Routledge The Single-Minded Animal: Shared Intentionality, Normativity, and the Foundations of Discursive Cognition (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy)

This book provides an account of discursive or reason-governed cognition by synthesizing research in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and evolutionary anthropology. Using the grasp of a natural language as a model for the autonomous or self-governed rationality of discursive cognition, and drawing on research concerning the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of intentionality and norm psychology in human beings, the author provides a semantics for individual intentions, collective intentions, and normative attitudes. This semantics interprets claims about collective intentions and claims about what people ought and may do as the expression of plans of action that involve taking the points of view of other people within a community. This has important consequences for our understanding of both the natural basis and the social relevance of intentional and normative mental states, and my formal account of the semantic content of the claims we use to give expression to these mental states integrates well with research in evolutionary anthropology and social psychology concerning the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of norm psychology and collective intentionality in human beings and other primates. The Single-Minded Animal will appeal to researchers and advanced students working on normativity, collective intentionality, social and development psychology, and evolutionary anthropology. Review “Stovall fills an important hole in the Sellars-Brandom account of normativity, the question of how normative rationality is acquired developmentally, by appealing to work in cognitive science on collective intentionality and sensitivity to norms, and by introducing a novel analysis of collective planning talk. This is an intriguing and sophisticated account of a central issue in philosophy.” – Stephen Turner, University of South Florida, USA About the Author Preston Stovall is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Philosophy and Social Science at the University of Hradec Králové. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh.