“These considerations help to explain why many philosophers are loathe to ascribe beliefs to animals. To a certain extent, this is a terminological dispute, since almost everyone is prepared to grant that dogs and cats have some kind of protobelief that is functionally similar to beliefs in humans."g The question is really how much sense it makes to ascribe beliefs to an organism when that organism is incapable of accepting or rejecting any of the inferential consequences of that belief, and where most of the standard criteria we use to individuate belief cannot be applied. In other words, since the vast majority of conclusions that follow from the claim "x believes that p" simply do not follow when x is a dog, rather than a person, there is something very misleading about using the term "belief" in this context.19”