Hypothetical Cognition and Coalition Enforcement. Language, Morality, and Violence

The so-called coalition enforcement hypothesis sees humans as self-domesticated animals engaged in the continuous activity of building morality, incorporating at the same time punishment policies. Its main intellectual value stresses the role in human and animal groups of more or less stable stages of cognitive cooperation through morality and related inexorable violence: morality and violence are seen as strictly intertwined with social and institutional aspects, implicit in the activity of cognitive niche construction. Hypothetical thinking and abduction are often embedded in various kinds of the so-called fallacious reasoning: to better grasp its philosophical status I think it is intriguing to stress that hypothetical cognition might be favored for reasons of – so to say – “social epistemology” and moral reasoning. Indeed, in evolution, coalition enforcement works through the building of social cognitive niches seen as new ways of diverse human adaptation, where guessing hypotheses is central and where guessing hypotheses is occurring as it can, depending on the cognitive/moral options human beings adopt. Basically, the coalition enforcement framework refers to cooperation between related and unrelated human animals to produce significant mutual benefit that exceeds costs and is thereby potentially adaptive for the cooperators.