Review of José Luis Bermúdez: Thinking without Words

Cognitive sciences such as developmental psychology, cognitive ethology and cognitive archaeology continuously produce evidence of high-level thinking in nonlinguistic creatures. José Luis Bermúdez applies this evidence in formulating a philosophical theory of non-linguistic thought, the main elements of which I summarise here. While I agree with most of the positive aspects of his theory of non-linguistic thought, I argue that the negative aspects of his theory—according to which non-linguistic creatures are denied metacognitive capacities—fails to take into account the evidence from aphasia. I conclude by offering a way of conceiving of non-linguistic metarepresentational