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.
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Notes
- 1.
We are grateful to Jared Kinggard for alerting us to this text. See Kinggard (2010).
- 2.
We are grateful to Christine Wieseler for alerting us to the source of this observation, a letter by Descartes to the Marquis of Newcastle, November 23, 1646. Later in the same text Descartes allows, “if they [animals] thought as we do, they would have an immortal soul as we do” (Descartes 2000, 277). But this conclusion is unacceptable if one aims to provide a purely naturalistic explanation.
- 3.
This ignores, for the moment, the many fascinating attempts to teach such languages to nonhumans, of which arguably the most successful have involved not primates, but birds (see Pepperberg 2002).
- 4.
Though we have our doubts about whether it has been treated as an empirical question in the practice of comparative linguistics. If every time a new language is described that appears to violate one or another stricture of Generative Grammar, the community response is to tweak Generative Grammar to accommodate it, one begins to suspect a self-sealing argument.
- 5.
Though it can—at least in plants, where allopolyploid speciation is possible. This occurs when a hybrid, which is capable of reproduction, is not capable of breeding with either of its parent species. See e.g., Soltis and Soltis (1989).
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Winters, A.M., Levine, A. (2013). Not So Exceptional: Away from Chomskian Saltationism and Towards a Naturally Gradual Account of Mindfulness. In: Swan, L. (eds) Origins of Mind. Biosemiotics, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5419-5_15
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