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Life on Earth will eventually come to an end. The thought expressed in the previous sentence is about a point in time that is not known to the individual entertaining the thought. This paper is concerned with the nature of such temporal thoughts. We propose that the capacity to mentally represent thoughts about non‐specific temporal intervals is a unique aspect of human cognition. We suggest that this capacity is a consequence of the fact that human grammar defines/generates sentences involving binding of temporal variables and quantification over intervals. This leads to a view of language evolution as a transition between logics.

Life on Earth will eventually come to an end. The thought expressed in the previous sentence is about a point in time that is not known to the individual entertaining the thought. This paper is concerned with the nature of such temporal thoughts. We propose that the capacity to mentally represent thoughts about non-specific temporal intervals is a unique aspect of human cognition. We suggest that this capacity is a consequence of the fact that human grammar defines/generates sentences involving binding of temporal variables and quantification over intervals. This leads to a view of language evolution as transition between logics.

This paper is about kinds of reasoning that are unique to humans. Distinguishing between direct (e.g. Modus Ponens, Conjunction Elimination) and indirect (e.g. Hypothetical Reasoning, Reductio ad Absurdum) forms of reasoning, we suggest that humans and only humans are capable of the latter. We provide evidence that non-human great apes (from here on: apes) can do reasoning, but the evidence we have of their reasoning is compatible with it being direct only. Evidence for employment of indirect forms of reasoning in human cognition comes from natural language semantics/pragmatics and from research on psychological defense mechanisms. Indirect forms of reasoning require access to earlier stages of computation, i.e. access to the derivational history of the reasoning in question, which relies on extended involvement of the procedural memory. We tentatively suggest that the uniqueness of humans in various forms of reasoning is related to a boost in the procedural memory within the evolution of homo sapiens.

There appear to be some qualitative differences between the conceptual repertoire of humans and that of other animals. We propose that the mental operation of Lambda Abstraction may shed some light on this distinction. More specifically, we claim that humans and only humans make use of mental representations constructed with the rule of Lambda Abstraction, which enables them to entertain concepts that can be used for entities that are not necessarily within their domain of experience. In addition to defining new types of concepts, Lambda Abstraction has played a crucial role in unlocking the potential for semantically consequential Internal Merge and quantification. This paper highlights the fact that research on language evolution should focus more on the transformative cognitive consequences of the interface between syntax and thought systems.

Measurement is about finding structure in a set of objects (or events). It is about associating a set of objects whose structure we wish to understand with a set of formal objects, typically numbers, whose structure we understand. Underlying measurements are the four types of scales (nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio), which differ in how much information they provide about the objects being measured. These scale types are classified into those that involve a unit of measurement (interval and ratio) and those that do not (nominal and ordinal). In this paper, we make use of this distinction to formulate a hypothesis about the nature of human concepts. We suggest that humans and only humans mentally represent concepts that rely on measurement scales that invoke a unit (i.e. interval and ratio scales). We test this uniqueness claim in the context of social cognition and show that this hypothesis provides a principled account of why certain forms of sociality are only observed in human relations. We highlight the fact that the significance of measurement scales in the study of cognition in general and human cognition in particular is yet to be appreciated.