Weight as a Matter of Fact
This chapter presents the author's explanation of the rationale behind this book. The central objective of the investigations reported was to address if chimpanzees have access to a representational system akin to f (WEIGHT), or if their most abstract reasoning about weight is limited to establishing and using causal relations between particular perceptual properties and their effects. Researchers speculated that humans possessed a mental system for reinterpreting very ancient behaviors and capacities (ones that we share in common with chimpanzees and many other species) in terms of unobservable causal variables — things such as mental states and physical forces. This idea was dubbed the reinterpretation hypothesis.
Keywords: chimpanzees, weight, representational system, abstract reasoning, reinterpretation hypothesis
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