Propositional Content and the Beliefs of Animals

Abstract

Having formulated a heuristic model for the ascription of intentional mental states, we must consider more closely its application to languageless animals and its import for distinguishing between sentient animals and human persons. Reflection here serves to advance a number of critical themes. For one thing, it focusses our attention on how substantially different (non-intentional) sensations and (intentional) thoughts are — which bears on the general prospects of reductionism. For another, it clarifies the inherently anthropomorphized nature of animal psychology and the recalcitrance of intensional distinctions on the linguistic level — which confirms the strategic difference between attempting a reduction of animal sentience and of human linguistic ability. For a third, it draws attention to the dawning importance of teleological and non-teleological accounts of natural phenomena, varieties of teleology, and the distinction of human culture — which suggests the possibility of an ordered but nonreductive account of the conceptual distinctions required in explanations covering graduated stages of the continuum of things that include inanimate physical phenomena, plants, sentient animals, and human persons. For the present, let us confine our attention to animal sentience and the nature of intentional states.