Making animal sentience explicit : practical intentionality and the problem of animal awareness

Robert Brandom's account of the boundary between sapience and sentience has been\ud met with criticism on the basis of not doing justice to non-human animal sentience, of\ud limiting the awareness of non-human animals to the same reliable differential responsive dispositions exhibited by human artifacts and inanimate objects such as thermostats and chunks of iron. Brandom has the resources to make explicit an intermediary domain of conceptual activity between the space of reasons and the space of causes, a domain of practical intentionality that accounts for the intelligent and skillful activity of non-human animals. Non-human animals exhibit practical intentionality, a sensitivity and responsiveness to norms that enable them to skillfully interact with their environment. I conclude that Brandom's account of practical intentionality suffices as a minimal criterion for non-human animal sentience but that a more thorough treatment of empirical and naturalistic approaches to animal sentience can provide Brandom with resources that further describe the causal and biological mechanisms that enable animals to respond to normative features of their environment