| One of the central problems in comparative psychology is to explain how humans came to have such exceptional cognitive abilities -- we alone have sophisticated languages, cultures, tool use, and scientific reasoning -- despite our recent common ancestry with our closest primate relatives. A promising hypothesis is that humans alone evolved the capacity to theorize, to reason about theoretical entities, events, and relations in a way analogous to theory usage in scientific practice. In this dissertation, I examine this hypothesis, the theory-theory of human uniqueness.;I begin by elucidating a historical debate between Charles Darwin and C. Lloyd Morgan regarding our mental continuity with animals in which they employ competing principles of parsimony that are still influential in cognitive ethology today. I argue that these principles are actually instantiations of the same vera causa principle of parsimony and that the disagreement stems from their conflicting theories of the human mind, with Morgan forwarding a view similar to that of theory-theorists today.;Next, I turn to the contemporary developments of the account. After formulating the most plausible version of the theory-theory, I raise serious challenges to the plausibility and testability of this view. I demonstrate that a common argument that has been used to deny that animals are theorists threatens to undermine the claim that theorizing plays some special epistemic role in human cognition, in part because it bears strong similarities to an argument in the philosophy of science, Hempel's theoretician's dilemma, which purports to show that theorizing is superfluous.;After developing the strongest version of this challenge, I first show how several attempts to resolve this dilemma fail to adequately resolve the dilemma for the purposes of the theory-theory. Then, I propose two functions that theories play in human cognition and demonstrate how we can use these roles to make sense of several common intuitive theories. Lastly, I exploit insights in causal modeling to propose a novel variant of the triangulation methodology in cognitive science to test for the presence of theoretical beliefs in light of the functions that they play. |
