Debates in animal cognition research are often polarized between the romantic view that some animals have human like cognitive capacities and the killjoy view that human cognitive capacities are unique. This lack of progress towards agreement is especially surprising since debates concerning cognitive capacities like causal understanding, theory of mind, or animal belief remain largely unaffected by new empirical evidence. The goal of this talk is to a) diagnose reasons for disagreement, and b) suggest a way to make progress. Concerning a) I will discuss three potential reasons for this situation: (1) researchers subscribe to different principles of interpretations; (2) the methods to investigate animal cognition necessarily result in a problem of underdetermination, and (3), what I take to be the central problem: disagreement is largely conceptual, i.e. researchers have different views on how to best characterize cognitive capacities. On the assumption that this analysis is correct I’ll b) argue that this does not boil down to merely verbal disagreement, and that the most promising approach to solve the conceptual question is to shift our attention from the question whether or not animals have a cognitive capacity to treating them as informative concerning how to best think about these capacities.