Animal reasoning: negation and representations of absence

In this paper I reject the possibility that animal reasoning, negation in particular, necessarily involves the representation of Absence, as suggested by José Luis Bermúdez, since this would still work as a logical negation (unavailable for non-linguistic creatures). False belief, pretense, and comm...

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Autor principal: Morales Ladrón de Guevara, Jorge
Formato: Artículo revista
Lenguaje:Español
Publicado: Universidad Nacional de Córdoba 2011
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Acceso en línea:https://revistas.unc.edu.ar/index.php/racc/article/view/5231
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Sumario:In this paper I reject the possibility that animal reasoning, negation in particular, necessarily involves the representation of Absence, as suggested by José Luis Bermúdez, since this would still work as a logical negation (unavailable for non-linguistic creatures). False belief, pretense, and communication experiments show that non-human animals (at least some primates) have difficulties representing absent entities or properties. I offer an alternative account resorting to the sub-symbolic similarity judgments proposed by Vigo & Allen and I introduce the notion of expectation: animal proto-negation takes place through the incompatibility between an expected and the actual representation. Finally, I propose that the paradigm of expectations can be extrapolated to other experiments in cognitive psychology (both with pre-linguistic children and animals) in order to design ?fair? experiments which test other minds considering their true abilities.