A language of baboon thought?

The Philosophy of Animal Minds

Volumn , Issue , 2009, Pages 108-127

  Camp, Elisabeth ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

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Indexed keywords

EID: 61549117169     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511819001.007     Document Type: Chapter

References (5)

1. To have a certain propositional attitude is to be in a specified relation to an internal representation: to know, believe, or fear that something is the case. (p. 250)
2. Cheney and Seyfarth appear to be employing this sense when they write that "the baboon's alarm wahoo seems best described as a proposition: a single utterance or thought that simultaneously incorporates a subject and a predicate" (p. 256).
3. Cheney and Seyfarth write: "Like natural languages, [the Language of Thought] includes some mental representations that correspond to objects in the world and others that specify the relation between these objects" (p. 250).
4. Tetzlaff and Rey (chapter 4) and Carruthers (chapter 5) for such an argument applied to honeybee and (other) invertebrate cognition.
5. Cheney and Seyfarth (p. 252) explicitly include the closely related property of recursion among the features specific to modern natural languages that they're not claiming baboon cognition to possess.