Descartes' two errors: Reason and reflection in the great apes
This chapter examines reason and reflection in the great apes. It presents a variety of behavioural evidence that is best explained either by causal reasoning or by metacognition and analyses the between capacities for reasoning and for metacognition. It evaluates the results of a study which suggest that apes do not simply associate a cue with the presence of food, but understand that the food is the cause of the cue, and can reason accordingly. This behaviour can be regarded as evidence of a capacity for proto-logical reasoning that relies on pairs of contraries and conditional dependence based on causal dependence.
Keywords: reason, reflection, apes, causal reasoning, metacognition, proto-logical reasoning, conditional dependence, causal dependence
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .