive nexus, individuals form a sense of responsibility to their (potential) collaborative partners.

Again, in a second step, this scales up to life in a cooperative cultural group. Now, instead of just joint commitments between individuals there are commitments to group-wide social norms by means of which the group regulates the behavior of individuals. Individuals who break social norms are chastised by other members of the group, who protest the individual’s behavior on behalf of the group. They join into the collective commitment of the group to their shared social norms almost as co-authors: “we” made up these rules so they are legitimate and we all have an obligation to follow them and even enforce them on others for the good of the group, on pain of a loss of our sense of cooperative identity within the group (so we must apologize or otherwise make an excuse for any transgression). In this case, internalization of the interactive process involved leads individuals to feel a sense not just of responsibility to partners but an obligation to the group or moral community as such. And it is important that the group is not just conceptualized as a collection of individuals, but rather as an idealized identity: not just a collection of individuals but “anyone who would be one of us” [ref.].

As part of this transformation comes a kind of objectification of normativity. In one of the most curious phenomena of the natural world, individuals extend a sense of objectivity to their social-institutional worlds to create what John Searle calls social facts and institutional reality. Social facts and institutional reality comprise real and powerful entities such as: husbands and wives with their respective rights and responsibilities (created by the cultural ritual of a marriage ceremony); leaders or chiefs and their rights and responsibilities (created by group consensus and sometimes a ceremony); medicine men and their rights and responsibilities; and so forth. They also can turn otherwise ordinary objects, such as shells or pieces of paper, into culturally potent entities such as money. The phenomenon is that a normal person or object acquires a new status based solely on the deontic powers she is collectively given by the group via some form of collective agreement and recognition, and that agreement is objectified and so becomes part of external reality. Clever as they are, chimpanzees (and human infants) cannot act meaningfully in modern humans’ social-institutional world—they do not recognize husbands and presidents and money with their respective deontic powers, nor can they understand scoring a goal in soccer—because they are not capable of conferring normative statuses on otherwise ordinary persons, objects, or actions by collective “agreement” with their cultural compatriots.

And so human capacities for collaboration and cultural participation, a.k.a., shared intentionality, create for humans a new experiential niche in which subjective preferences are distinguished from objective normative standards of right and wrong that everyone who would be one of us are obliged to respect. Chimpanzees do not operate in this way because they did not evolve to make their living by cooperating respectfully with others and obliging themselves to others in their cultural group.

4.3 Shared intentionality and individual psychology

Beyond general great ape reflective and logical (rational) decision-making and thinking, then, humans evolved to form shared agencies among rational individuals based on adaptations for shared intentionality. There is much evidence … that great apes have not evolved to operate in this way, neither to collaborate with other individuals in acts of joint intentionality nor to identify and commit to their social group in acts of collective intentionality.

This means that if we wish to imagine ourselves as a chimpanzee, then we must recognize first and foremost that their experiential niche lacks such human-specific social structures as joint goals and joint attention, in addition to cultural conventions, norms, and institutions.

In addition, we must recognize that because they lack skills of shared intentionality apes operate without the distinction between subjective perspectives or beliefs and the objective situation; they simply take experience as it presents itself to them formatted in terms of situations with underlying causal and intentional relations.

Then, similarly but further, we must imagine ourselves operating without the distinction between personal motives or preferences and the (objective) normatively right things to think and do; we must simply operate in terms of the individual goals and preferences of ourselves and others.

And, finally, we must imagine ourselves operating in a world devoid of the things that we have created by collective agreements, from money to marriage to governments, not to mention such things as checkmate in the game of chess (i.e., rule games and their constituents).

… I proposed above that our experience of using a stick as a tool to pry beneath the bark for termites might be very similar to that of chimpanzees’. Both species conceptualize the objects and events involved in this activity in very similar ways, including the causal relations involved. Of course, if it was suddenly relevant to us, as humans, that the proper way to use the tool was “thus”, or if it was suddenly relevant to us that we might be hogging the termites to the detriment of our groupmates unfairly, then of course the normative dimension would begin structuring our experience.

In the social domain, when we are observing another individual and focused only on her intentional sensorimotor actions in using a tool, for example, our experience would be similar to that of a chimpanzee. But, again, if it was suddenly relevant that she was using the tool wrongly, or that she believed something false about the termites, then, again, the objective/normative dimension would begin structuring our experience. So I would certainly not argue that we could ever subtract out or annul the normative dimensions of human experience from contexts in which it is relevant; it constitutes the “form of life” within which we are operating in such contexts. But humans operate in some contexts that are, in a sense, evolutionarily more ancient, in which the objective/normative dimension is simply not operative.

5 Intentionality, rationality, and normativity

…. Thus, both the [human and chimpanzee] species’ ecological/experiential niche in general and the individual’s focus of attention at any given moment are structured by the goal-directed actions to be performed. Chimpanzees, as all mammals including humans, operate as intentional agents in this sense.

The human case is distinguished by unique forms of shared intentionality, which create an experiential niche structured by the differentiation of subjective perspectives or beliefs from the objective situation at which they aim.

My proposal for what I have called reflective rationality is to think of it as deriving from a second-order executive tier of functioning in which the agent reflects on its own intentional decision-making in order to diagnose potential problems and intervene in them. Reflecting on the mental processes involved in intentional decision-making then provides the requisite concepts for experiencing the world in terms of the underlying causal and intentional relations that give it its rational (logical) coherence.

This way of operating is characteristic of chimpanzees and other great apes and represents a significant step beyond simple instrumental (economic) rationality, in which organisms simply pursue their goals intelligently and efficiently. But it is not the kind of normative rationality with which humans operate.

Again, human uniqueness derives from processes of shared intentionality that give rational coherence to humans’ joint and collective agencies through collectively created and constituted norms of rational and moral action and thought.

Mammals think and make decisions via an instrumental rationality; great apes think and make decisions via a reflective rationality; humans think and make decisions via a normative rationality. …

… Normative judgments have to do with how “we” judge both other individuals in the group and ourselves, with individuals internalizing and objectifying the resulting norms. Thus, individuals participating in a shared agency not only chastise their partner for non-cooperative behavior but also expect to be chastised themselves if they behave non-cooperatively, and the chastising is considered legitimate because it is coming from the shared agent “we” (such that the transgressor feels the need to make an excuse or apologize or feel guilty – which chimpanzees do not do).

Internalization of this interactive process leads individuals to a sense of responsibility or obligation to their partner(s) or group. This process constitutes the normative self-regulation of a socially shared agency that derives its normative force from the fact that all cooperating individuals feel together that the normative ideals of the cooperative body transcend any individual opinions or preferences. Indeed, once individuals identify with the culture’s ideal way of doing things – and so the norm is held not by a group of individuals but by “anyone who would be one of us” – the social norms begin to be seen as reflecting truly objective values. …

Composition with the three figures by Fernand Leger [Date: 1932]

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