Palmer’s extremely rich and wide ranging target paper defends a bold thesis; that social minds exist. Apparently, a social mind is not just a set or collection or conglomerate of individual minds. A group of individuals that just happen to think the same thoughts, even all at the same time and in perfect synchrony – whether by accident or design –would presumably not qualify as a social mind. To be a social mind literally (not metaphorically) requires forming a more cohesive sort of unity. There’s a lot that could be said about the very idea of a social mind, so conceived. Palmer highlights the proposal that minds sometimes extend. Defenders of this view try to show that when the necessary completion of some task requires cognitive processing involving the manipulation of external resources, there is no good reason to think that the boundary of mind does not include these external resources. If so, what should we say about cases in which the external resources include other minds – for example, as when couples rely on one another to complete trains of thought? Such activity surely requires forming a more cohesive union than simply co-cognizing with another – i.e. thinking along the same lines as them or thinking thoughts with the same content as theirs. But, unless one also tries to include ordinary conversations under this heading (which would be a stretch at best) it is not clear how widespread such forms of coupling are – either in fiction or ‘real’ life. And although Palmer does not claim that all social minds are of a piece, it is worth observing that his detailed analysis of the so-called Middlemarch mind reveals that it is not a case of a social mind of the sort just described. Indeed in stressing its norm-engendering role when reflecting that society’s view of things, the latter looks as if it might be better understood as a kind of cognitive niche that reliably shapes individual minds in its purview rather than as literally being a mind with thoughts of its own. In short, while I find Palmer’s suggestion intriguing – and I believe I have some handle on what is required to qualify as a social mind – it is clear that the exact nature of such minds (if any exist) and the requirements for being one needs further and more detailed explication...