séminaire PhilSciCog

Résumée :My aim is to sketch an ambitious but pursuit-worthy research program: comparative cognitive paleoanthropology. The discovery of multiple hominin species in the relatively-late Pleistocene, coupled with a flattened and increasingly diverse picture of the evolution of behavioural modernity in our own lineage, raises an enticing possibility. Specifically, studying different behavioral, cognitive and cultural capacities across a set of evolutionarily divergent but still significantly human lineages. That is, a comparative cognitive paleoanthropology. Such a program takes it methodological cue from the phylogenetic analysis of cognitive/behavioural characters seen in comparative psychology. It takes its characters from our species’ close cousins inferred from cognitive paleoanthropology. These are then combined to get a sense of the range of variability in cognitive capacities across our close relatives. While there are serious epistemic challenges to such a science, including a lack of specimens, the difficulty of inferring cognitive and behavioral traits from them, as well as the ephemeral, unstable nature of behaviour and cognition itself, I’ll nonetheless provide preliminary reasons to think comparative cognitive paleoanthropology is worth the attempt.