Abstract

This paper is the third in a sequence of essays and steps toward the worked demonstration the preceding essay left owed. When one animal turns to look where another is looking, two very different things might be happening: orientation-tracking or mere reaction to motion or local salience. This paper states that distinction as a controlled difference — a residual that survives once the cruder cue introduced by the experiment is subtracted — and reads one well-controlled chimpanzee gaze-following study through it. The result is narrow but positive: where the layout controls for salience-capture, the residual survives and returns recognition; where proximity explains the response in object-choice tasks, the residual collapses and returns detection. The paper's contribution is not a claim about animal experience, but a demonstration that the structure-first posture developed in the preceding essays can produce a measured structural verdict rather than merely refusing the inference to presence. Series note: This is the third paper in the series that begins with “Not Less, But Other."