# Proust 1999 **Opening (not a real abstract):** Can Nonhuman Primates Read Minds ? Joëlle Proust ( CREA, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris) ----------Attributing mental concepts to non-linguistic animals poses well-known problems to ethologists and philosophers. It is all too easy to interpret a piece of animal social behavior (i.e. a behavior performed inside a group on the basis of information being displayed by behaviors from other members of the group) as involving representations of other individual's beliefs and motivational states as mental states. For this "intentional stance"1 is indeed the most natural way for humans to explain and predict each other's behavior. Attributing mental states is a fast, easy and convenient way to predict behavior, even when it is known that the system under study cannot be granted intentionality - convenient in so far as it may allow instrumentally correct **Authors:** [[Can Nonhuman Primates Read Minds ?]]