Good to hear from you, and thanks for your comments
> mmascolo@merrimack.edu wrote:
>
> Gary:
> Your question is a good one, of course.[Can cats construe? What
> evidence/grounding is there to prove this claim?] It is always good to have
> someone looking over our shoulders and asking us to justify our assertions.
> But this isn't really a difficult one, it seems to me. It seems to
> me that it is the responsibilty of the person who wants to make the
> claim that a cat can construe a Cathedral as an expression of her
> relationship to God to make that case. For the person who wishes to
> deny this, it goes a long way simply to state that there isn't the
> slightest bit of evidence that the cat is able to do this. Further,
> cats can't perform even the most rudimentary tasks that one would see
> as precursors of the type of adequate self-knowledge in order to make
> such a judgment (e.g., cat's don't show self-consciousness when placed
> in front of a mirror). So yes, we can make judgments about the other
> people's (and organism's) consciousness on the basis of inferences about
> their behavior.
>
> Mike Mascolo
I'm not clear on what you're saying here, Mike. Please clarify.
Thanks.
Gary
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