Draft of Talk; Please Do Not Quote

As commonsense would have it, dogs, cats, elephants, dolphins, chimps, and many other species of nonhuman animals are minded creatures: they can feel hunger, thirst, fatigue, agitation, pain and pleasure; they can try or want to do things; they can be startled, surprised, puzzled, or scared by this or that; they can have more or less specific interests, wants, and expectations; and, though languageless, they can communicate with – and understand – each other. Yet a long tradition of philosophical skeptics have sought to establish on conceptual grounds that animals’ mental states, understanding, and communication differ so greatly from ours that they cannot be intelligibly regarded as located along a natural continuum culminating in our own mentality and language.2 The minds of nonhuman animals (and possibly even of very young humans) and our minds are separated by an unbridgeable gap, and this undermines the possibility of a natural history of human minds (or at least of our ability to tell and make sense of such a history). This view I call ‘continuity skepticism’.3 My aim is to engage a continuity skeptic who maintains that philosophical reflection on the differences between human minds and the minds (such as they are) of the nonhuman animals we know should lead us to question the very idea of the emergence (or natural origins) of mind. That is: the idea that we should regard as misguided the philosophical search for natural precursors of our own minds in the mental capacities of some ancestral creatures expecting that they could have foreshadowed (and could shed light on) our own.