Can Animals Be Rational?

The question of why an animal acts this or that way invokes the further question of whether it acts for specific reasons. In a more sophisticated sense, the capacity for intentional action—not merely giving in to a desire and aiming for a goal but also knowing why, which means acting for specific reasons, which in turn means that the decision taken is based on a reasonable conclusion. Can animals reason, can they draw practical conclusions? More generally, can they be rational? In his famous essay on rational creatures, Donald Davidson [4], as mentioned above, made a clear differentiation about the possession of propositional attitudes. Only creatures that can have beliefs, desires, and intentions, which in turn presupposes the possession of language, are rational. Snails are therefore not, and according to Davidson, human infants are not yet rational either. The point here is that communication partners can exchange ideas about external things, think about the same things, thus sharing their world and objectifying it in the process. They produce an intersubjective truth in the sense of objectivity via a process of triangulation (2 subjects and one object). Rationality is thus a social construct.