# Popperian Dogs—Practical Rationality and Inferential Reasoning in Dogs

## TL;DR

The paper explores how dogs can think ahead and make inferences, suggesting they have a more complex mental life than previously believed.

## Contribution

The paper introduces the concept of dogs as 'Popperian animals' capable of inferential reasoning and perspective-taking.

## Key findings

- Dogs can infer the location of a hidden treat based on a person's visibility.
- Dogs adjust their behavior based on sounds associated with a person's presence.
- Dogs selectively imitate actions based on inferred efficiency and goals.

## Abstract

Many people wonder whether dogs simply react to what they see and hear, or whether they can also “think ahead” and draw conclusions in their minds. This article reviews research showing that pet dogs can do more than follow simple habits: they can rule out wrong options to find the right one, copy others selectively when it seems the most efficient choice, and use clues to figure out what a person wants, knows, or mistakenly believes—even when those clues are subtle or out of sight. For example, dogs could choose a hidden treat by inferring where a person could or could not have seen it, and in another task, they adjusted their stealing when a person might be nearby but unseen, guided only by a sound they had learned to associate with that person. While some findings are mixed and not all dogs perform the same, the overall picture suggests dogs can run “mental trials” before acting. Understanding this richer dog mind can improve training, strengthen human–dog relationships, enhance welfare, and inform how we design supportive environments and roles for dogs in society.

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.