Abstract
When experimentally confronted with discrimination or recall tasks, non-human primates and pre-language children are able to assess whether they are likely to give a correct answer before responding. They can also modulate their decision according to expected pragmatic gains. In all these cases, however, the assessments are made in the absence of any theory of mental functioning. How do they represent the cognitive and pragmatic affordances relevant to their decision ? Peter Strawson's (1959) preconceptual semantics, based on " placement of features in space", provides one possible answer. We propose to complement it with an intensity indicator and an action pointer, and to generalize it to the case of non-spatial features such as metacognitive feelings.
