In “Steps toward Origins of Propositional Thought”, Burge claims that animals of different species are capable of making deductive inferences. According to Burge, that is why propositional thought is extended beyond the human mind to the minds of other kinds of creatures. But, as I argue here, the inferential capacities of animals do not guarantee a propositional structure. According to my argument, propositional content has predicates that might involve a quantificational structure. And the absence of this structure in animal thought (...) might explain some of the differences with the propositional content of human thought. (shrink)

In this paper, I reject that animal reasoning, negation in particular, necessarily involves the representation of absences, as suggested by Bermúdez (2003, 2006, 2007), since this would still work as a logical negation (unavailable for non-linguistic creatures). False belief, pretense, and communication experiments show that non-human animals (at least some primates) have difficulties representing absent entities or properties. I offer an alternative account resorting to the sub-symbolic similarity judgments proposed by Vigo & Allen (2009) and expectations: animal proto-negation takes place (...) through the incompatibility between an expected and the actual representation. Finally, I propose that the expectation paradigm be extrapolated to other experi-ments in cognitive psychology (both with pre-linguistic children and animals) in order to design fair experiments that test other minds considering their true abilities. (shrink)

In this essay, I deal with the problem of the attribution of psychological predicates to non-human animals. The first section illustrates three research topics where it has become scientifically legitimate to explain the conduct of non-human animals by means of the attribution of psychological predicates. The second section discusses several philosophical objections to the legitimacy of such attributions provided by central thinkers from the last decades. I try to show that these objections —which are related among other questions to the (...) holism of the mental, the indeterminacy of the attributions, and the strangeness of animal concepts— can be alleviated. In the third section, I propose to adopt a literalist view of the attributions in the sense articulated by Figdor. At the same time, I argue that one must draw limits to the conceptual change forwarded by her literalist view, taking into account holistic considerations and the fact that the psychological concepts must retain their core notes. (shrink)

En este artículo propongo una variedad de conceptualismo contra la objeción no conceptualista de acuerdo con la cual los enfoques no conceptualistas no serían capaces de explicar apropiadamente la percepción animal. En primer lugar, sintetizo la posición de McDowell sobre las mentes animales. En segundo lugar, señalo algunos problemas conceptuales en ella. En tercer lugar, sugiero una extensión del conceptualismo al reino animal a fin de resolver las inconsistencias de McDowell y de acomodar cierta evidencia empírica acerca de algunas capacidades (...) intelectuales atribuidas a algunos animales. Finalmente, presento dos argumentos para rechazar el no conceptualismo. La posición resultante es una versión mínima o deflacionada de conceptualismo de acuerdo con la cual ciertos animales no humanos son capaces de participar del espacio lógico de las razones aun cuando no sean capaces de justificar sus creencias o acciones. (shrink)