Moderate mindreading priority

Abstract

According to the common sense view, self-consciousness is the climax of human cognition. This provides the ordinary feeling of being special thanks to the faculty of self-consciousness. But, we can doubt how much nature takes care of our satisfactory feeling of being self-conscious. What if self-consciousness has any top role in human cognition (whatever it does mean)? In particular, is self-consciousness really prior to mindreading?, or the contrary? Call the first thesis “self-consciousness priority account” (SCPA) and the other “mindreading priority account” (MRPA). While MRPA is also the view that mindreading evolved prior to self-consciousness, SCPA is the claim that self-consciousness evolved prior to mindreading.