Understanding the actions that animals perform during different contexts is central to learning about what animals know, desire, intend, believe and feel. While philosophical discussions of action theory focus almost exclusively on humans, there is quite a lot of information stemming from cognitive ethological investigations of animals, which can inform discussion among people who do not spend much time watching other animals, or who focus on non-human primates to the exclusion of other groups.

Cognitive ethologists are breaking new ground almost daily about the surprising cognitive abilities of a wide range of animals, and these data are essential for informing philosophical inquiries about the nature of animal minds – what is in them and how they process information. Because of the rapid accumulation of comparative data, there is less guesswork about what animals know, desire, intend, believe and feel. Cognitive ethology is the comparative, evolutionary and ecological study of non-human animal minds, including thought processes, beliefs, rationality, information processing, emotions and feelings, and consciousness. Cognitive ethology traces its beginnings to the writings of Charles Darwin and some of his contemporaries and followers. Their approach incorporated appeals to evolutionary theory; interests in mental continuity (where it is argued that differences among species are differences of degree rather than of kind); concerns with individual, intraspecific (within species) and interspecific (between species) variation; strong interests in the worlds of the animals themselves; close associations with natural history; and attempts to learn more about the behaviour of animals in conditions that are as close as possible to the natural environment where selection has occurred.