Dienes & Perner (D&P) link explicit knowledge of facts
to predication. But predication is basically a linguistic notion. Their
approach therefore makes it difficult to attribute knowledge of facts to
non- language-users, such as animals. The explicit/implicit distinction,
as D&P formulate it, is accordingly of little use for exploring the
cognitive capacities of nonhuman primates – despite the increasing
evidence for sophisticated social awareness among apes, implying mental
representations of events in which participants are clearly
distinguished. A revised formulation, less biased toward syntax as it
happens to have evolved in humans, could avoid this drawback.
