Abstract

This study critically reflects and assesses a recent debate over the nature of uniquely human cognition. The two standpoints in this debate are advocated by Michael Tomasello and Henrike Moll. Both agree that _shared intentionality_ is a key difference-maker, affording qualitatively new mental processes that support new forms of cooperative sociality and cumulative culture and thoroughly _transform_ human cognition. But Moll argues that Tomasello is infirm in his commitment to the transformative impact of shared intentionality on human cognition, flirting with a conflicting, _additive_ account of shared intentionality as making a key difference only in the social domain. On her own view, human-unique social development innervated by human-unique forms of shared intentionality makes a difference across the board, and all the way down. This, we are told, is a reason not only to reject additive accounts, but to accept cognitive discontinuity across the board. Having reconstructed the two standpoints, I argue that Tomasello develops a consistently transformative approach immune to most objections leveled by Moll and in key respects more modest and plausible than her own alternative proposal. And I draw from this debate some general methodological lessons for theorizing about the nature and scope of human-unique cognition.