%0 Journal Article
%T Animal Reasoning: Negation and Representations of Absence.
%A Morales Ladr¨®n de Guevara
%A Jorge
%J Revista Argentina de Ciencias del Comportamiento
%D 2011
%I Universidad de C¨®rdoba
%X In this paper I reject the possibility that animal reasoning, negation in particular, necessarily involves the representation of Absence, as suggested by Jos¨¦ Luis Berm¨˛dez, since this would still work as a logical negation (unavailable for non-linguistic creatures). False belief, pretense, and communication experiments show that non-human animals (at least some primates) have difficulties representing absent entities or properties. I offer an alternative account resorting to the sub-symbolic similarity judgments proposed by Vigo & Allen and I introduce the notion of expectation: animal proto-negation takes place through the incompatibility between an expected and the actual representation. Finally, I propose that the paradigm of expectations can be extrapolated to other experiments in cognitive psychology (both with pre-linguistic children and animals) in order to design ˇ°fairˇ± experiments which test other minds considering their true abilities.
%K Non-Human Animals
%K Non-Linguistic Creatures
%K Rationality
%K Comparative Psychology
%K Cognitive Ethology
%K Berm¨˛dez
%U http://www.psyche.unc.edu.ar/racc/index.php/comportamiento/article/view/70/Morales