The Daily Ant hosts a weekly series, Philosophy Phridays, in which real philosophers share their thoughts at the intersection of ants and philosophy. This is the fifty-ninth contribution in the series, submitted by Dr. Andrew Moon.
Do Ants Doubt?
Do ants doubt? I will argue that they probably don’t.
Some might think that ants don’t have doubts because they don’t have any mental states. They are just mindless robots.
Those people might be right. However, there are some reasons to think that ants do have mental states. Suppose an ant is walking along a path, and you put a Lego in front of it. The ant stops. If I said, “The ant knows that there is something in front of it,” this would seem like a correct thing to say. Or if I said, “The ant thinks that there is something in front of it,” that would also seem correct to say. In contrast, suppose you rolled a marble and it stopped because of the Lego in its path. If I said, “The marble knows/thinks there’s something in front of it,” this would be incorrect to say. The fact that we attribute knowledge and thinking to the ant (but not the marble) is some evidence that we categorize ants (but not marbles) into the group of things with minds.
