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Open Access
|Dec 2018

Abstract

Can animals think? In this paper I address the proposal that many animals, including insects such as honeybees, have genuine thoughts. I consider one prominent version of this view (Carruthers 2004; 2006) that claims that honeybees can represent and process information about their environments in a way that satisfies the main hallmarks of human conceptual thought. I shall argue, however, that this view fails to provide convincing grounds for accepting that animals possess concepts. More precisely, I suggest that two important aspects of conceptual thought, viz., concept individuation and the generality constraint, are not satisfied.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/disp-2011-0002 | Journal eISSN: 2182-2875 | Journal ISSN: 0873-626X
Language: English, Portuguese
Page range: 107 - 125
Published on: Dec 31, 2018
Published by: University of Lisbon
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 4 times per year

© 2018 Bernardo Aguilera Dreyse, published by University of Lisbon
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.