When Minds Converse: A Social Genealogy of the Human Soul

We are distinguished as a species by how we deliberate with one another and within ourselves about what judgments to form, what conclusions to draw, and what perceptions to trust; and about how we ought to treat our fellows, when we ought to hold ourselves or others to account, and what constitutes our identity as persons. Do these capacities come from our nature alone? Or are they skills that our nature has allowed us to master in the exercise of practices that are primarily social and only mental in the second place? This book argues for the society-first view of the human mind and soul. It does so by relying on a counterfactual but empirically informed genealogy to explore how such practices and skills would evolve without planning among certain humanoid counterparts. The main idea is this: that equipped to employ even a simple sort of language, those humanoids would more or less inevitably come to make judgments, practice reasoning and probe perception, that they would be led to make commitments and evaluations, hold themselves and one another to their values, and assume the status and relationships of persons. The argument consists in an extended thought experiment, an imaginative philosophical narrative, in which those developments are derived and documented. It may not teach a lesson about the precise origin of those capacities in our own kind, but it promises to tell us a lot about their nature and role in human as well as humanoid life.