ABSTRACT
Moderate differentialists like Aristotle and I. Kant credited animals with "lower" mental/psychic phenomena like sentience, emotions, moods and perception, while denying the "higher" faculties of intellect and reason, including the capacity for genuine belief. Whether animals can draw theoretical and/or practical inferences is connected to the issue of animal rationality. A venerable tradition conceives of reason as a capacity to justify one's beliefs and actions, paradigmatically by deriving them from less-contentious assumptions. Animals face problems of discrimination, and some of them can solve these by distinguishing things according to their properties in a deliberate and considered manner. For the discriminations which underlie animal behavior need not coincide with people verbal classifications, either extensionally – by grouping together the same objects – or intensionally –by grouping objects according to the same properties. An intermediate position maintains that animals can possess some concepts, namely those that can be manifested in nonlinguistic behavior.
