Avant, Vol. XI, No. 2, doi: 10.26913/avant.2020.02.17
published under license CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Marcin Trybulec 
Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin
marcin.trybulec@umcs.pl
Received 1 June 2020; accepted 5 August 2020; published 3 October 2020 Download full text
The aim of the special issue “Understanding Social Cognition” is to transfer Aristotelian claim about humans as social beings from the political into the cognitive domain, as well as explore its implications for philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences. Recent decades have made it increasingly evident that cognition is deeply embedded into the collective lives of groups, institutions and societies. Being raised by others, cooperating and coming into conflict with them, inheriting material and institutional environments do not happen by chance but constitute the essential features of the way we are. The Aristotelian dictum that “he who by nature and not by a mere accident is without a state, is either above humanity, or below it” (Politics, 1253a2-4) has been echoed by recent trends in situated cognition, largely inspired by Daniel Dennett, who argues that “Every human mind (…) is a product not just of natural selection but of cultural redesign of enormous proportions” (Dennett, 1996, p. 153).
Keywords: social cognition; situated cognition; group mind; mindreading; cognition as socio-material practice; mind as cultural artefact; Daniel C. Dennett
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