Cooperation model and linguistic practices: a comparative view

Andrea Marcelli (La Trobe University)

According to Michael Tomasello’s 'cooperation model', shared intentionality is an essential requirement for cultural evolution. His evolutionary account of the emergence of language is thus faced with a two-tailed issue: that of determining the environmental motivations for the pursuit of shared goals, and that of identifying the skills which provide a cognitive ground for cooperation and communication. While, in the former case, biology takes up the results of neuroscience and palaeoanthropology, in the latter one new insight is given by that branch of philosophy of language which addresses linguistic practices. In its first part, this paper provides a brief overview of Tomasello’s research on cooperation and shared intentionality. It subsequently focusses on the problem of assessing the consistency of his account of early pre-linguistic human ontogeny with John Searle’s development of the concept of 'status function'—which plays a relevant role in some of Tomasello’s explanatory steps. Such a comparison will show the need for further specification of what it is meant with the extra-linguistic aspect of statements, together with an open question about their ontological character.