W. Ott

Animal Logic: Locke and the Nature of Inference

Can animals reason? If so, what would their reasoning consist in, and how, if at all, would it differ from its human counterpart? On these questions, John Locke stakes out a position that also merits consideration today. I argue that, for Locke, reasoning is a matter of the subject's construing her mental states as support for a conclusion, where that conclusion can be a self‐directed imperative. Locke does not require that the subject represent the rules governing her inferences, nor that she use language or deploy abstract ideas. I argue that Locke's particularist, imagistic account is worth taking seriously in the contemporary debates over the nature of inference and animal reasoning.