Abstract
Some of our linguistic practices are special in that they involve claims about how things stand in the world. These judgments are thought to be true or false with respect to what they are about. The nature of these practices of claim-making has been studied by philosophers and psychologists alike. Furthermore, important strands in evolutionary studies have relied on both psychological and philosophical theories for addressing the question of how these practices evolved in the hominins lineage, claiming that engagement in such linguistic practices is humans’ exclusive heritage. This paper aims to show that (some of) the conceptual tools provided by collective intentionality and inferentialist theorists can productively complement each other in pursuing this theoretical endeavor, namely the elucidation of human practices of claim-making.
In particular, I argue that (i) Brandom’s inferentialist account of basic linguistic practices in interpretational terms is problematic and that these problems can be addressed via appeal to the collective intentionality theorist’s toolbox, and (ii) Inferentialists resource to linguistic norms in understanding meaning and claim-making can offer crucial tools for understanding the emergence of human specific cognitive capacities of objective judgement, tools that are needed to complement the accounts offered by collective intentionality theorists. The main aim of the paper is to provide an account of the evolution and development of human-specific abilities of claim-making which combines resources from both approaches in order to understand the nature and crucial role of shared activities in their emergence.
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Notes
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For a detailed argument regarding this problem in Brandom, see Satne (2017).
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As we discussed above, the Content view championed by Bratman is not suited for the task at issue because its story is too cognitively-demanding. For the same reason, cognitively-demanding accounts of the ‘we’ belonging to the Subject view—such as Gilbert’s (cf. Gilbert 2014), where joint practices depend on participants’ commitments to each other—are not suited for the task.
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Accounting for the introduction of children into normative practices through social conformism has the additional advantage of avoiding giving too much weight to intricate debates about the emergence of ToM abilities and the nature of their early versions (see Low and Perner 2012). The remarks on developmental trajectories provided here fit well the specialized empirical literature on the development of capacities for understanding others in terms of reasons, placing them at the end of the developmental process, at around 3 to 4 years of age (Ibid.). In this view, infants’ success in allegedly early ToM tasks tracks not ToM abilities but precursors of them, in particular, infants’ abilities to monitor the positions of others for possibly engaging with them in basic coordinated activities (see Satne and Salice 2020 and Satne 2020).
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Satne, G. (2021). Collective Intentionality, Inferentialism and the Capacity for Claim-Making. In: Koreň, L., Schmid, H.B., Stovall, P., Townsend, L. (eds) Groups, Norms and Practices. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49590-9_6
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