The Skill Hypothesis: A Variant
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Kim Sterelny
Abstract
The basic idea of Birch’s analysis is plausible: normative guidance began in agents’ assessment of their own craft skills. But I suggest developing that idea in a different way. I suggest that proto-normative affect plays its guiding role diachronically, in the development of those skills, rather than synchronically, in modulating their moment-by-moment execution. More importantly, I suggest a different pathway to normative affect’s direction at second and third parties. Normative response became social in the context of skilled collaborative activities, for in those activities others’ failures have material consequences for each agent. In such collaborations, all have reason to care about others’ skill, or lack of it.
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Title
- Contents
- Editorial
- Symposium on Capital and Ideology
- Accumulating Capital: Capital and Ideology after Capital in the Twenty-First Century
- Ideology and Institutions in the Evolution of Capital
- Is More Mittelstand the Answer? Firm Size and the Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
- Tensions in Piketty’s Participatory Socialism: Reconciling Justice and Democracy
- Justice, Power, and Participatory Socialism: on Piketty’s Capital and Ideology
- More Lessons to Learn: Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology and Alternative Archives of Social Experience
- About Capital, Socialism and Ideology
- General Part
- The Role of Culture in Evolutionary Theories of Human Cooperation
- Discussion: Jonathan Birch, Toolmaking and the Origin of Normative Cognition
- The Skilful Origins of Human Normative Cognition
- If Skill is Normative, Then Norms are Everywhere
- Norms Require Not Just Technical Skill and Social Learning, but Real Cooperation
- The Skill Hypothesis: A Variant
- Normative Guidance, Evaluative Guidance, and Skill
- Refining the Skill Hypothesis: Replies to Andrews/Westra, Tomasello, Sterelny, and Railton
Articles in the same Issue
- Title
- Contents
- Editorial
- Symposium on Capital and Ideology
- Accumulating Capital: Capital and Ideology after Capital in the Twenty-First Century
- Ideology and Institutions in the Evolution of Capital
- Is More Mittelstand the Answer? Firm Size and the Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
- Tensions in Piketty’s Participatory Socialism: Reconciling Justice and Democracy
- Justice, Power, and Participatory Socialism: on Piketty’s Capital and Ideology
- More Lessons to Learn: Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology and Alternative Archives of Social Experience
- About Capital, Socialism and Ideology
- General Part
- The Role of Culture in Evolutionary Theories of Human Cooperation
- Discussion: Jonathan Birch, Toolmaking and the Origin of Normative Cognition
- The Skilful Origins of Human Normative Cognition
- If Skill is Normative, Then Norms are Everywhere
- Norms Require Not Just Technical Skill and Social Learning, but Real Cooperation
- The Skill Hypothesis: A Variant
- Normative Guidance, Evaluative Guidance, and Skill
- Refining the Skill Hypothesis: Replies to Andrews/Westra, Tomasello, Sterelny, and Railton
