ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the various possible views on animal beliefs and their implications for psychologists folk practice as well as their scientific investigations. In defense of the idea that animals have beliefs that psychologists can explicate in human concepts, Colin Allen argues that they shouldn’t worry about capturing the exact content of a thought in their belief attributions to humans or other animals. The worries about ascribing belief to nonlinguistic animals are based largely on the intuition that beliefs expressed in language are stereotypical of all forms of belief. Despite the common practice of attributing thought to animals and the scientific evidence in favor of doing so, the exact nature of the mental states psychologists observe in other animals remains unclear. While it is largely assumed that animals have representational mental states, such as beliefs, a question of much interest has been whether other animals have beliefs about others’ beliefs.
