In his work A Natural History of Human Thinking, Michael Tomasello depicts thinking as a form of cooperation. Presenting at the same time a conceptual schema enriched with empirical data, he outlines a natural history of thinking in particular, indicating how the process of socialization and new, unique manifestations of human interaction alter the forms of thinking, from the ones we share with primates, through increasingly complex forms characteristic of the primitive man, to these of the contemporary man. In A Natural History of Human Morality Tomasello presents a similar structure, showing morality as a form of human cooperation in which, according to Tomasello, Homo sapiens, seen as “ultra-social primates”, developed new and uniquely human forms of social interaction and organization which, as a result, required new and also very specific for Homo sapiens psychological mechanisms in cognitive processes, social interaction and self-control. While in A Natural History of Human Thinking Tomasello’s main hypothesis is the Shared Intentionality Hypothesis, in A Natural History of Human Morality it is the Interdependence Hypothesis. Thus, this unique structure of abilities and motivation is the feature which distinguishes us from other primates. This essay aims to extract and outline this structure, focusing more on A Natural History of Human Morality.

How should we understand intentionality in the physical world? This question may be further divided into at least two other: How to understand intentional states in the physical world? (And if we refer to the entirety of such states as the mind then our question will take on the following form: How should we understand the mind in the physical world) and How to understand intentional content in the physical world? One of the most important projects in modern philosophy of mind and cognitive science consists in naturalisation of the content of mental states. The prevalent concept in the thus understood content naturalisation programme was the reductionist conception. In the article I present one of the proposals of content naturalisation by Daniel D. Hutto and Glenda Satne from the article The Natural Origins of Content. On the one hand, they reject the project of naturalising the content of mental states which is conceived as a reduction of semantic properties of contents of mental states solely to physical causative relations, properties or social mechanisms. On the other hand, Daniel D. Hutto and Glenda Satne present a research programme which does not seek a reductionist explanation of content but rather examines how the content emerged in the natural world – the natural origins of content. Although the authors describe the main framework of such a programme, they do not venture to answer the question whether such a theory even exists. In this article I am going to present the concept of Michael Tomaello most explicitly expressed in his Natural History of Human Thinking as a promising example of such a theory.