ABSTRACT
The idea that animals think has come into and out of fashion (see Roitblat, 1987a, for a more detailed history of comparative cognition). Depending on the cosmology and epistemology of the time, and one's view regarding the relation between humans and nature, opinion vacillated between finding it self-evident that animals must think, to finding it unquestionable that they could not possibly think. Broadly, these opposing views represent, respectively, mental continuity and discontinuity.
