 And, although not initially developed as a response to the thinking animal argument, S. Shoemaker’s (1984, 1999, 2004) view represents a direct and formidable challenge to (P2). On his account, the human animal sitting in your chair is not thinking because no animal is capable of thinking. This in turn is because the capacity for thought requires persistence conditions that all animals, human or otherwise, lack: “mental properties”, Shoemaker writes, “can belong only to things having psychological persistence conditions” (2004: 528). A thinker’s psychological states play characteristic causal roles, and these states (in combination with others) tend to cause the thinking being whose states they are to behave in certain ways. Thus, for example, the state of being in pain may be caused by bodily damage of some kind and may dispose the one who is in pain to cry out or recoil.