ACHIM STEPHAN ARE ANIMALS CAPABLE OF CONCEPTS? ABSTRACT. Often, the behavior of animals can be better explained and predicted, it seems, if we ascribe the capacity to have beliefs, intentions, and concepts to them. Whether we really can do so, however, is a debated issue. Particularly, Donald Davidson maintains that there is no basis in fact for ascribing propositional attitudes or concepts to animals. I will consider his and rival views, such as Colin Allen’s three-part approach, for determining whether animals possess concepts. To avoid pure theoretical debate, however, I will test these criteria using characteristic examples from ethology that depict a broad range of animal behavior. This will allow us to detect a series of gradations in animals’ capacities, in the course of which we can think over what would count for or against an attribution of concepts and propositional attitudes to them in each single case. Self-conceit is our natural hereditary disease. Of all creatures man is the most wretched and fragile, and at once the most supercilious. ... It is by this conceit that man arrogates to himself ... divine properties, that he segregates himself from the mass of other creatures and raises himself above them ... (de Montaigne) 1. INTRODUCTION From the perspective of the history of ideas, animals’ ability to ‘reason’ is of interest primarily for the light it sheds on the anthropological question of the place of man in nature. 1 Today, however, the cognitive capacities of animals are examined in their own right. Their behavior can be better described, explained, and predicted, it seems, when animals are seen as ‘intentional systems’. In particular, this means ascribing to animals the capacity to have beliefs and intentions – and herewith, the capacity to have concepts. A desirable side effect of this line of inquiry may be that the insight it generates into the complex capacities of animals will tell us quite a bit about the cognitive development of man, too. Nevertheless, there are strong intuitive reasons to believe that it would not only be difficult for animals to have concepts, but impossible. The Erkenntnis 51: 79–92, 1999. © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.