Cultural intelligence, shared intentionality and human cognitive uniquenes

Abstract

This study critically reflects and assesses a recent debate over the nature of uniquely human cognition. The two standpoints in this debate are advocated by Michael Tomasello and Henrike Moll. Both agree that shared intentionality is a key difference-maker, affording qualitatively new mental processes that support new forms of cooperative sociality and cumulative culture and thoroughly transform human cognition. But Moll argues that Tomasello is infirm in his commitment to the transformative impact of shared intentionality on human cognition, flirting with a conflicting, additive account of shared intentionality as making a key difference only in the social domain. On her own view, human-unique social development innervated by human-unique forms of shared intentionality makes a difference across the board, and all the way down. This, we are told, is a reason not only to reject additive accounts, but to accept cognitive discontinuity across the board. Having reconstructed the two standpoints, I argue that Tomasello develops a consistently transformative approach immune to most objections leveled by Moll and in key respects more modest and plausible than her own alternative proposal. And I draw from this debate some general methodological lessons for theorizing about the nature and scope of human-unique cognition.