Laura Danón

According to Daniel Dennett, some non-human animals are “Popperian creatures” who possess internal representational models that allow them to simulate different responses offline, evaluate their consequences, and discard bad options in advance. There are, however, some discrepancies, both in Dennett’s writings and those of his critics, regarding what animals can be classified as Popperian. While some defend a very inclusive view, which counts all mammals and even some invertebrates as Popperian animals, others think that humans might be the only animals qualifying as such. This disagreement suggests significant discrepancies in understanding what it means to be a Popperian creature. In light of such disputes, in this paper, I aim to clarify which cognitive abilities should be considered critical to being a Popperian animal. Based on that analysis, I then focus on a specific cognitive ability – instrumental or means-end reasoning – and argue that possessing it suffices to count as a Popperian animal in a robust understanding of this notion. Finally, I discuss some empirical evidence and argue, based on it, that at least some non-human animals – the most compelling evidence coming from great apes and New Caledonian crows – count as genuine instrumental reasoners and, therefore, also as genuine Popperian creatures.

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.

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.