I was having a discussion the other day with a friend about whether animals without language can see themselves in a world that is beyond the present moment and environment in which they are. After I had suggested that they cannot because they lack a capacity for discursive thought, which requires a language, my friend demurred and pointed out that we can never know what animals know or what they are thinking because we can't get into their heads, read their minds. Well, I said, we can't get into one another's heads either, can we, and yet we know in the only important sense of knowing that they have minds rather like our own. After all, the mere fact of our discussion made it plain that I considered my friend to be a thinking subject, rather like myself, with ideas I could grasp and respond to. And he thought the same concerning me.

But you really can't know, he insisted, and perhaps at some point animal psychologists would be able to give us enough information so we could definitively state, one way or another, whether animals (like dogs and cats, rats and squirrels, primates and porpoises, etc.) had a sense of a wider world, one that extends beyond the moment in time and the locus in space in which they stand. He rejected out of hand, it seemed, my suggestion, that it is language that makes all that possible and that because of this we can do what dogs and cats can't, e.g., think about the days of the week, see ourselves as having a history and project the historical self we recognize as us into the future. Maybe they can, he said. You can't know. But maybe scientists can eventually tell us. And he promised to do further research on the matter and get back to me. . . .