Angelica Kaufmann

Dunbar’s emphasis on dyadic relationships in group formation overlooks the roles of interdependence and joint commitment in social cohesion. We challenge his premise by highlighting the importance of group-level processes, particularly where top-down group pressures like cooperative breeding and out-group threat can induce joint commitment as an alternate means to sustain group cohesion.

The sense of commitment directs us toward our goals, shielding us from distractions and temptations, and thereby facilitates a wide range of cooperative activities and institutions characteristic of our species. Building upon recent research, this paper identifies cognitive, motivational, and social factors that elicit or enhance the sense of commitment. It surveys studies on cognitive and motivational mechanisms, including control mechanisms, that may support the sense of commitment. This research is organised into a framework that enables us to relate these distinct mechanisms to one another. It also allows us to formulate novel hypotheses about how these mechanisms may interact to help us stay on course toward our goals .

Social entities only exist in virtue of collective acceptance or recognition, or acknowledgement by two or more individuals in the context of joint activities. Joint activities are made possible by the coordination of plans for action, and the coordination of plans for action is made possible by the capacity for collective intentionality. This paper investigates how primitive is the capacity that nonhuman animals have to create social entities, by individuating how primitive is the capacity for collective intentionality. I present a novel argument for the evolutionary primitiveness of social entities, by showing that the collective intentions upon which these social entities are created and shared are metaphysically reducible to the relevant individual intentions.

Mind blanking is a mental state in which attention does not bring any perceptual input into conscious awareness. As this state is still largely unexplored, we suggest that a comprehensive understanding of mind blanking can be achieved through a multifaceted approach combining self‐assessment methods, neuroimaging and neuromodulation. In this article, we explain how electroencephalography and transcranial magnetic stimulation could be combined to help determine whether mind blanking is associated with a lack of mental content or a lack of linguistically or conceptually determinable mental content. We also question whether mind blanking occurs spontaneously or intentionally and whether these two forms are instantiated by the same or different neural correlates.

Quilty-Dunn et al. claim that all complex infant and animal reasoning implicate language-of-thought hypothesis (LOTH)-like structures. We agree with the authors that the mental life of animals can be explained in representationalist terms, but we disagree with their idea that the complexity of mental representations is best explained by appealing to abstract concepts, and instead, we explain that it doesn't need to.

The multidimensional framework to the study of consciousness, which comes as an alternative to a single sliding scale model, offers a set of experimental paradigms for investigating dimensions of animal consciousness, acknowledging the compelling urge for a novel approach. One of these dimensions investigates whether non-human animals can flexibly and spontaneously plan for a future event, and for future desires, without relying on reinforcement learning. This is a critical question since different intentional structures for action in non-human animals are described as served by different neural mechanisms underpinning the capacity to represent temporal properties. And a lack of appreciation of this variety of intentional structures and neural correlates has led many experts to doubt that animals have access to temporal reasoning and to not recognize temporality as a mark of consciousness, and as a psychological resource for their life. With respect to this, there is a significant body of ethological evidence for planning abilities in non-human animals, too often overlooked, and that instead should be taken into serious account. This could contribute to assigning consciousness profiles, across and within species, that should be tailored according to an implemented and expansive use of the multidimensional framework. This cannot be fully operational in the absence of an additional tag to its dimensions of variations: theexperience-specificityof consciousness.

Tomasello claims that we lack convincing evidence that nonhuman animals manifest a sense of moral obligation (i.e., the concept of fairness) in their group activities. The philosophical analysis of distinctive evidence from ethology, namely group hunting practices among chimpanzees, can help the author appreciate the distinctive character of this behaviour as a display of fairness put into practice.