The underdetermination of intentional explanation by motor behavior complicates inferences drawn from preserved artifacts in the archaeological record to intentions in their production. Without knowledge of a producer's intentions, inferences drawn from those intentions to required cognitive abilities for having those intentions is also complicated.
: I argue that, on plausible assumptions, anomalous entails monism epiphenomenalism of the mental. The plausible assumptions are (1) events are particulars; (2) causal relations are extensional; (3) mental properties are epiphrastic. A principle defender of anomalous monism, Donald Davidson, acknowledges that anomalous monism is committed to (1) and (2). I argue that it is committed to (3) as well. Given (1), (2), and (3), epiphenomenalism of the mental falls out immediately. Three attempts to salvage anomalous monism from epiphenomenalism of the mental are examined and rejected. I conclude with reflections on the status of non‐reductive physicalism.
Cognitive archaeologists regularly ask: Unlike other tool-using animals and earlier hominins, how did humans, and perhaps Neandertals, acquire reflective awareness of themselves and their agency? This chapter proposes one part of an answer to that question by focusing on a subset of conscious and attentional states, namely, those conscious states that are states of reflective self-awareness and joint attention. It argues that joint attention played an important causal role in the development of reflective self-awareness and that both joint attention and reflective self-awareness probably became sedimented in hominin populations by no later than 100,000 years ago.
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