Imitazione e condivisione nella comunicazione e nell’azione

The main ipothesis of this paper is that the study of imitation is useful to understand a fundamental aspect of the development of intersubjectivity. Starting from Meltzoff’s theory of imitation as “like me”, I suggest that the main feature of human imitation is that it is performed in interaction. Imitation is the first form taken by sharedness. The importance of sharedness has been recently stressed by Tomasello. For Tomasello children have the ability to share actions while nonhuman primates have the mere ability to understand and perform individual actions. This position leads to negate what some primatologists consider as an evidence, i.e. that hunt is a form of collective action. My hypothesis is that all data can be explained if we separate the concept of sharedness from the concept of action. I maintain that the innate predisposition of human beings to sharedness allows them to develop the communicative capacity. This capacity appears in the first months in a very simple form which has imitation as a basic tool and assumes later much more refined forms when the child acquires the capacity to interpret others’ mental states. In the meanwhile human beings, like primates, develop the capacity to plan and understand actions both individual and collective. This can explain why primates live in complex societies even if these are very different from human ones.