HERE. The book looks like it will contain too many problematic Chomskyan presuppositions for my tastes, but the review by Barbara King raises some really important points.
King calls the root of higher cognition "time travel." I know that some philosophers have been theorizing about "offline intelligence" and also the important role of counterfactual reasoning. (1) I think recursivity is a consequence of these deeper patterns (and I'm not at all convinced that all languages are recursive in Chomsky's sense, e.g. the Pirahã language), (2) I think that King's time travel examples show that higher animals do engage in kind of offline, counterfactual reasoning.
This is important to me because I think that offline counterfactual reasoning is exactly the place where it makes sense to attribut beliefs in a non-anthropomorphic way. This adds another layer to Mark Okrent's fine analysis of intentionality in Rational Animals, and my student Joel Musser and I are writing a paper about it. One of Mark Lance's colleagues is working on the importance of counterfactuals in basic reasoning, and I'm going to bug Mark for the guy's name and then e-mail him for a draft today.
