Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

A baby bares its teeth when angry because its ancestors did so to bite. Your hair stands on end when you are frightened because hair standing on end served some purpose for animals.

Beauty of face is different from that of flowers and animals.

Given perceptions and actions, animals have the capacity to develop memories and prior intentions, as well as beliefs and desires and other forms of intentionality, such as expectation and fear, anger and aggression.

Many species of animals have perceptions, perform actions and are capable of acquiring beliefs, desires and intentions, though they have no language.

At one time, animals more or less like us, hominids, walked the earth without language. Now we have language. What happened in between?

For comparison I will sometimes make reference to other animals, but if it should turn out that everything we currently believe, for example, about bee languages and primate thought processes is false, that would be only marginally relevant to my questions.

And even if it should turn out that some animals have full blown languages in the sense that we do, and that human language did not gradually evolve but was the result of a single evolutionary Big Bang that produced brains with full blown generative grammars, such facts would be only marginally relevant to the questions I am asking about logical dependencies.

If it should turn out that some other animals have what we have, I welcome them to the club.

This implies, at the very least, that the animals have beliefs, desires, intentions, and at least some form of memories, enough to enable them to recognize familiar objects and situations.

If it is thirsty, it must be able to tell when it has drunk; if it is hungry, it must be able to tell when it has eaten; if it is trying to do something, it must know when it has done it, and so on. We can summarize this point by saying that when we supposed that our animals had intentional states we were already supposing that they had mental representations with propositional contents and conditions of satisfaction.