"You know," Höller says, "it is clearly impossible to have the first idea how animals close to us, dogs for instance, understand the world.
Most reasonable Americans, for instance, understand that it's necessary for gun owners to pass through a registration process, and think that it's proper for the government to ban assault weapons.
Billionaires in oil and gas from the Middle East, for instance, understand why the wars happened.
(The apes, for instance, understood that a cup that rattled when shaken was more likely to contain food than one that did not).
Together they have, for instance, understood that Ghanaians prefer liquid to solid soap for hand-washing and are more likely to wash their hands before eating if the soap does not smell too strong (since Ghanaians often eat with their hands).
Lily Scofield Butler, for instance, understands that while she stuffs tomatoes and bakes a ham for a dinner party, "somewhere else a person was weeping with the misery of hunger," but also that "if she allowed herself always to consider everything she knew... well, she doubted if she would even bother to get out of bed in the morning".
When children get hospitalized, for instance, we understand that they're scared.
A dog, for instance, can understand the will of its owner, say that its owner wants it to sit down.
In this perspective it has become possible, for instance, to understand the role of positive and negative feedback loops and the mechanism of periodic oscillations of engineered gene networks.
A human body could be understood in precisely the same way, as living and continuing by virtue of constant metabolism as Aristotle for instance later understood it.
For instance, Suppes understands first-order predicate logic, with its "linguistic" rather than "set-theoretical" entities, as "utterly impractical" for the formalization of "theories with more complicated structures like probability theory" (Suppes 1957, 232, 248 9; cf. Suppes 2002).
