  Although great apes exhibit such forms of consciousness, DeGrazia also notes that primarily because of their lack of linguistic competence (itself important to personhood and also relevant because it limits the cognitive capacities available), non-linguistically trained great apes “are not so well endowed with [personhood-relevant] traits that they clearly qualify as persons” (ibid., 321). They do not even fare well compared to normal human children, who “are clearly capable of introspective awareness …, robustly competent in language, and more likely to show signs of autonomy” (ibid., 322). Despite his use of the adverb “clearly” which suggests that this is an epistemic claim, the conclusion is metaphysical: “It’s not that we don’t know enough about them to say whether they are persons. Rather, they exist in the gray area between paradigm persons and the vast majority of animals who definitely are not persons” (ibid., 322).