The Organization of Human Experience

How an evolutionary psychology of agency explains dimensions of human behavior and experience overlooked by the computational model of mind. Modern cognitive science is dominated by a mind-as-computer model that pays scant attention to the evolutionary history via which human psychological processes came into existence. It thus struggles to explain why human psychology and experience are the way they are. In The Organization of Human Experience, Michael Tomasello seeks to fill this explanatory gap by proposing a complementary organism-as-agent model. Integrating findings from comparative research on ancestral species (using extant species as models) with concepts from modern philosophical theories of action and agency, he unearths the evolutionary foundations of human psychology and experience. The specific claim is that all human psychological processes—and the forms of experience that they engender—evolved across species over evolutionary time for a common function: to empower individuals to make agentive decisions about how best to act in novel circumstances. Questions about why humans attend to and represent certain kinds of information and not others, why they learn certain kinds of things and draw certain kinds of inferences and not others, and why they understand events in terms of causal, intentional, and normative relations can only be answered via an evolutionary history of the ways in which humans’ ancestors made and executed agentive decisions.