Not So Exceptional: Away from Chomskian Saltationism and Towards a Naturally Gradual Account of Mindfulness

Abstract

It is argued that a chief obstacle to a naturalistic explanation of the origins of mind is human exceptionalism, as exemplified in the seventeenth century by René Descartes and in the twentieth century by Noam Chomsky. As an antidote to human exceptionalism, we turn to the account of aesthetic judgment in Charles Darwin's Descent of Man, according to which the mental capacities of humans differ from those of lower animals only in degree, and not in kind. Thoroughgoing naturalistic explanation of these capacities is made easier by shifting away from the substance-metaphysical implications of the search for an account of mind, toward a dispositional account of the origins of mindfulness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)