Popperian Dogs—Practical Rationality and Inferential Reasoning in Dogs

The last few decades have provided mounting evidence that dogs are not only able to behave in intelligent ways but also that they have the capacity to make inferences by associating visible and imagined events. In particular, the kinds of inferences shown by dogs elevate them to ‘Popperian animals’, which are rational in the sense of being able to conduct trials and errors in the head. Here, I review a selection of studies with dogs that fulfil this attribution. Dogs have been found capable of (a) making inferences by exclusion, with both computer images and word-object associations, (b) drawing inferences about the efficiency of the observed methods, the situational constraints of the situation, and the goals of the model in the course of selective (‘rational’) imitation, and (c) going beyond directly observable cues when inferring the intention, the knowledge, or even the beliefs of humans in perspective-taking tasks. Despite the contamination with ambiguous data, open questions, and current debates about the possession of (non-linguistic) mechanisms for creating mental representations of the mental states of others (called mind reading), we may safely assume that domesticated dogs have become Popperian animals equipped with the cognitive tool set of inferential thinking and perspective taking.