Mattia Gallotti (LSE): “Co-Cognition and Social Discourse”

Abstract: When people achieve knowledge of things by sharing mental resources, they think thoughts whose linguistic expression makes salient the use of the first-person plural pronoun, ‘we’. Jane Heal (2013) has argued that considerations about the relevance of acts of shared (‘we’) intentionality, or ‘co-cognition’, suggest that the notion of mentality recommended by (social) anti-individualism ought to be privileged in accounts of psychological knowledge. In this paper, I challenge Heal’s argument by distinguishing two routes to understanding claims about the scope and philosophical significance of acts of co-cognition. Both routes lend credibility to aspects of an anti-individualistic view of the nature of thoughts about others’ minds. However, neither provides decisive support for the conclusion that a ‘co-cognitivist’ account of psychological concepts provides support for anti-individualism.

Mattia Gallotti is an LSE Fellow in Philosophy.

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