Animal logics: Decisions in the absence of human language

Human beings are rational animals, in other words, they have logic. The word ‘logic’ has a double meaning, as it describes both a way of thinking and one of the most ancient intellectual disciplines, with its beginnings going back to the 4th century b.c. According to the second meaning, logic is the science of reasoning. Not only because of its long history, but also mainly because of its strong influence on society, it can be viewed as the backbone of Western civilization, holding together its systems of philosophy, science, and law. Obviously, the authors of this special issue on ‘animal logic’ refer to the first meaning, by describing the findings of stateof-the-art research on how the mind of human as well as nonhuman animals works. However, this strain of science cannot be decoupled from the historical approaches to the study of the mind, as they have been unfolded in philosophy, psychology, and logic. As the papers in this issue demonstrate, many phenomena studied now in animals have been studied in humans, or have distinct philosophical roots of conceptualization. Inferential and causal reasoning, mind reading, and the formation of concepts, to mention the most popular, are concepts of cognitive processes framed traditionally in logic and the philosophy of mind. Building on traditional terminology and concepts does not necessarily mean to fall