My work explores the origins of distinctively human cognitive abilities, including cooperative communication, the origins of reasoning, and the origins of concepts:
Origins of Cooperative Communication
Humans possess remarkable abilities to inform one another. Even simple pointing gestures are filled with meaning – and understood as early as 9mths of age. What is the origin of these abilities? Here my work explores the origin and semantics of some of the simplest referring tools we have: pointing gestures, labels, and demonstratives.
Right: illustration from the study "The Origin of Pointing: Evidence for the Touch Hypothesis"
Relevant papers:
O’Madagain, C. This is a Paper about Demonstratives. Philosophia, 49, 745–764 (2021) Available here
O’Madagain, C. Kachel, G. Strickland, B. The origin of pointing: Evidence for the touch hypothesis. Science Advances. Sci. Adv. 5, eaav2558 (2019); available here
Media coverage:
O’Madagain, C. (2014). When Shapes and Sounds become Utterances: Indexicals and the Metaphysics of Semantic Tokens. Thought, 3(1): 71-79. Preprint here
Origins of Reasoning and Rationality
With the ability to inform one another, humans are placed in a position to not just to give each other new information, but to teach each other how to think. I have argued that our ability to reason is learned or culturally inherited, and explored the social and psychological structures underlying reasoning in humans and apes.
Left: Abeeku (Gorilla gorilla) rechecks his evidence in the study "Apes and Children Rationally Monitor Their Decisions"
Relevant papers:
O'Madagain, C. Helming, K, Schmitd, M, Shupe, K. Call, J and Tomasello, M. (2022). "Apes and Children Rationally Monitor their Decisions". Forthcoming in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, available here.
O'Madagain, C. (2022). Ways of Reasoning in Humans and Other Animals. In "Why and How We Give and Ask for Reasons: Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives", ed P. Stovall; preprint here.
O'Madagain C. and Tomasello, M. (2021). Shared Intentionality, Reason-Giving, and Cumulative Culture. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. available here.
Walmsley, J. and O'Madagain, C. (2020) The Worst Motive Fallacy: a Negativity Bias in Motive Attribution. Psychological Science. Volume: 31 issue: 11, page(s): 1430-1438. preprint here
Media coverage:
Koymen, B. O’Madagain, C. Domberg, A. and Tomasello (2019), M. Young children's ability to produce valid and relevant counter-arguments. Child Development, 2019, 10.1111/cdev.13338
O’Madagain, C. and Tomasello (2019). M. Joint Attention to Mental Contents and the Social Origin of Reasoning. Synthese, online here.
O’Madagain, C. (2018). Is Reasoning Culturally Transmitted? Teorema.XXXVIII/I Winter 2019 available here.
O’Madagain, C. (2016). Davidson and Husserl on the Social Origin of our Concept of Objectivity. In Discovering the ‘We’: The Phenomenology of Sociality, ed. Dermot Moran and Thomas Szanto, Routledge. pdf (a nice review here)
Origins of Concepts
A key component of thought is the concepts we use – such as PLANET or VIRUS. I argue that many of our concepts are acquired from others, and I have developed (with Paul Égré) a new framework for measuring the utility of different conceptual schemes.
Right: Artificial taxonomy illustrating measurement schema for concept utility (from Égré and O'Madagain "Concept Utility")
Relevant papers:
Égré, P. and O'Madagain C. (2022). On the Utility of Empty Concepts. In Manuel Gustavo (ed). New Perspectives on Conceptual Engineering. pdf
Égré, P. and O’Madagain, C. (2019). Concept Utility. The Journal of Philosophy, Volume 116(10): 525-554. pdf
O’Madagain, C. (2018). Outsourcing Concepts: Deference, the Extended Mind, and Expanding our Epistemic Capacity. In J. Adam Carter, S. Orestis Palermos, Andy Clark, Duncan Pritchard and Jesper Kallestrup (eds). Socially Extended Knowledge, Oxford. pdf
O’Madagain, C. (2014). Can Groups have Concepts? Semantics for Collective Intentions. Philosophical Issues, 24(1): 347–363. available here.
O’Madagain, C. (2012). Group Agents: Persons, Mobs or Zombies? International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 20:2: 271-287. pdf
Comparative Cognition
I am very interested in exploring cognitive abilities across species, to give us a fuller picture of cognition in all its varieties.
An initiative I have co-founded with Daniel Hanus (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig) is the 'Atlas of Comparative Cognition'. This is to be an online set of visual representations of cognitive abilities in many species, and ultimately across human cultures and human development.
We held the first workshop for this project on March 6th 2019 in Zurich. Our flyer for the project is here.
Complete Publications
Articles and book chapters (bold = first author)
Helming, K. O’Madagain, C. and Tomasello, M. Three and Five Year Old Children know they Might be Wrong. (In press, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology).
O'Madagain, C. (2024). Reasoning. In "Things that Minds Do", Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming.
O'Madagain, C. (2024). Two Mysteries concerning the Pointing Gesture. In Bard Krause and Leavens "Pointing: Culture, Language and Collaboration"; forthcoming, Oxford University Press.
O'Madagain, C. (2024). Reasoning in Humans and Other Animals. In Why and How We Give and Ask for Reasons: Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives. ed P. Stovall, Routledge.
O’Madagain, C. Helming, K. Schmidt, M., Shupe, E. Call, J and Tomasello, M. (2022) Great Apes and Human Children Rationally Monitor Their Decisions. Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Égré, P. and O'Madagain C. (2022). On the Utility of Empty Concepts. In Manuel Gustavo (ed). New Perspectives on Conceptual Engineering.
Engelmann, J. M. ; Völter, C. J. ; O'Madagain, C ; Proft, M ; Haun, D. B. M. ; Rakoczy, H. ; Herrmann, E. (2021). Chimpanzees consider alternative possibilities. Current Biology. Volume 31 Issue 20 Pages R1377-R1378.
O'Madagain, C. and Tomasello, M. (2021) Shared Intentionality, Reason-Giving, and the Cumulative Culture". In Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Special Issue on Collective Knowledge and Cumulative Culture.
O’Madagain, C. (2021) This is a Paper about Demonstratives. Philosophia 49, pages 745–764
Walmsley, J. and O’Madagain, C. (2020) The Worst Motive Fallacy. Psychological Science Vol 31, Issue 11, 2020
Koymen, B. O’Madagain, C. Domberg, A. and Tomasello, M (2019). Young children recognize counter-arguments at age 5 but not 3. Child Development,
O'Madagain, C. (2019). Are we Entitled to O ur Own Concepts? Epistemic Injustice at the Conceptual Level. Studia Philosophia Estonica
O’Madagain, C. and Tomasello, M. (2019) Joint Attention to Mental Contents and the Social Origin of Reasoning. Synthese. 198, pages 4057–4078
O’Madagain, C., Kachel, G. and Strickland, B (2019). The Origin of Pointing: Evidence for the Touch Hypothesis. Science Advances, 5, eaav2558 (2019)
Égré, P. and O'Madagain, C. (2019). Concept Utility. The Journal of Philosophy.
O’Madagain, C. (2019). Is Reasoning Culturally Transmitted? Teorema.XXXVIII/I Winter 2019
O’Madagain, C. (2018). Outsourcing Concepts: Deference, the Extended Mind, and Expanding our Epistemic Capacity. In Carter, Palermos, Clark, Pritchard and Kallestrup (eds). Socially Extended Knowledge, Oxford University Press.
O’Madagain, C. (2015). Davidson and Husserl on the Social Origin of our Concept of Objectivity. In Discovering the ‘We’: The Phenomenology of Sociality, ed. Dermot Moran and Thomas Szanto, Routledge.
O’Madagain, C. (2014). When Shapes and Sounds become Utterances: Indexicals and the Metaphysics of Semantic Tokens. Thought, 3(1): 71-79.
O’Madagain, C. (2014). Can Groups have Concepts? Semantics for Collective Intentions. Philosophical Issues, 24(1): 347–363.
O’Madagain, C (2012). Group Agents: Persons, Mobs or Zombies? International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 20:2: 271-287.
O’Madagain, C. (2007). Is There an Intellectual Intuition in Kant’s Opus Postumum?, in Proceedings of the 10th International Kant Congress, de Gruyter, Berlin, 2007.
Enyclopedia entries and reviews:
O’Madagain C. (2018) Experience Projection. In: Vonk J., Shackelford T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. pdf
O’Madagain, C. (2014) Mind and Machine, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 22(2): 291-295. pdf
O’Madagain, C. (2013). Intentionality. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. James Fieser and Bradley Dowden, University of Tennessee at Martin. link
In progress:
O’Madagain, C. and Haun, D. Ten Million People Can’t be Wrong: What the Folk Think of Majorities (experimental, adults)
O'Madagain, C. Strickland, B., and Peperkamp, S. "Infants Learn Rules about Animals faster than Other Categories"
O'Madagain, C. Bai, D. Peperkamp, S. and Strickland, B. "It's Easier to Learn Irregular Grammar for Animals than Other Categories"