Camp (2009) distinguishes two varieties of conceptual recombination. One of them is full-blown or (as I prefer to call it) spontaneous recombination. The other is causal-counterfactual recombination. She suggests that while human animals recombine their concepts in a full-blown way, many non-human animals are capable of conceptual recombinability but only of the causal-counterfactual kind. In this paper, I argue that there is conceptual space to draw further sub-distinctions on how different animals may recombine their concepts. More specifically, I propose to (...) differentiate between a) narrow causal-counterfactual recombination; b) broad causal-counterfactual recombination; c) lean spontaneous recombination; d) robust spontaneous recombination. Afterwards, I focus on how these distinctions relate to several previous philosophical ideas on the representational capacities of non-human animals. I also provide several empirical examples suggesting that some animals display one or another of these four ways of recombining concepts, at least in some contexts. (shrink)

Philosophers have understood propositional contents in many different ways, some of them imposing stricter demands on cognition than others. In this paper, I want to characterize a specific sub-type of propositional content that shares many core features with full-blown propositional contents while lacking others. I will call them modest propositional contents, and I will be especially interested in examining which behavioral patterns would justify their attribution to non-human animals. To accomplish these tasks, I will begin by contrasting modest propositional contents (...) with primitive feature-placing contents: a kind of content that, according to some philosophers, can explain the behavior of non-human animals. I will examine which cognitive abilities are involved in having mental states with each of these contents and which sorts of behavioral patterns would provide evidence that an animal has one of them or another. Finally, I will present some empirical evidence which strongly suggests that some non-human animals have mental states with modest propositional contents. (shrink)

According to Hutto and Satne, 521–536, 2015), an “essential tension” plagues contemporary neo-Pragmatist accounts of mental contents: their explanation of the emergence and constitution of intentional mental contents is circular. After identifying the problem, they also propose a solution: what neo-Pragmatists need to do, to overcome circularity, is to appeal to a primitive content-free variety of intentionality, different from the full-blown intentionality of propositional attitudes. In this paper, I will argue that, in addition to the problem of circularity, there is (...) another important problem that both neo-Pragmatist accounts, and Hutto and Satnes’s refinement of them, should also deal with: their difficulty to accommodate a host of recent empirical evidence and theoretical developments on the interdisciplinary field of animal cognition. I will call this difficulty the objection from animal minds, and I will present several arguments designed to show that, even though the notion of primitive intentionality, introduced by Hutto and Satne, may be useful to account for some of the most basic ways of dealing with the environment of nonhuman animals, it falls short of providing an adequate explanation of the full-range of cognitive capacities and behavioral dispositions that many animal species display. Thus, their proposal ends up being insufficient to help neo-Pragmatist approaches to overcome the problem of animal minds. Finally, I will suggest that overcoming this objection requires attributing to non-human animals some basic, yet content involving, kinds of intentional mental states. (shrink)

The debate on concept possession in animals has moved at a very abstract level, with scant detailed consideration of case studies in animal behaviour. In this paper, we go against this trend by examining a specific prey defence mechanism, thanatosis or death-feigning, in order to determine what it can tell us about the minds of the predators it targets. We argue that thanatosis gives us evidence of conceptual abilities in predators. In particular, we defend that the best available explanation for (...) the evolution of thanatosis comes from positing that the predators whose cognition acted as selection pressure and shaped thanatosis displays satisfy the concept possession requirements of distance, inferentiality, aspectuality, generality, and a minimal semantic net. Moreover, we argue that the semantic content of the concept targeted by thanatosis likely corresponds to a minimal concept of death. We end on a methodological note, by showing how the consideration of case studies can help move this philosophical debate forward, while also generating concrete empirical predictions that can be put to the test, thus favouring interdisciplinary collaborations. (shrink)

El presente trabajo tiene dos objetivos centrales. Primero caracterizaré una variante de pragmatismo conceptual según la cual algunos conceptos deben entenderse como habilidades para identificar sustancias e identificar propiedades del entorno, y mostraré que quien cuenta con esas dos habilidades satisface, en grados diversos en cada caso, distintos requisitos centrales para la posesión de conceptos. Posteriormente defenderé la viabilidad de extender este enfoque a los animales no humanos, apelando a evidencia empírica que indica que distintas especies son capaces de identificar (...) sustancias de su entorno y que sugiere la presencia de habilidades para identificar propiedades en algunos primates y pájaros. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue that chimpanzees deploy some normative sensitivity when they select (i) materials they will use to manufacture tools and (ii) objects to be used as tools. To defend this claim, I will examine some empirical evidence showing chimpanzees’ remarkable abilities to select adequate tools and materials for the task at hand, as well as reports on how they acquired these abilities, both in their infancy and as naive adults. Based on this evidence, I will argue (...) that these selection processes are guided by evaluations that chimpanzees make about which materials or objects have the required properties to make them efficient tools for a specific task. This turns them into reason-based actions, at least in a modest sense. Furthermore, I will suggest that, after putting together these evaluations and their goals, chimpanzees arrive at “instrumental ought-thoughts” describing an ideal non-actual situation (the possession of a specific tool or material) and prescribing an action (that one chooses that tool or material). These ought-thoughts motivate chimpanzees’ selection behavior. Finally, I will give reasons to prefer the attribution of ought-thoughts to explain chimpanzees’ selection of tools and tool-making material over explanations that only invoke non-normative motivational states. (shrink)

Recently, several philosophers have called attention to the idea that there are occasions on which we can perceive (at least some) mental states of others. In this paper we consider two recent proposals in this direction: the co-presence thesis (Smith, 2010) and the hybrid model (Krueger and Overgaard, 2012). We will examine the aforementioned alternatives and present some objections to both of them. Then, we will propose a way of integrating both accounts which allows us to avoid such objections. Broadly (...) stated, our idea is that by perceiving other people’s behaviors we also perceive their mental states because behaviors co-present some features of the latter, and that this perception of others’ minds is direct and immediate because behavior is a constitutive part of the mental states in question. Keywords: mindreading, hybrid model, direct perception of other minds, co-presence thesis. (shrink)

If we focus on current debates on how creatures revise or correct their beliefs, we can identify two opposing approaches that we propose to call “intellectualism” and “minimalism.” In this paper, we outline a new account of doxastic revision — “the first-order model”— that is neither as cognitively demanding as intellectualism nor as deflationary as minimalism. First-order doxastic revision, we argue, is a personal-level process in which a creature rejects some beliefs and accepts others based on reasons. However, it does (...) not involve second-order thinking or sophisticated semantic and epistemic concepts. Besides defending that there is conceptual space for this alternative, we explore the possibility of extending it to some non-human animals. Based on our interpretation of some empirical evidence, we conclude that there are initial reasons to think that some animals — i.e., great apes— might be able to correct their beliefs in the way that our first-order model suggests. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Davidson’s argument from referential opacity against the attribution of thoughts to non-linguistics animals. I will begin by reconstructing the strongest version of the argument — i.e., the one which is better suited to overcome the different objections that have been raised against it. Once that is done, I will also object this version arguing, in a nutshell, that the fact that non-human animals lack language does not preclude us from acquiring some knowledge of their mental (...) contents. Thus, I conclude that the argument from referential opacity fails to support Davidson’s radical skepticism regarding the possibility of acquiring knowledge of the mental contents of non-linguistic animals, and of legitimately attributing intentional mental states to them. (shrink)

Lurz and Krachun propose a new experimental protocol designed to discriminate genuine mindreading animals from mere behavior-readers and to give evidence in favor of the claim that chimpanzees are capable of attributing internal goals to others. They suggest that chimpanzees' variety of "internal goal attribution" consists in attributing to others basic intentional representations, baptized by Millikan as "pushmi-pullyu representations". Now, Millikan distinguishes what I propose to call 'pure' PPs from more complex varieties of PPs, which allow their owners to respond (...) more flexibly to their environments. But, what would happen if we tried to differentiate, analogously, between more or less sophisticated mind-readers in virtue of the sorts of PPs that they could attribute to others? What would attributing complex PPs consist in and how would such capacity increase the predictive powers of chimpanzee mind-readers? This paper offers an answer to these questions. Based on Millikan's work, I differentiate two varieties of complex PPs. Then, I examine what a basic mind-reader, only capable of attributing 'pure' PPs, would be able to do. After that, I distinguish two more sophisticated varieties of mindreading, each consisting in the attribution of one of the complex PPs previously presented, and I show how the ability to attribute complex PPs to others comes with more potent and flexible capacities to anticipate their behavior. Finally, I offer some reasons to think that attributing complex PPs is still simpler than full-blown mindreading and I briefly evaluate the prospects of extending this proposal to infant social cognition. (shrink)

“Intentional Attributions to Animals without Language: Aspectuality and Referential Opacity”. It is generally accepted that intentional attributions are referentially opaque. But, as it is also stressed in the literature, referential opacity introduces difficulties to those who defend the attribution of intentionalmental states to non-human animals. In this paper: i) I identify one of these difficulties –which I call the problem of nonsense –; ii) I offer an answer to that problem. In order to accomplish ii), I begin by examining which (...) are the behavioral and representational requisites that a creature has to satisfy so that our mental states attributions to it are referentially opaque but, at the same time, avoid the problem of nonsense. Secondly, I offer some empirical examples of non-human animals which seem to follow such requirements. (shrink)

Nuestros intentos por hallar palabras que capturen de modo preciso los contenidos de los pensamientos de los animales suelen tropezar con dificultades persistentes. En este trabajo evaluaré dos explicaciones de este fenómeno discutidas por Beck : la explicación basada en el carácter poco familiar de los contenidos animales -que él rechaza- y la basada en diferencias de formato -que resulta su favorita-. En primer lugar, objetaré las razones por las cuales Beck descarta la explicación basada en el carácter poco familiar (...) de los contenidos. En segundo lugar argumentaré que, aunque algunas dificultades para expresar lingüísticamente los pensamientos animales pueden surgir por diferencias de formato, hay otras que no parecen deberse a este factor. Luego sugeriré que, a fin de comprender adecuadamente el problema que nos ocupa, deberíamos elaborar una explicación dual que apele, en algunos casos, a las diferencias de contenido y, en otros, a las diferencias de formato. When we try to find a precise linguistic expression to the contents of animal thoughts we face persisting difficulties. In this paper, I will evaluate two alternative explanations of this phenomenon: the explanation from unfamiliar contents and the explanation from nonlinguistic format. Beck rejects the former and endorses the latter. I will begin by presenting objections against Beck's reasons to reject the explanation from unfamiliar contents. Afterwards, I will argue, against Beck, that even if some difficulties to put into words the contents of animal thoughts may be due to their nonlinguistic format, others have a different source. Thus, I will suggest that if we want to reach a more encompassing understanding of these difficulties, we need to develop a dual explanation which incorporates both differences in formats and differences in contents. (shrink)

In this paper, I would like to explore the idea that some non-human animals may be incapable of detaching or separating some of their concepts both from other concepts and from the larger thought contents that they are part of. This, in turn, will make it impossible for them to recombine these undetachable concepts with others in every admissible way. I will begin by distinguishing three different ways in which one concept may be undetachable from others, and I will show (...) how each of them leads to specific restrictions in the kinds of conceptual re-combinations that they admit. Finally, I will try to provide some theoretical reasons, as well as some empirical evidence, to give at least initial support to the hypothesis that some non-human animals actually suffer from the limitations previously identified. (shrink)