Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • 1 - What do animals think?

  • Edited by Robert W. Lurz, Brooklyn College, City University of New York
  • Book:
    The Philosophy of Animal Minds
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    03 September 2009, pp 15-34

  • Summary

    The chapter explores how we should think about specifying exactly what it is that a particular animal thinks on a particular occasion. It identifies a tension in our thinking about animal minds and reviews some ways of trying to resolve it. The fundamental problem we face is that most people are committed to the following pair of propositions: many animals think; exactly what animals think on particular occasions cannot reliably be characterized. The chapter discusses four families of responses to the problem: eliminativism, wet eliminativism, brute content view, and interpretivism. If we are tempted by interpretivism, then perhaps we should rethink, not just the problem with which we began, but the very way in which we have come to portray the mind in philosophical discourse. The idea of content is a metaphor that infuses the way in which philosophers think about mind and language.