The Ghost of Clever Hans

Abstract

According to the problem of other animal minds, claims to know anything about the minds of animals suffer from serious problems of justification. These problems parallel the problem of other human minds. Inferentialist approaches argue that the justification lies in the appropriate form of inference. These approaches are inadequate for a variety of reasons. Direct perception approaches claim our access to the minds of animals is, in some cases, perceptual. A novel form of the direct perception account is defended. This is based on three ideas: (a) a distinction between seeing and seeing that, (b) a distinction between formal and functional descriptions of behavior, and (c) the idea that functional descriptions of behavior are (often) disguised psychological descriptions. If we wish to have any useful descriptions of animal behavior, we must accept that we can often see their mental states.