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Category: Project

Description: While philosophers often deny that infants and animals may be properly said to be rational on the grounds that they appear to lack the ability to assess their reasons for belief and action, cognitive psychologists and ethologists tend to describe infants and animals as rational agents in roughly the same sense that pertains to human adults. This project aims to develop a characterization of epistemic agency and rationality that applies to human adults, infants, non-human animals, and idealized subjects of many philosophical theories. It integrates an original philosophical framework with empirical research on the cognition of non-linguistic subjects, which will seek evidence of forms of reflective skills in pre-verbal human infants, pigs, and dogs.