I largely concur with Pompe-Alama’s commentary on my contribution to this collection. She nicely summarizes my arguments against what I call Davidson’s “Master Argument,” an argument that he levies against the possibility of propositional attitudes for nonlinguistic animals. As Pompe-Alama notes, aside from conceptual clarifications, my arguments are largely empirical. As such, the strength of my arguments depends on the solidity of the empirical facts they are based upon. But provisionally, since all the logically valid reconstructions of Davidson’s arguments have what look to be empirically false premises, none serves to establish the impossibility of animal thought.
Pompe-Alama then offers an interesting discussion of the Davidsonian claim that nonlinguistic animals cannot have propositional attitudes. She locates the source of the dispute at the phenomenological level, citing the phenomenology of thought as “inner speech”, and suggests that it is this that leads Davidson, and us, to mistakenly think that thinking is fundamentally a language-dependent phenomenon. While I disagree that this is the source of Davidson’s perspective, I appreciate Pompe-Alama’s discussion of some important practical consequences of the Davidsonian view, or any view that posits human thought processes to be qualitatively different than those of all other animals. In her discussion, Pompe-Alama tells us that contemporary cognitive science indicates that Davidson is wrong, and suggests that our own understanding of our own thought processes may be adversely influenced by our introspective recognition of our thoughts as embodied in inner speech. She cautions that too much attention to the phenomenological or introspective sense of inner speech can prevent us from exploring the representational aspects and physiological bases of thought that we share with other animals, and moreover, she suggests that taking language to be a necessary prerequisite for thinking poses a barrier to understanding human thought as well. As a remedy, she suggests that we discount the phenomenal aspects of thinking and instead focus on a reductive strategy for exploring the neural basis of human and animal thought in a bottom-up fashion.