Single-minded animals sharing intentionality and norms: Preston Stovall: The single-minded animal: shared intentionality, normativity, and the foundations of discursive cognition. New York: Routledge, 2022, 398 pp, $136.00 HB, $42.36 PB.

Preston Stovall's book, "The Single-Minded Animal," offers an interdisciplinary perspective on human cognition, incorporating philosophy, evolutionary biology, psychology, and neuroscience. Stovall argues that what distinguishes human cognition from that of other animals is its normative and discursive character. He introduces the concept of single-mindedness, which involves the rejection of choices incompatible with one's chosen course of thought or action. While the book's ambitious scope and novel ideas are commendable, some critics question the compatibility of Stovall's claims with other philosophical and scientific approaches, as well as the relationship between neurophysiological "picturing" and discursive symbolic meanings. Nonetheless, the book highlights the value of broad-mindedness in philosophical and scientific inquiry. [Extracted from the article]