Let me propose a case in which we can see the philosophical sleight-of-hand happening right in front of our eyes: a puzzle is masked by our accepting an invitation to treat a curious phenomenon as unproblematically falling into our standard, human, folk-psychological categories. Many years ago. Bertrand Russell (1927, p32-3) made a wry observation:
Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible display of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance. Animals observed by Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve the situation out of their inner consciousness.
Wolfgang Köhler's (1925) early experiments with chimpanzees were the inspiration for Russell's witticism, which helps to perpetuate a common misunderstanding. Köhler's apes did not just sit and think up the solutions. They had to have many hours of exposure to the relevant props--the boxes and sticks, for instance--and they engaged in much manipulation of these items. Those apes that discovered the solutions--some never did--accomplished it with the aid of many hours of trial and error manipulating.
Now were they thinking when they were fussing about in their cages? What were they manipulating? Boxes and sticks. It is all too tempting to suppose that their external, visible manipulations were accompanied by, and driven by, internal, covert manipulations--of thoughts about or representations of these objects, but succumbing to this temptation is losing the main chance. What they were attending to, manipulating and turning over and rearranging were boxes and sticks, not thoughts.
They were familiarizing themselves with objects in their environments. What does that mean? It means that they were building up some sort of perceptuo-locomotor structures tuned to the specific objects, discovering the affordances of those objects, getting used to them, making them salient, etc. So their behavior was not all that different from the incessant trial and error scrambling of the behaviorists' cats, rats and pigeons. They were acting in the world, rearranging things in the world--without any apparent plan or insight or goal, at least at the outset.
Animals at all levels are designed to tidy up their immediate environments, which are initially messy, confusing, intractable, dangerous, inscrutable, hard to move around in. They build nests, caches, escape tunnels, ambush sites, scent trails, territorial boundaries. They familiarize themselves with landmarks. They do all this to help them keep better track of the things that matter--predators and prey, mates, etc. These are done by "instinct": automatized routines for improving the environment of action, making a better fit between agent and world.
