Can dumb animals think? Since anything from the merest flickerings of sensory consciousness to highly abstract cogitation might be taken to count as thought, the first step towards an answer is to determine what kind of thinking is meant. Once this is done it appears that the question may be answered merely as a corollary of a general theory of thought. If, for instance, thinking is just the acquisition of certain behavioural dispositions, then languageless animals can think provided they can acquire the relevant dispositions. Or, again, if thinking is silent speech, dumb creatures evidently cannot think. And so on. What is philosophically important here is the search for a taxonomy and general theory of thinking. The question whether dumb creatures can think is apparently subsidiary. In this section, I shall suggest that this plausible view is mistaken. The question is important, because it is the site for a last ditch stand by those who maintain that there is a significant difference in kind between man and the rest of nature. Belief in an ontological gulf between humans and other natural beings is widely held to be as deeply mistaken as it was entrenched in a now discredited theistic world-view. Yet many feel uneasy about the alternative continuum assumption. Is there anything other than sentiment to back their view that, though man has some community with wider nature, human life is importantly distinct in kind? Suppose it is agreed that the Cartesian view of man's apartness from nature is to be rejected. Someone who still believes that man is distinct in kind may now try to reformulate his position in epistemological terms. Humans are different, he may suggest, not because they, and only they, have immaterial souls, but because only their behaviour ever requires that special form of 'rational' explanation in which phenomena are accounted for as the outcome of an agent's practical reasoning from his beliefs and intentions. On this view, we are marked off from the brutes because we, and not they, sometimes perform intentional actions-behaviour