Believing, experiencing, and animals' mental contents

In recent years the issue of mute animals’ mind has been considered as a litmus paper or as a limiting end, by authors such as John McDowell, Robert Brandom, and many others. In their efforts devoted in clarifying what are the thoughts and what thought, in general, is, these philosophers have taken mute animals as a contrasting class for clarifying the role of the conceptual, linguistic and cognitive abilities we are endowed with. My purpose in this paper is to argue that thoughts are not necessarily linguistic in nature, making my case indirectly by arguing that they are not necessarily conceptual. To this end, I will maintain that mute animals can be credited with intentional states of different kinds, this difference being mainly fixed by the nature of their contents.