Many people think the mind evolved. Some of them think it had to evolve. They think the mind not only has a history, but a history essential to its very existence.

Of those who think it had to evolve, some think it because they discern, or think they discern, a normative quality to mental affairs, a way mental states and activities {qua mental) are supposed to be, that can only be understood by conceiving of mentality as a product of an evolutionary process. Without a process like natural selection (or learning), processes capable of grounding a difference between how things are and how they are supposed to be, there is nothing to provide the requisite contrast with existing fact, the sort of contrast implied by speaking (as we do in cognitive affairs) of beliefs, perceptions, and inferences as correct or incorrect, mistaken or fallacious, right and wrong, veridical and illusory. If this normative quality is really essential to cognitive affairs, and history is the only source of normativity, then history is to minds what it is to fossils. Without the right history, there aren't any.

Since the arguments for this view are not entirely convincing—even to someone like me who accepts their conclusion—and the consequences of the view, I keep being told, are preposterous, I take this occasion to re-examine the matter. If I am to continue believing not just that the mind is a product of historical development, but, like a fossil, can only exist in that way, I need better reasons than I've already got.