 Perception is usually understood to ground defeasible epistemic warrant for belief — for example, if you look outside and it appears to be raining, you have some grounds to believe that it is raining. It is difficult to forgo this assumption without succumbing to radical global skepticism, since we base so many of our beliefs on perception.  If seeming to perceive something to be the case provides defeasible epistemic warrant for believing it to be the case, than the fact the I seem to perceive a dog as being happy and playful warrants my belief that the dog is happy and playful, i.e. warrants my ascription of mental states to the dog. Given the prima facie epistemic support of seeming to perceive mental states in familiar animals like dogs, perceptualists would argue that only overwhelming evidence should overturn the common-sense, intuitive attribution of mental states to those animals. Whereas, as discussed above, Carruthers (1989) argues that because his theory denies consciousness to animals, we should strive to eradicate our intuitive attributions of consciousness, a perceptualist would respond that the evidence derived from our perceptual encounters with dogs is more convincing than his arguments (which hang on the plausibility of his higher order thought theory of consciousness; see section 6.1). 