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Late Pleistocene Dual Process Minds

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Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy

Part of the book series: Synthese Library ((SYLI,volume 433))

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Abstract

The global dispersal of prehistoric ancient humans from Africa to North America, and the existence of artistic innovation evidenced in the Late Pleistocene are, by now, parts of a familiar and fascinating story. But the explanation of how our human career was possible cries out for clarification. In this chapter, I argue that dual process theory can provide the needed explanation. My claim will be that the advent of System-2 reasoning running offline, aided by executive cognitive control and language, and facilitated by neural plasticity, made possible the remarkable human dispersal from Africa to North America by way of the Middle East and Asia. System-1 modular adaptations, together with System-2 reasoning, gave rise to the flexible, culturally-informed, mental operations that were essential to shape the psychologically modern mind. The result was, inter alia, the surprising Late Pleistocene dispersal of ancient humans to North America.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Clarke (2004, ch 4–5), for a detailed summary of this literature. The Wason Selection Task is the most intensively studied reasoning task in the history of psychology. It involves determining whether subjects reason in accordance with modus tollens, a standard deductive reasoning rule, in a variety of experimental set-ups.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jesse Prinz and Edouard Machery for comments on the earlier version of this paper that was read at the Digging Deeper: Archaeological and Philosophical Perspectives conference (December 1-3, 2017). I would especially like to thank Anton Killin and Sean Allen-Hermanson for comments on several drafts of this paper. Those comments are deeply appreciated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Murray Clarke

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  1. Murray Clarke
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Correspondence to Murray Clarke .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Mount Allison University, Sackville NB, Canada, School of Philosophy and Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australian National University, Acton ACT, Australia, Acton, ACT, Australia

    Anton Killin

  2. Department of Philosophy, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA

    Sean Allen-Hermanson

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Clarke, M. (2021). Late Pleistocene Dual Process Minds. In: Killin, A., Allen-Hermanson, S. (eds) Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy. Synthese Library, vol 433. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61052-4_9

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