Man as a normative creature

The perennial question of what makes humans distinctive from other animal species has been given a number of well-known answers by both philosophers and scientists, the chief among them being reason, language and culture. In our project, we aim to develop and substantiate a novel approach to this question that has been underexplored so far: we, human beings, are distinctively normative creatures. More specifically, our core hypotheses are: 1) the evolution of the species-specific ability to institute, endorse and follow the rules put humans on a track on which they have diverged from other animals, and 2) this ability, in turn, enabled the distinctively human modes of thought, communication, and cooperative culture. Crucially, these hypotheses will be developed and scrutinized not only on the level of philosophical analyses but also by systematic drawing on meta-analyses of the up-to-date research in behavioral and cognitive sciences that has generated intriguing hypotheses about why and how this ability could evolve, by what proximal mechanisms (psychology, neurophysiology) it is produced, and how it underlies human reasoning, language and culture. In particular, we shall relate our investigations to the results of empirical/experimental research on the ontogeny and phylogeny of social cognition, collective agency, thinking, and linguistic communication (studied in the field of comparative psychology, cognitive ethology, evolutionary, developmental, and social psychology, evolutionary game theory, evolutionary anthropology, and linguistics). Fostering in this way the cross-fertilization between recent scientific research on human sociability and philosophical analyses of rules/norms, the project promises to stimulate a change in the traditional way of conceiving human nature.

This project grows from the previous research by Jaroslav Peregrin and his colleagues carried out partly at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences and partly at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Hradec Králové, especially within the framework of inferentialism, a philosophical doctrine proposed by Bob Brandom. It aims at assuming a still more general vantage point on rules and normativity and at their studies within a naturalistic framework proceeded by the sciences.