Belief Revision in Non-Human Animals

LAURA DANÓN; DANIEL ENRIQUE KALPOKAS

Workshop; Normative Behavior in the Animal World; 2023

Philosophers have frequently assumed that doxastic creatures must be capable of revising or correcting their beliefs in light of new evidence. There are, however, more or less demanding ways of understanding these belief revision processes. Roughly, we can identify two extreme opposing views that we call: ?intellectualism? and ?minimalism.?Intellectualism and minimalism may describe how some cognitive creatures change their beliefs and other informational states. But there is conceptual space to delimit another kind of doxastic revision that is neither as demanding as intellectualism nor as deflationary as minimalism. So, the aim of this presentation is to sketch such an intermediate account of doxastic revision that we call ?the first-order model.? One of the chief virtues of this model is that, besides being a sound conceptual alternative, it is empirically plausible. It might help us account for specific behavioural patterns and cognitive abilities of some non-human animals, like great apes, and help us understand in what sense they can be considered rational and normative creatures.