Camp, Elisabeth

Shupe, Eli

English

Instrumental reasoning is not just practically but also theoretically important. An agent capable of instrumental reason represents a state of affairs which they simultaneously realize does not actually obtain and have no inherent interest in obtaining, because they take its actualization to contribute to achieving a state they do desire. This makes it intuitive to treat instrumental reasoning as involving the sorts of abstract relations that are easy to encode linguistically, for instance with sentential modal operators, but that are more challenging for other, more expressively restricted formats. We offer an analysis of the cognitive capacities required for instrumental reasoning, review empirical evidence that some non-human animals possess at least some of each of these capacities, and suggest non-linguistic mechanisms by which they might be implemented

PhilPapers

Instrumental Reasoning in Nonhuman Animals

https://philpapers.org/archive/CAMIRI-3.pdf

Instrumental Reasoning in Nonhuman Animals

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