> “Do animals have mental states? We don’t know, and we can never know for sure,” he said in an interview with BrainWorld magazine in 2012. For LeDoux, observat

> “Do animals have mental states? We don’t know, and we can never know for sure,” he said in an interview with BrainWorld magazine in 2012. For LeDoux, observations of behavior aren’t enough to give it a label like “anxiety” when we can’t enter into the animal’s subjective experience. It might be emotion, it might also just be an automatic response to danger, and without any way of entering into the animal’s brain—the way language allows us to, at least to a certain mediated degree, with other humans—we can’t assess that. I can't disagree more strongly with this. Sure, we can never know "for sure". But it's the same with other humans. Language, despite what is said here, doesn't solve that, even if it feels that way. In other words a human saying "I feel happy" is not actual evidence that they are having a subjective experience like our own feeling of happiness. Or rather, it is evidence, but no stronger than smiling. Which, in turn, is the same type of evidence as a dog wagging its tail and showing other signs of happiness. We can attribute mental states to both humans and animals to the same extent. Of course, they might be different - we may never know what it is like to experience the world through sonar, and animals may not feel some specific human emotions. But anyone that has loved a pet knows the pet can feel things, just as well as they can know that other humans feel things.