According to the shared intentionality hypothesis proposed by Michael Tomasello, two cognitive upgrades – joint and collective intentionality, respectively – make human thinking unique. Joint intentionality, in particular, is a mindset supposed to account for our early, species-specific capacity to participate in collaborative activities involving two (or a few) agents. In order to elucidate such activities and their proximate cognitive-motivational mechanism, Tomasello draws on philosophical accounts of shared intentionality. I argue that his deference to such cognitively demanding accounts of shared intentional activities is problematic if his theoretical ambition is in part to show that and how early (prelinguistic and precultural) capacities for joint action contribute to the development of higher cognitive capacities.

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This paper focuses on the connection between inferentialist philosophy and inferentialism in the epistemology of testimony. In contemporary epistemology there is a debate between inferentialists and anti-inferentialists; inferentialists argue that the adoption of a testimonial belief is the result of an inferential process in which the premises include beliefs about the testifier's trustworthiness. This paper defends the view that if assertions are testimonies, the best candidate for a theory of assertion is a normative theory, particularly a theory held by inferentialist philosophers in which assertions come with certain commitments. A Brandomian inferentialist need not be an inferentialist in the epistemology of testimony, who has a skeptical attitude and who searches for inferential justification for the testifier's competence or sincerity in order to believe what the speaker claims. However, this paper argues that the normative attitude emphasized by Robert Brandom and Jaroslav Peregrin and the evaluative attitude towards the testifier are related. By utilizing Gottlob Frege's and W.V. Quine's semantic views, it elaborates the idea that the adoption of a testimonial belief involves the recipient's seeing the testifier as a certain kind of person; still, the evaluative attitude towards the testifier need not generate an explicit premise into the inferential chain.

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