Laura Danón

According to the normative pluralistic approach (Westra and Andrews 2022; Westra et al. 2024), social norms are understood as normative regularities defined by two components: patterns of behavioral conformity and forms of social maintenance. I argue that bonobos exhibit social norms in at least three domains: inequity aversion, reactions to interruptions of social activities, and female coalition formation. For each domain, I identify both components of normative regularities. I conclude that current evidence supports the view that bonobos display genuine forms of social normativity that structure and regulate their societies.

This essay makes a case that the ethical phenomena of accountability and recognition are not, as is widely believed, grounded in the psychological capacity of self-conscious reflective thought characteristic of persons. We know this because we have relationships of accountability and recognition with some animals who are clearly not self-conscious in that sense. On the other hand, not all conscious animals are capable of accountability or recognition. Thus we must focus on a capacity intermediate between mere conscious awareness and self-consciousness in order to explain accountability and recognition.

Normative conceptual holists have argued that conceptual capabilities can only be acquired through language. The a priori nature of their argument means that, if it is correct, not only is it a mistake for scientists to attribute conceptual capabilities to nonlinguistic animals, but also a mistake to think that empirical results have any bearing on such a claim. I argue that the absurd conclusion that concept acquisition is impossible can be derived from the claims that motivate this argument. Normative conceptual holists can avoid this result, but only by giving up the claim that linguistic and conceptual capabilities are necessarily linked. It follows that it is an open and empirical question whether nonlinguistic animals have conceptual capabilities.

Drawing on recent findings in cognitive neuroscience on aha-experiences in humans, I develop and defend the occurrent-thought hypothesis, which holds that chimpanzees evolved the ability for aha-experiences/occurrent thoughts to make their unconscious inferential reasoning abilities more effective. I argue that the occurrent-thought hypothesis provides a better explanation than the inference-only hypothesis for a range of facts about chimpanzees’ inferential reasoning abilities. I recommend more direct empirical tests of the hypothesis and describe three experimental protocols. I end by drawing out the philosophical implications of the hypothesis for the evolution of a priori reason in humans and chimpanzees.

I compare the study of inference in some philosophical and psychological traditions, and I make three general points. First, I suggest that in both human and non-human animals, inference is a means by which subjects aim to achieve an accurate and coherent representation of the world. Second, I contend that philosophical work on rational dispositions and empirical research on reasoning helps to outline an unreflective notion of taking the premises to support the conclusion. Third, I claim that paying attention to the distinction between logic and reasoning is important to fine-tune the standards for the observation of deductive reasoning in empirical research.