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Michael Tomasello (1950–)

Tomasello’s question is what makes human cognition unique, and his answer is not raw intelligence but shared intentionality — the capacity, and the motivation, to share psychological states with others: to attend to something together, hold a goal in common, and act as a genuine “we” rather than a collection of “I”s. Everything he builds — language, culture, cooperation, morality — rests on this. He pursued it by an unusual double method, studying human children and great apes side by side to isolate what is human-only, and from it produced, among much else, a usage-based theory of how children learn language: from use, by reading intentions and finding patterns, rather than from an innate universal grammar.

Michael Tomasello (1950–) was born in Bartow, Florida, took his degree at Duke and a doctorate in experimental psychology at the University of Georgia in 1980 — his dissertation, on early word learning, supervised by the radical constructivist Ernst von Glasersfeld. He taught at Emory University from 1980, working with the great apes at the Yerkes primate centre, and in 1998 became a founding co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where for two decades he ran the developmental and comparative work in parallel. In 2016 he returned to Duke. He is among the most cited figures in developmental and comparative psychology, elected to the National Academy of Sciences and recipient of the field’s major awards, including the Jean Nicod Prize and the Rumelhart Prize.

The core project

The organising question is the difference between human and other primate minds, and Tomasello’s distinctive answer locates it in the social domain rather than in general intelligence. The clearest single piece of evidence is the cultural intelligence finding: given a large battery of cognitive tasks, chimpanzees, orangutans, and two-and-a-half-year-old children perform about equally on the physical domain — space, quantity, causality — while the children pull decisively ahead on the social domain: social learning, communication, reading others’ minds. The difference, on this reading, is not that humans are generally smarter but that they are equipped, early and by motivation, for a particular kind of sharing with others.

Key concepts

Shared intentionality. The spine of the whole account: the human-unique capacity to participate with others in collaborative activity with genuinely shared goals and intentions — which requires not only powerful intention-reading and cultural learning but, Tomasello stresses, a unique motivation to share psychological states and the cognitive means to represent them. The joint “we” has a dual structure — a shared goal together with differentiated individual roles, known in common — and is more than the sum of two individual intentions. In his later work he splits the idea into a two-step sequence: joint intentionality, the dyadic “we” of small-scale collaboration that emerges around nine months, and collective intentionality, the group-level world of conventions, norms, and institutions that comes online around age three. (The single term “shared intentionality” names the umbrella in his 2005 statement and the first of the two steps in the later work; they are not quite the same, and he is careful about which he means.)

Joint attention. The developmental foundation, and a triadic structure — child, adult, and object, each aware that the other is attending — distinct from the earlier face-to-face dyad. Around nine to twelve months, in what he called a revolution, infants begin to treat others as intentional agents “like me,” following gaze, referencing others socially, and pointing to share attention rather than merely request. (Recent developmental work finds joint-attention bids appearing earlier and more gradually than a sharp nine-month threshold implies — a live empirical revision.)

The usage-based theory of language acquisition. His most consequential claim for the study of language, and a direct alternative to nativism: language is learned from use, not generated by an innate universal grammar. Children acquire it through two general capacities — intention-reading, the social-cognitive skill of grasping what others mean, which lets a child acquire symbols; and pattern-finding, the general-cognitive skill of categorising, analogising, and tracking distributions, which lets a child extract grammatical structure. The units of language are constructions — form-meaning pairings running from concrete words and fixed phrases to abstract schemas like the transitive — and grammar is not an autonomous module but something that emerges. The acquisition is piecemeal and conservative: his verb-island hypothesis holds that early grammar is organised verb by verb, each with its own little syntax, before any abstract categories form, and that children build cautiously from what they have actually heard, abstracting only gradually. The landmark statement is Constructing a Language (2003).

Cultural learning, and the ratchet. Tomasello distinguishes three grades of social learning by how much of the other’s mind the learner takes on: emulation, reproducing the result another achieved without copying the method; imitative learning, reproducing the actual means as an intentional way of reaching a goal; and instructed learning, in which a teacher conveys and the learner internalises the instructor’s perspective. The high-fidelity grades make possible what he named the ratchet effect — cultural transmission faithful enough that improvements are retained rather than lost, so that innovations accumulate across generations. Human culture ratchets upward; other species’ traditions, lacking the fidelity, largely do not. (Whether high-fidelity imitation is strictly necessary for cumulative culture is itself debated.)

The great-ape comparison. The other half of the method, and the source of his sharpest reversals. In 1997 he had concluded that chimpanzees understand nothing of others’ psychological states; around 2000–2001, on the strength of experiments framed as competition over food — the ecologically natural setting for apes, where cooperative tasks borrowed from child research had failed — he reversed himself, concluding that chimpanzees do track what others see and know. His later review bounded the claim carefully: apes understand goals, intentions, perception, and knowledge, but he found no evidence at that time of their grasping false belief. What apes do not do, on his account, marks the human difference: genuinely cooperative communication, pointing to inform rather than to request, active teaching, and shared goals. The cooperative eye hypothesis — that the visible white sclera of the human eye is an adaptation making gaze readable for joint attention — belongs here, and is now itself contested by morphological studies. So does the finding, with Felix Warneken, that human infants spontaneously help an unrelated adult from around fourteen to eighteen months, with young chimpanzees showing a weaker version of the same.

The natural history of thinking and morality. His later books extend shared intentionality into an evolutionary account of human thought and ethics. Thinking becomes cooperative, perspectival, and self-monitored against shared standards; morality is built in the same two steps as intentionality. Joint intentionality yields a second-person morality — the mutual respect, fairness, and joint commitment of interdependent partners who hold each other accountable — and collective intentionality yields the agent-independent norms and obligations of cultural group life. Interdependence, not altruism for its own sake, is the driver throughout.

Lineage and influences

The most explicit debt is to Vygotsky, and Tomasello declares it himself — pursuing his method, in his words, “in Vygotskian fashion,” and taking over the two Vygotskian theses that anchor his program: that the higher mind is socially formed, appearing first between people and only then within the individual, and that it grows by internalisation. With Henrike Moll he named a “Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis,” set deliberately against the “Machiavellian” one: human cognition evolved for cooperation and coordination, not for social competition. What he adds to Vygotsky is the half Vygotsky never had — an evolutionary and comparative frame, the great-ape baseline against which the human-unique is measured; so “Vygotskian” names the social-formation core, not a wholesale discipleship, and he leans more on Vygotsky’s social-origins thesis than on the sign-mediation and zone-of-proximal-development apparatus.

For what language is, he draws on the construction-grammar and cognitive-linguistics tradition — Fillmore, who made the construction the basic unit; Goldberg on argument-structure constructions; Langacker, from whom the term “usage-based” comes; and Croft’s strongly typological grammar, which fits his case against universals — importing their picture of grammar and supplying the account of how children come to acquire it. From Bruner come the “formats” of joint action that become his joint attentional frames, the scaffolds within which a child acquires its first symbols — and Bruner was himself a principal conduit of Vygotsky into English-language developmental psychology, reinforcing the line. For the apparatus of the “we,” he took up an existing philosophy of collective intentionality — Bratman on shared intention, Gilbert on joint commitment and the plural subject, Searle on collective intentionality and institutional reality, Tuomela on the “we-mode” — and made it empirical and developmental, a synthesis he assembled eclectically rather than adopting any one philosopher whole. (Philosophers have charged that he invokes Gilbert’s joint commitment without fully characterising it.) Beneath all of it runs the Darwinian comparative method itself, the means by which the phylogeny of cognition is inferred.

Disputes and afterlife

The central dispute is with Chomsky and the nativist tradition: usage-based, emergentist, socially grounded acquisition against an innate universal grammar and the poverty-of-the-stimulus argument. Tomasello’s case against universal grammar is that the cross-linguistic universals it predicts do not robustly exist, that the theory is shielded from falsification, and that the poverty argument presupposes an impoverished view of learning while ignoring the statistical, analogical, and social resources a child actually has — a position he pressed in a commentary pointedly titled “Universal Grammar Is Dead.” The title is sharper than the claim: it is a short commentary, and what he declares dead is the idea of a biological endowment with specific linguistic content, not the existence of language universals as such. The nativist replies — that universal grammar is an evolved adaptation, that surface diversity is compatible with abstract underlying universals, and above all that usage-based models have yet to demonstrate how abstract syntax is learnable from realistic input — are live, and the debate is genuinely unresolved; neither side has carried it.

His comparative work draws its own criticism. The “rich” interpretation of ape social cognition — that the apes are reading minds rather than behavioural cues — is contested by those, Povinelli foremost, who hold that observable cues explain the results, a charge pressed hardest against his most contested later study, the 2016 eye-tracking claim that apes anticipate others’ false beliefs. Critics also note confounds between WEIRD young children and older, often institution-reared apes, and the sensitivity of the findings to how a task is framed. And the headline claim itself — that shared intentionality is a difference of kind — is met by the argument that the human/ape gap is one of degree; Tomasello himself blurs the line, having written that a quantitative difference in social-learning skill produces a qualitative difference in cultural trajectory. His influence is nonetheless among the largest in his fields.

Where Tomasello stops

He frames shared intentionality as a hypothesis about the human difference, an evolutionary-developmental conjecture grounded in the comparative experiments but not settled by them. The two-step ladder from individual through joint to collective intentionality is offered as a plausible reconstruction of an evolutionary sequence, not as something the fossil and phylogenetic record directly proves. On the apes he has kept the claim bounded — goals, intentions, perception, and knowledge, but not, on the evidence he accepted, false belief — and the place where he pushed past that boundary is the most contested thing he has done. He concedes that the line between a quantitative and a qualitative difference is not clean, and his framework leaves genuinely open how the earliest shared experience works before the nine-month understanding of others as intentional agents is in place. And he is careful that the death of universal grammar he announced is the death only of a content-specific innate grammar, not of language universals or of every innate contribution to learning.

Key works

See also: Vygotsky · Chomsky · Piaget · Searle