Wer den Pavian versteht … Eine naturalistische Perspektive auf Wissen bei Mensch und Tier

In the first part of this essay a variety of naturalism is introduced that will be called ‘unifying biological naturalism’. A naturalistic (teleosemantic) account of mental representation is presented in order to get a grip on a special kind of representation, namely knowledge. The claim of the second part is that human beings and animals do both possess knowledge in the same sense of the term ‘knowledge’. Both, humans and animals are able to know things; they are both creatures that exhibit reliable mental states representing objective facts. Finally, it is argued that this account implies externalism about knowledge and justification.