Chapter Six

In my opinion, this chapter did an excellent job of tying together many of the concepts we had been already discussing in class. The concept of an infant human growing up without any other human contact was touched upon and Tomasello went so far as to claim that the knowledge they could acquire was limited simply because observation of the world (and not another human) was the singular way they could acquire knowledge. I'm curious as to whether the infant could acquire knowledge by observing an animal (i.e. a primate) and its actions but I'm not sure what studies could actually be done to discover the answer. Obviously a child mimicking a parent of the same species could acquire more knowledge but I would assume some level of knowledge could be acquired - at least a higher level than other primates.

Tomasello discussed the fact that even nonliterate cultures are able to transmit skills and knowledge to their children but he went on to say that these cultures do communicate with symbols which seemed confusing to me. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding but couldn't symbols be a form of a language? After all, our alphabet is really just 26 symbols. Irregardless of this discrepancy, Tomasello makes a good point in claiming that human children rely on knowledge taught (or simply observed) by human adults. If this did not occur, culture would not be passed on and no progress would ever be made.