Single-Minded Animal

Preston Stovall is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Philosophy and Social Science at the University of Hradec Králové. He received his B.A. from Montana State University, his M.A. from Texas A&M University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. He works in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and metaphysics, informed by a reading of the German idealists and the American pragmatists.

• Introduction: Rationality, Autonomy, and Shared IntentionalityPart I1. The Lamp of Reason and the Mirror of Nature2. Evolutionary Anthropology and Shared Practical Picturing3. Deontic Picturing and Obedience to Linguistic NormsPart II4. Discursive Deontic Cognition 5. Understanding What We Ought and Shall Do6. From the Grunts and Groans of the Cave to the Light of Discursive Cognition: Climbing Jones’s Ladder7. On the Scientific Image of the Foundations of Discursive Cognition Part III 8. Discursive and Nondiscursive Cognition: Questions of Conceptual and Ontological Priority9. Comparing Plan-Conditional World-Mind Expressions of Shared Intentionality with Truth-Conditional Mind-World Representations of Shared Intentionality10. The Power of SpiritConclusion: Systematic and Edifying Philosophy Reconsidered

“Stovall fills an important hole in the Sellars-Brandom account of normativity, the question of how normative rationality is acquired developmentally, by appealing to work in cognitive science on collective intentionality and sensitivity to norms, and by introducing a novel analysis of collective planning talk. This is an intriguing and sophisticated account of a central issue in philosophy.”Stephen Turner, University of South Florida, USA"Stovall’s is one of the very few accounts seeking to connect empirical and philosophical approaches to human cognition that gives normativity pride of place. This is an enormously important book that could potentially lead the philosophy of cognitive science to new and productive insights."Michael Tomasello, Duke University, USA"Preston Stovall's book is rich in details and covers in broad strokes some very important themes within philosophy of language and intentionality."R. Krishnaswamy, The Philosophical Quarterly“The Single-Minded Animal is an ambitious, wide-ranging, and admirably interdisciplinary book, taking on a vast range of philosophical and scientific work . . . while we may indeed be single-minded animals, in his sense, in this impressive book, Stovall has shown us the virtue and fruitfulness of philosophical and scientific broad-mindedness.”Brandon Beasley, Metascience“Preston Stovall’s The Single-Minded Animal is an ambitious and original book . . . Stovall’s arguments are detailed and subtle, deserving careful scholarly attention in the philosophy of mind and language.”Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews