Essay 3
Given what we know or can safely assume to be true of animal brains and behaviors, do animals actually exhibit thought and reason? The answer depends in large measure on one’s definition of thought and reason. Philosophers René Descartes and David Hume hold conflicting views about the nature and possession of thought and reason and, as a result, offer starkly different arguments for and against the existence of thought and reason in animals. While Descartes maintains in Part Five of Discourse on Method that only humans are capable of conscious thought, Hume asserts that human and animal behaviors are not so different in Section Nine of his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Descartes argues that although animals are living, organic creatures, they are essentially automata, like mechanical robots. On the other hand, Hume asserts that animals, just like humans, learn from experience and come to infer causal connections between events through experience, rather than through means of reason. While both Descartes and Hume hold juxtaposed positions on animal behavior, …show more content…
We have no evidence that animals have minds because we have no evidence that they can talk. Such a language test may be unable to establish conclusively that animals lack minds. However, the fact that animals do not have the capacity for speech means that we fail to have positive evidence that they do have minds. Therefore, the language test does not prove that animals are non-rational creatures or that they lack consciousness as Descartes suggests. The absence of speech, Descartes reasons, can only be explained in terms of animals lacking what speech expresses—thought. From this, he concludes that animals also lack all forms of consciousness, since, for Descartes, thought is the very object of conscious
Given what we know or can safely assume to be true of animal brains and behaviors, do animals actually exhibit thought and reason? The answer depends in large measure on one’s definition of thought and reason. Philosophers René Descartes and David Hume hold conflicting views about the nature and possession of thought and reason and, as a result, offer starkly different arguments for and against the existence of thought and reason in animals. While Descartes maintains in Part Five of Discourse on Method that only humans are capable of conscious thought, Hume asserts that human and animal behaviors are not so different in Section Nine of his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Descartes argues that although animals are living, organic creatures, they are essentially automata, like mechanical robots. On the other hand, Hume asserts that animals, just like humans, learn from experience and come to infer causal connections between events through experience, rather than through means of reason. While both Descartes and Hume hold juxtaposed positions on animal behavior, …show more content…
We have no evidence that animals have minds because we have no evidence that they can talk. Such a language test may be unable to establish conclusively that animals lack minds. However, the fact that animals do not have the capacity for speech means that we fail to have positive evidence that they do have minds. Therefore, the language test does not prove that animals are non-rational creatures or that they lack consciousness as Descartes suggests. The absence of speech, Descartes reasons, can only be explained in terms of animals lacking what speech expresses—thought. From this, he concludes that animals also lack all forms of consciousness, since, for Descartes, thought is the very object of conscious