KLI Colloquia are informal, public talks that are followed by extensive dissussions. Speakers are KLI fellows or visiting researchers who are interested in presenting their work to an interdisciplinary audience and discussing it in a wider research context. We offer three types of talks:
1. Current Research Talks. KLI fellows or visiting researchers present and discuss their most recent research with the KLI fellows and the Vienna scientific community.
2. Future Research Talks. Visiting researchers present and discuss future projects and ideas togehter with the KLI fellows and the Vienna scientific community.
3. Professional Developmental Talks. Experts about research grants and applications at the Austrian and European levels present career opportunities and strategies to late-PhD and post-doctoral researchers.
- The presentation language is English.
- If you are interested in presenting your current or future work at the KLI, please contact the Scientific Director or the Executive Manager.
Event Details
Topic description / abstract:
Shared intentionality is thought to be a key driver of human cooperation. In this paper, we situate the evolution of shared intentionality within the broader context of the extended evolutionary synthesis by claiming that niche construction played a key role in shared intentionality’s evolution. We argue for this claim by showing that all the main evolutionary explanations of shared intentionality involve special cases of selective or developmental niche construction. One important implication of this view is that shared intentionality might not have initially relied on phylogenetically novel cognitive machinery, as suggested by previous hypotheses, but on environmental modifications that biased the development of existing traits.
Biographical note:
Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera recently completed his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the Australian National University supervised by Professor Kim Sterelny. He has been Research Student in Professor Yoshiyuki Hirono’s lab at the University of Tokyo and Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology under Professor Michael Tomasello’s supervision. He was Writing-Up Fellow at the KLI in 2016. His research focuses on the intersection between biology and psychology, and their philosophical implications. Most of his previous work has been concerned with issues about normative cognition, with a secondary interest in causal and physical cognition. As a KLI Postdoctoral Fellow, he is currently working on normative disagreement and its role in the emergence of large-scale cooperation and cultural complexity in humans.
