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The Animal Mind

Book · November 2014

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Kristin Andrews
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 The  Animal  Mind  
 
Acknowledgments  ……………………………………………………………………..  x  
Introduction  ………………………………………………………………………………  1  
 
Chapter  1:  Getting  to  know  other  minds  ……………………………………..  
1.1 Mind  and  cognition  
1.2 Historical  opinions  
1.3 Arguments  for  other  animal  minds  
1.3.1 Arguments  from  analogy  
1.3.2 Arguments  from  evolutionary  parsimony  
1.3.3 Inference  to  the  best  explanation  arguments  
1.3.4 Direct  perception  arguments  
1.4 The  calibration  method  
1.4.1 Describing  behaviors  
1.4.2 Explaining  behaviors  
1.5 A  case:  Explaining  monkey  alarm  calls  
1.6 Chapter  summary  
Further  reading  
 
Chapter  2:  The  Science  of  other  minds  
2.1 Anecdotal  anthropomorphism  
2.1.1 Problems  with  the  first  step  in  anecdotal  anthropomorphism  
2.1.2 Problems  with  the  second  step  in  anecdotal  
anthropomorphism  
2.2 The rise of animal psychology as a science: Morgan’s Canon
2.3 Learning principles: Associations and insight
2.4 Anthropomorphism, and Morgan’s Canon revisited
2.5 The rise of ethology and kinds of explanation
2.6 New directions in animal cognition research
2.7 Chapter summary
Further reading

Chapter 3: Consciousness
3.1 What is consciousness?
3.2 Are other animals conscious?
3.3 Non-inferential arguments for animal consciousness
3.4 Inferential arguments for animal consciousness
3.5 A representationalist challenge to animal consciousness
3.6. Neural correlates of consciousness arguments for animal minds
3.6.1. Fish pain
3.6.2. Evaluating animal pain
3.6.3. Other analogical features
3.6.4. Learning and consciousness revisited
3.7 Self-consciousness
3.7.1. Mirror self-recognition
 3.7.2. Uncertainty monitoring
3.7.3. Episodic memory
3.8 Chapter summary
Further Reading

Chapter 4: Thinking: belief, concepts, and rationality

4.1 What is belief?
4.1.1 Representational views
4.1.2 Nonrepresentational views
4.1.3 Eliminativist views
4.2 Requirements for having beliefs
4.2.1 Attributing content and concepts
4.2.2 Having concepts
4.2.2.1  Investigating  animal  concepts  
    4.2.2.2  Nonconceptual  thought  
      4.2.2.3  Animals  and  concepts?  
4.2.3 Systematicity in propositional thought
4.2.4 Logical reasoning and rationality
4.2.5 Metacognitive capacities
4.2.6 Animal logic
4.3 Chapter summary
Further Reading

Chapter 5: Communication
5.1 What is communication?
5.1.1 Biological accounts
5.1.2 Information-based accounts
5.1.3 Intentional accounts
5.1.3.1 Gricean accounts
5.1.3.2    Weaker  versions  of  intentional  communication  
    5.1.3.3  Dynamical  systems  account  of  communication  
5.1.3.4  Studying  intentional  communication  in  other  species  
5.2.  Meaning  in  intentional  communication  
    5.2.1  Reference  
    5.2.2  Expressivisim  
5.2.3  Content  vs.  attention-­‐getting  signals  
5.3.  Evolution  of  language  
5.3.1  What  is  language?  
5.3.2  Gestural  origins  of  language  evolution  
5.3.3  Teaching  animals  language  
5.4  Chapter  summary  
Further  Reading  
 
Chapter  6:  Knowing  Minds  
6.1  Mindreading  (or  theory  of  mind)  
6.1.1. Is nonhuman mindreading empirically tractable?
 6.1.2. The “logical problem”
6.1.3. Do we need to solve the logical problem?
6.2.4 Benefits of mindreading
6.2. Understanding intentional agency
6.3. Understanding others’ emotions
6.4. Understanding perceptions and attributing personality traits
6.4.1. Research on perceptual mindreading in animals
6.4.2. Research on personality understanding in animals
6.5 Chapter summary
Further Reading

Chapter 7: Moral minds

7.1 Moral status
7.1.1 Utilitiarian accounts of moral status
7.1.2 Rights-based accounts of moral status
7.1.3 Social accounts of moral status
7.2 Moral subjects and near-persons
7.3 Moral agency
7.4 Psychological properties and morality
7.5 Moral differences
7.6 Chapter summary
Further Reading

Glossary
Bibliography

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 Introduction

Kinds of Minds

“Rico, get the tyrex.” Rico ambles into the next room, picks up the blue dinosaur from

among a jumble of stuffed toys, and carries it back with him. “Rico, get the ball… the

Santa Claus… the sock, the white bunny…” Again, and again, Rico leaves the room, and

returns with the named object. Rico’s performance would be pretty good for a small

child. For a border collie, it is astounding.

Rico has been taught 200 labels by his owners, who show Rico a new object—say

a rubber chicken—and then repeat the name of the object—“chicken, chicken,

chicken”—two or three times. Then Rico gets to play with the toy, and before long he is

able to retrieve the chicken from his collection of objects when asked. In a formal study

of Rico’s word learning ability, researchers found that Rico can also fast map new words
via a learning-by-exclusion mechanism—he is able to deduce the referent of an

unfamiliar word by realizing, for example, that the word has to refer to one of eight

objects, and that it can’t refer to the seven familiar objects. So, if Rico is asked to retrieve

the dax, and the other objects are the familiar ball, Santa Claus, sock, white bunny, etc.,

he is able to infer that the unfamiliar object must be the dax. In a video of this test that is

posted on-line, you can see Rico nosing the various objects in the room before finally

choosing the correct one (Kaminski et al. 2004).

Fig. 0.1 Rico, knowing the name of all the other objects in the array, chooses the

unnamed object as the “dax”. [Note, figures to be redrawn by in house artist.]

How do toddlers and border collies infer that the novel object is the target, when

they are asked to pick up a “dax”? How does fast mapping work? Developmental

psychologists think that children rely on operating principles in their language learning,

and that even toddlers understand that words refer to objects. Rico’s ability to fast map is

taken as evidence that he shares some of the operating principles—he knows that objects

can have names—and he possesses a learning-by-exclusion mechanism that allows him

to deduce the referent of the unfamiliar word. For example, when asked, “Where is the

dax?” Rico realizes that the word has to refer to one of the eight objects in the array, and

since he knows the name of seven objects, “dax” cannot refer to any of them. In order to
make this inference, he needs to either believe that objects can only have one name, or

believe something about his owners' intentions.

Rico’s fascinating abilities raise a number of questions about how to interpret his

behavior, as well as about the mechanisms involved. Does Rico understand that words

refer? Does he grasp the intention of speakers who utter an unfamiliar word? Is his word

learning similar to that of human children? Or does he take the word “sock” to be a

command to fetch the sock, and his “word learning” is just a result of obedience training;

is it like teaching a dog to sit or come?

We may have different intuitions about these questions. Some dog lovers might

think that Rico really does understand words. But for others, the intuition goes the other

way, and they may explain Rico’s success as a matter of forming simple associations

between objects and utterances. However, neither intuition goes very far as a meaningful

or justified answer to the questions. The dog owner may be biased by her relationship

with her own dog, and more likely to anthropomorphize—or attribute human qualities—

to dogs and other familiar animals, and she may not have thought carefully about what it

means to know something as a word. The skeptic may be biased in the other direction,

being inclined to anthropectomy— the stance that denies human qualities in other

animals—and she may not realize that training and understanding often go hand in hand

for humans as well as dogs, as in the cases of learning to play the violin, or learning a

second language.

In order to provide justified answers to the questions raised by Rico's feats, we

need to turn to both science and philosophy. Questions about animal minds are addressed

across academic disciplines, with psychologists, biologists, anthropologists, ecologists,

ethologists, primatologists, and philosophers—among others—engaged in answering

overlapping sets of questions using different methods. The scientific methods are in place

to minimize bias and to develop and test hypotheses about various animal minds in order

to determine, with justification, what those minds are like. The philosophical methods are

in place to clarify the questions, as well as the answers. As in any interdisciplinary

endeavor, it can be difficult for a person from one discipline to make herself understood

to someone from the other disciplines given that along with different methods there are

often different vocabularies. However, the possibility of increasing overall understanding

certainly makes it worth the extra effort. And a growing number of researchers have been

dual-trained in more than one of these disciplines; for example, Juliane Kaminski, the

lead researcher on the Rico study, was trained in biology and psychology, and she has

worked with a number of different species, including humans, other great apes, and goats.

The scientific research on the cognitive abilities of animals comes from many

different disciplines and involves many different methodological approaches. In

laboratories, zoos, or other captive settings, psychologists ask questions about the

cognitive mechanisms involved in perception, memory classification, spatial cognition,

numerical abilities, learning, future planning, social intelligence, communication, and so

forth. In the field, psychologists, biologists, ethologists, ecologists and anthropologists

are interested in documenting what different species do, examining similarities and

differences between individuals and groups, and conducting experiments to learn

something about the causes of behavior and the contents of animal minds. These and

other biological approaches to studying animals take seriously animals’ evolved nature,

and aim to answer questions about the evolutionary function of the observed behaviors,
and the reproductive benefits that the behavior offers. In front of the computer, some

psychologists and ecologists seek to answer questions about animal minds by developing

and manipulating functional models of animal behavior based on the interaction between

individuals and the environment. And, in the neuroscience lab, scientists are engaged in

studying the brains of animals as they process different kinds of information. But for all

these sciences, there arise fundamental issues about the concepts used in the

investigation, and the usefulness of the methods implemented to address the questions

and interpret the data.

To see why taking all these different perspectives into account is productive in

animal cognition research, consider again the questions we asked about Rico’s behavior.

While scientists can ask the empirical question of whether Rico will respond by fetching

a new object when he is commanded to fetch the dax, philosophers are more focused on

how we should best interpret Rico’s behavior. Philosophers may investigate whether Rico

understands words, and that words refer, appealing to some account of reference, naming,

or understanding. In addition, philosophers may investigate the nature of reference,

naming, and understanding, using Rico’s behavior as additional evidence for developing

new theories of these notions. As I see it, the philosopher’s analysis of concepts is both

fed by what she sees in the world, and then again by how the world behaves once it is

seen through the theoretical lens. For example, suppose we understand consciousness as

necessarily involving the ability to feel pain, and evidence of feeling pain comes from

observing irritant responses, such as shrinking back from a pinprick or a hot stove. We

can use this simple account to investigate the distribution of consciousness, and find that

a meditating monk doesn’t display an irritant response to a pinprick, and a mimosa plant
 will close its leaves when brushed—but doesn’t respond after being given an anesthetic

that eliminates pain responses in humans. Given other reasons we have for thinking that

the monk is conscious (say, her verbal report), and other reasons for thinking that plants

don’t experience pain (say, our identification of pain as being caused by neural structures

that are absent in plants), we can modify our understanding of consciousness slightly, and

use the new understanding to investigate the world again, which may lead to a further

revision of the concept. This constant calibration of concepts and observations means that

no simple answer is going to be available to any of the questions asked in this book. We

will be investigating the nature of animal consciousness, rationality, belief,

communication, social understanding and morality, while at the same time looking at

what animal behavior can help teach us about these concepts. The hope is that by looking

at a wide range of behaviors displayed by a variety of minded creatures, we will gain a

greater understanding of the various aspects of the biological mind, which will help us

better understand the human animal as well as our nonhuman relatives.

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