Causality, tool use, and folk physics

Chapter 2 showed how the natural, spontaneous social behavior of chimpanzees — no matter how similar it appears to our own — may be attended by very different kinds of psychological states. This chapter sets the stage for asking similar kinds of questions about chimpanzees' natural and spontaneous interactions with physical objects in the context of their use and manufacture of simple tools. It begins with a review of the very limited experimental evidence which bears on the question of how nonhuman primates understand physical causality in the context of their use and manufacture of tools. It shows how this evidence is ambiguous with respect to the question of whether or not species other than our own appeal to unobservable phenomena to assist in explaining or predicting interactions among physical objects. Second, and in contrast, the chapter presents evidence that human children, from a very early age, come to develop a folk physics which directly appeals to precisely these kinds of unobservable phenomena.

Causality (physics) · Physics · Quantum mechanics · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Image Processing and 3D Reconstruction · Language and cultural evolution