What makes a human being a rational animal? How did we become rational as a species? Kant’s account of autonomy marks a watershed moment in modern philosophy because it answers the first question in a novel way that makes the second appear unanswerable, possibly ill-formed. In Kant’s system, the capacity for autonomy as self-governed rationality cannot be integrated into nature. The result is a dualistic outlook where human subjects are not, strictly speaking, rational animals but instead, in Stanley Cavell’s apt and memorable phrase, “animal rationals” (1979, 399). Preston Stovall’s The Single-Minded Animal is an ambitious and original book that seeks to explain how, on the contrary, the capacity for autonomy, that which makes us rational, could have arisen from a set of other capacities that are plausibly identified as products of the evolution of the human species.
As Stovall highlights, undoing the dualism between reason and nature emerged as a central project for American pragmatism in the work of C. S. Peirce, a century before Wilfrid Sellars elaborated upon it as the task of “fusing the images”. The explanatory ambition Stovall picks up from this tradition effectively amounts to an inquiry into the metaphysics of normativity. For in this discussion, “autonomy” is not primarily a moral notion but rather designates a self-governed rationality that generally relies on representations of rules. Thus understood, freedom (“autonomy”) and rationality (“discursive cognition”) are inseparable because both rely on agency that is guided by representations of rules. “Freedom in this sense of autonomy as self-government is a matter of willing to live lives according to principles and standards we recognize as binding, and consequently binding ourselves to them in recognition of their authority” (Stovall, 2022, 3).[1] The tricky, and distinctively Kantian, metanormative idea is that the authority of such rules depends on rational beings recognizing them as authoritative. Stovall’s ambitious aim is nothing less than to offer a naturalistic account of how humans could have evolved into a species of rule-followers, and thus, a species that legislates rules for itself.
This type of animal is “single-minded” in a very specific sense. What is at issue is not agreement between individuals but a particular way of choosing. As Stovall notes, several authors, e.g., Sellars, Jamie Dreier, Allan Gibbard, have independently observed that any action can be chosen in two different ways. I can choose to A either “indifferently” because I am (only) permitted to A or “single-mindedly” because I am obligated to A. To choose A single-mindedly is to reject all those actions that are incompatible with A. The key insight behind Stovall’s overall project is this: the capacity to enact and recognize the distinction between the two ways of choosing should be the primary explanatory target for a naturalistic account of autonomy as self-governed rationality. Why? It is a precondition for discursive cognition to understand the difference between the two ways of choosing because moves in reasoning are either entitlement-preserving or commitment-preserving choices. Consequently, the crucial question for Stovall is how humans could have acquired the capacity to distinguish between permission and obligation without already relying on discursive cognition.
To explore this question, one needs a notion of intentionality that is more basic than discursive cognition, that is, concept-use that involves reasoning. Stovall finds it in Sellars’s account of picturing:
My proposal is that picturing, as a real-order subjunctively robust covariation relation between the neural episodes of organisms with a certain degree of cognitive complexity and their environments, functions as a warrant for recognizing something as a bearer of propositional attitudes. (89)
Whereas Sellars contrasts picturing with intentionality, Stovall holds that—in its most basic form—picturing is both covariance and intentionality. This divergence is related to the limits of psychological nominalism—the philosophical method Stovall adopts from Sellars—according to which one should rely on linguistic resources in the study of intentionality, which includes discursive cognition. Stovall argues convincingly that the intentionality of planning represented by “shall” is more basic than the capacity to choose single-mindedly, which involves “ought”. Can we use the same method, though, to determine whether neural episodes involve cognition of objects? Stovall and Sellars share an explanatory ambition that requires an explanatory base outside of the domain of intentionality as it is discursively articulated, but it is an intricate question how one should identify intentionality in its most basic form. Interestingly, Stovall suggests that in this respect Sellars, too, might have overstepped the bounds of psychological nominalism in his later work. On the other hand, proponents of enactivism are likely going to resist Stovall’s endorsement of picturing as arguably too representationalist an account of intentionality, especially given his main focus on “shared practical picturing” that enables agents to coordinate action.
Starting with picturing, Stovall seeks to show how a path could have evolved through a gradual scaffolding of capacities to the space of reasons humans inhabit as rule-followers. On Stovall’s account, this is a story of how individuals coordinate action and how their shared plans become enforceable through reactive attitudes that respond to the distinction between choosing indifferently and choosing single-mindedly. In other words, Stovall argues that the practical picturing of shared intentionality enables practical deontic picturing, which involves an understanding of the normative distinction between permission and obligation. The general outline of this account follows Michael Tomasello’s theory about the origins of human cognition in the evolution of shared intentionality. But Stovall offers an important revision to address the criticism that Tomasello overintellectualizes the capacities of our hominid ancestors. Here, the pre-discursive shared intentionality must be characterized independently of the discursive cognition the account seeks to explain. In particular, the coordination of shared intentionality between pre-discursive agents must not require that the agents have beliefs about one another’s attitudes. While picturing is Stovall’s proposal for intentionality in its basic form, he appeals to research in cognitive science to explain how practical picturing enables agents to coordinate attitudes independently of a capacity to think what those attitudes are:
processes of entrainment, motor simulation, and task co-representation allow for an understanding of shared intentionality that coordinates individual agents’ behaviors through nonconscious processes rather than by appeal to higher-order cognition. (98–99)
Stovall’s book is original not because it lays out a novel project, but because it invokes and defends an old explanatory ambition that has been widely abandoned. He executes it with an unorthodox array of updated tools, drawing from philosophical and scientific resources alike. To appreciate this point, it is helpful to contextualize Stovall’s work in the aftermath of Sellars’s philosophy, which has been marked by a naturalist/normativist division whose most extreme formulations are eliminative materialism on the one hand and insistence on the irreducibly sui generis character of the logical space of reasons on the other. In opposite ways, both sides reject the aim for “a synoptic vision”, whose articulation Sellars identified as philosophy’s distinctive task.
Robert Brandom’s explanatory project in Making It Explicit, however, exemplifies a middle-ground position that is instructively unstable (1994). Brandom’s goal is to explain the normative statuses of discursive commitment—and thus also conceptual content—in terms of normative attitudes that are only implicitly enacted in a social practice. The unarticulated normative attitudes function as unexplained explainers in this account. But one might wonder under what conditions individuals who lack discursive cognition might nevertheless be able to enact attitudes about correctness. In particular—as Stovall emphasizes—how can such individuals distinguish between permission and obligation as two types of correctness?
As already mentioned, understanding of this distinction between entitlement and commitment is built into the normativity of discursive cognition. By investigating how our species could have acquired the capacity to enact and enforce that distinction prior to being able to form thoughts about permission and obligation, Stovall’s inquiry provides a foundation that vindicates Brandom’s entitlement to the unexplained explainers in his account. Whether this is needed, however—let alone the account itself—depends on the aspirations that motivate one’s philosophical work. John McDowell’s account of reason as second nature is meant to disabuse us of the felt urgency to pursue an explanatory project precisely like Stovall’s (McDowell, 1994). But, again, it is a hallmark and merit of Stovall’s work that it revives the legacy of Sellars “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” (1962, 35).
Such a grand project goes against the grain of most contemporary philosophy. And the ecumenical attitude that characterizes Stovall’s execution of the task makes one wonder occasionally what philosophical commitments would be incompatible with it. In a characteristic fashion, Stovall denies that we need to choose between psychological nominalism and the language of thought hypothesis, which are widely seen as incompatible philosophical commitments. On the contrary, Stovall urges us to synthesize and to investigate how apparently competing approaches and theses might be recognized as different aspects of the same whole in the broadest scheme of things. An example of this attitude is Stovall’s proposal to portray model theory and proof theory as two necessary components of a fully developed theory in semantics. These ideas may be sweeping in scope, but Stovall’s arguments are detailed and subtle, deserving careful scholarly attention in the philosophy of mind and language.
As a counterbalance to the syncretic spirit that animates The Single-Minded Animal, I want to end by highlighting a contribution Stovall’s book makes that is in fact at odds with many, if not most, contemporary work in social ontology. It is customary in the field to rely on individuals with fully-fledged discursive capacities to explain how something “social” comes about, but Stovall reverses the order of explanation. The argument goes far beyond yet another reiteration of the claim that the discursive cognition of individuals depends on language as a social practice. Through shared practical picturing sociality is also built into pre-discursive intentionality. On Stovall’s account, there must be social coordination before there can be individuals who can think about the coordination problem. This result flies in the face of dominant approaches in social ontology and merits more emphasis than it receives in the book. Stovall offers a fresh and sophisticated account of why the rational animal is a social animal.
REFERENCES
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979.
Preston Stovall, The Single-Minded Animal: Shared Intentionality, Normativity, and the Foundations of Discursive Cognition, Routledge, New York, 2022.
Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994.
John McDowell, Mind and World, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994.
Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”. In Robert Garland Colodny (ed.), Frontiers of Science and Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1962.
[1] Hereafter quotes from this source will be followed simply by the page number in parentheses.