Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Abstract

This chapter addresses a theoretical problem that arises when we treat non-linguistic animals as thinkers in order to explain their behavior in psychological terms. Psychological explanations work because they identify beliefs and desires that show why the action in question made sense from the agent's perspective. To say that an action makes sense in the light of an agent's beliefs and desires is to say that it is the rational thing to do (or, at least, a rational thing to do) given those beliefs and desires. And that in turn means that, in at least some cases, an agent might reason her way from those beliefs and desires to acting in the relevant way. Most models of reasoning, however, treat it in terms of logical operations defined over linguistic structures, which makes it difficult to see how it might be extended to non-linguistic creatures. This paper develops a framework for thinking about the types of reasoning engaged in by non-linguistic creatures. It explores non-linguistic analogs of basic patterns of inference that can be understood at the linguistic level in terms of rules of inference involving elementary logical concepts. The three schemas discussed (reasoning from an excluded alternative and two types of conditional reasoning) are highly relevant to animal practical reasoning, and I show how animals might apply them without deploying any logical concepts.