Rational Animals?
Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew)
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Amazon Reviews

  1. An essential book for anyone interested in the evolution of intelligence. Herb Terrace, Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, Columbia University
  2. This volume offers a useful overview of current thinking about animal rationality from a variety of academic perspectives. It provides an invaluable point of entry for students new to the area, while offering researchers an insight into the perspectives of those whose approaches to animal rationality are grounded in disciplines other than their own.
    Applied Cognitive Psychology, Vol 21
  3. Rational Animals? is thoughtful, thought-provoking, informative and fascinating and will do a great deal to further interdisciplinary understanding and informed debate.
    Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol 13, No 12
  4. This is an excellent, informative book on animal rationality.
    Doody's Notes
Cover Blurb
  1. Are any nonhuman animals rational? What issues are we raising when we ask this question? Are there different kinds or levels of rationality, some of which fall short of full human rationality? Should any behaviour by nonhuman animals he regarded as rational? What kinds of tasks can animals successfully perform? From what kinds of processes does their behaviour result, and do they count as rational processes? Is it useful or theoretically justified to raise questions about the rationality of animals at all? Should we be interested in whether they are rational? Why does it matter?
  2. This book pursues these questions both theoretically and empirically. The contributors include distinguished philosophers, as sell as scientists who report and reflect on their work with such impressive animals as Kanzi the bonobo, Betty the New Caledonian crow, Sheba the chimpanzee. Sweetie-Pie the scrub jay, Akeakamai the bottlenose dolphin, and Alex the African Grey parrot. Studies of different species are brought together for comparison, and philosophical arguments about rationality are brought into contact with empirical evidence of the behavioural and cognitive capacities of animals. Sections of the volume focus on various types and levels of rationality, on rational versus associative processes, on metacognition and metarepresentation, on social behaviour and cognition, on mind reading versus behaviour reading, and on behaviour and cognition in symbolic environments. An editorial introduction provides an analytical framework for the issues discussed by contributors and a comparative summary of the chapters.
Cover Reviews
  1. ‘This is a superb interdisciplinary collection of essays by many of the best specialists in the area. It truly enhances our understanding of what is at stake in discussions of animal rationality, and presents fascinating state-of-the-art evidence.'
    Dan Sperber, Director of Research, CNRS, Paris
  2. ‘Most students of animal behavior regard Descartes' claim that animals are unthinking, mechanical brutes as hopelessly simplistic. Rational Animals? shows why in an important and timely integration of recent breakthroughs on this fascinating topic. Susan Hurley and Matthew Nudds have done a superb job of editing and highlighting the contributions of a distinguished group of psychologists and philosophers that will leave little doubt in the reader's mind that there is a high degree of overlap in how animals and humans think about their worlds. An essential book for anyone interested in the evolution of intelligence.'
    Herb Terrace, Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, Columbia University
  3. Rational Animals? has successfully brought together an impressive number of the world's leading philosophers and cognitive scientists to create a comparative and evolutionary analysis of rationality that is unprecedented in its comprehensiveness and intellectual depth. Ingenious empirical studies have recently transformed our understanding of animal cognition, and here the results receive razor-sharp appraisal. The conclusions matter not only for how we view the diversity of non-human minds we share the planet with, but also how we regard the extraordinary mix of rational and irrational psychology that makes us human.'
    Andrew Whiten, Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology, School of Psychology, University of St Andrews.
Book Comment

Oxford University Press; 2006. Nice Paperback.


"Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - The questions of animal rationality: Theory and evidence"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Section Headings, Hyperlinks & text extracts
    Introduction
  1. Background: Theoretical questions and distinctions
    … 1.1 Rationality and Intelligence
    … 1.2 Rationality, generalization, and decentring
    … 1.3 Rationality and normativity
    … 1.4 Rationality and consciousness
    … 1.5 Rationality and conceptual and linguistic abilities
    … 1.6 Rationality and reasoning; behavioural versus process rationality
    … 1.7 Ends versus means
    … 1.8 Instrumental rationality as behavioural rationality
    … 1.9 Instrumental rationality as process rationality
    … 1.10 Formal versus substantive rationality
    … 1.11 Individual versus social rationality
    … 1.12 Practical versus theoretical rationality
    … 1.13 The landscape of questions about animal rationality
    • Rationality differs from intelligence: In requiring a greater capacity for flexible generalization — extending to some capacity for decentring from me here and now, if not to full domain-generality — and in its normativity, which requires the possibility of making mistakes and perhaps some kind of reflective awareness, or metacognition, concerning the possibility of mistake.
    • Disciplines vary in their focus on rational behaviour as opposed to on rational processes that explain behaviour.
    • Rational behaviour is usually understood in terms of instrumental practical rationality, concerning the rational means to a given end, rather than the rationality of ends. However, it is arguable that the implicit dependence of purely formal conceptions of rationality on some substantive assumptions puts pressure on behavioural rationality to include some process elements.
    • Classical conceptions of behavioural rationality, such as EUT, have been challenged by results from the heuristics and biases line of research, and revised and liberalized by the ecological rationality school.
    • Process rationality can be understood either as practical, concerning the processes that explain actions, or as theoretical, concerning the processes than explain beliefs.
    • A classical view of process rationality in terms of reflective, domain-general reasoning might be revised and liberalized by allowing other processes to count as rational, such as domain-specific heuristics, processes implemented by associative mechanisms, and widely distributed processes.
    • Such liberal revisions of classical conceptions of human behavioural and process rationality may make more room for animal rationality.
    • In social environments, agents play against other agents (rather than nature), who can manipulate information; this creates selection pressure that may drive the development of advanced cognitive capacities, including behaviour reading and mind reading capacities, in social animals.
    • Practical rationality may be more accommodating than theoretical rationality of the forms of social cognition found in non-human animals, and of the domain-specificity of many of their problem-solving abilities.
  2. Types and levels of rationality
  3. Rational versus associative processes
  4. Metacognition
  5. Social behaviour and cognition
  6. Mind reading and behaviour reading
  7. Behaviour and cognition in symbolic environments
  8. Why does it matter?

Paper Comment

Editors' Introduction


"Kacelnik (Alex) - Meanings of rationality"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
    The concept of rationality differs between psychology, philosophy, economics, and biology. For psychologists and philosophers, the emphasis is on the process by which decisions are made: rational beliefs are arrived at by reasoning and contrasted with beliefs arrived at by emotion, faith, authority, or arbitrary choice. Economists emphasize consistency of choice, regardless of the process and the goal. Biologists use a concept that links both previous ideas. Following Darwin's theory of natural selection, they expect animals to behave as if they had been designed to surpass the fitness of their conspecifics and use optimality to predict behaviour that might achieve this. I introduce the terms PP-rationality, E-rationality, and B-rationality to refer to these three different conceptions, and explore the advantages and weaknesses of each of them. The concepts are first discussed and then illustrated with specific examples from research in bird behaviour, including New Caledonian crows' tool design, hummingbirds' preferences between flowers, and starlings' choices between walking and flying. I conclude that no single definition of rationality can serve the purposes of the research community but that agreement on meanings and justifications for each stand is both necessary and possible.
Sections
  1. Introduction
  2. PP-rationality
  3. E-rationality
  4. B-rationality
  5. Rational birds? Some experimental tests
    … 5.1 B-rationality: Optimal foraging theory
    … 5.2 B-rationality: To fly or to walk?
    … 5.3 E-rationality
    … 5.4 PP-rationality: New Caledonian crows
  6. Conclusions: Are animals rational after all?

Paper Comment

Part I: Types and levels of rationality, Chapter 2


"Dretske (Fred) - Minimal rationality"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
    In thinking about animal rationality, it is useful to distinguish (what I call) minimal rationality, doing something for reasons, and doing something for good reasons, reasons that (if true) exhibit the behavior as contributing to goal attainment and desire satisfaction. Minimal rationality, though it is less demanding than rationality (it doesn't require good reasons), is, in another way, more demanding than other forms of rationality (e.g. biological rationality). It requires the behavior to not only be under the causal control of thought, but to be explained by the content of these thoughts. It is for this reason that a lot of behavior (especially by plants and machines) that would appear to be rational is not even minimally rational.

Paper Comment

Part I: Types and levels of rationality, Chapter 3


"Millikan (Ruth Garrett) - Styles of rationality"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
    One way to describe rationality is as an ability to make trials and errors in one's head rather than in overt behaviour. I speculate about two different kinds of cognitive capacities of this sort that we humans seem to have, one of which we may share with many of the animals, the other, perhaps, with none. First, there is a certain kind of rationality that may occur on the level of perception, prior to cognition proper. Second, there is the capacity to form subject-predicate judgements sensitive to a negation transformation, hence subject to the law of non-contradiction. This latter capacity may be what allows humans to learn to represent world affairs that are not of immediate practical interest to them, a capacity that we probably don't share with the animals.

Paper Comment

Part I: Types and levels of rationality, Chapter 4


"Bermudez (Jose Luis) - Animal reasoning and proto-logic"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
    This chapter addresses a theoretical problem that arises when we treat non-linguistic animals as thinkers in order to explain their behavior in psychological terms. Psychological explanations work because they identify beliefs and desires that show why the action in question made sense from the agent's perspective. To say that an action makes sense in the light of an agent's beliefs and desires is to say that it is the rational thing to do (or, at least, a rational thing to do) given those beliefs and desires. And that in turn means that, in at least some cases, an agent might reason her way from those beliefs and desires to acting in the relevant way. Most models of reasoning, however, treat it in terms of logical operations defined over linguistic structures, which makes it difficult to see how it might be extended to non-linguistic creatures. This paper develops a framework for thinking about the types of reasoning engaged in by non-linguistic creatures. It explores non-linguistic analogs of basic patterns of inference that can be understood at the linguistic level in terms of rules of inference involving elementary logical concepts. The three schemas discussed (reasoning from an excluded alternative and two types of conditional reasoning) are highly relevant to animal practical reasoning, and I show how animals might apply them without deploying any logical concepts.

Paper Comment

Part I: Types and levels of rationality, Chapter 5


"Hurley (Susan) - Making sense of animals"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
    We shouldn't overintellectualize the mind. Non-human animals can occupy islands of practical rationality: they can have domain-specific reasons for action even though they lack full conceptual abilities. Holism and the possibility of mistake are required for such reasons to be the agent's reasons, but these requirements can be met in the absence of inferential promiscuity. Empirical work with animals is used to illustrate the possibility that reasons for action could be specific to symbolic or social contexts, and connections are made to simulationist accounts of cognitive skills.
Sections
  1. Reasons without conceptual abilities: belief vs. action
  2. Degrees of generality: holism vs. inferential promiscuity
  3. A quibble: are conceptual abilities themselves a matter of degree?
  4. Normativity and the possibility of mistake
  5. Illustrations of context-bound reasons for action: symbolic context
  6. Illustrations of context-bound reasons for action: social contexts
  7. Simulation: context-bound reasons vs. conceptual abilities
  8. What is the point of making sense of animals?
  9. Summary and concluding remarks

Paper Comment

Part I: Types and levels of rationality, Chapter 6


"Allen (Colin) - Transitive inference in animals: Reasoning or conditioned associations?"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
    It is widely accepted that many species of non-human animals appear to engage in transitive inference, producing appropriate responses to novel pairings of non-adjacent members of an ordered series without previous experience of these pairings. Some researchers have taken this capability as providing direct evidence that these animals reason. Others resist such declarations, favouring instead explanations in terms of associative conditioning. Associative accounts of transitive inference have been refined in application to a simple five-element learning task that is the main paradigm for laboratory investigations of the phenomenon, but it remains unclear how well those accounts generalize to more information-rich environments such as primate social hierarchies, which may contain scores of individuals. The case of transitive inference is an example of a more general dispute between proponents of associative accounts and advocates of more cognitive accounts of animal behaviour. Examination of the specific details of transitive inference suggests some lessons for the wider debate.
Sections
  1. Transitive inference
  2. Expaining (the appearance of) transitive inference
  3. Reasoning or conditioned associations?
  4. Reflections on animal cognition

Paper Comment

Part II: Rational versus associative processes, Chapter 7


"Papineau (David) & Heyes (Cecilia M.) - Rational or associative? Imitation in Japanese quail"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
  1. Much contemporary psychology assumes a fundamental distinction between associative explanations of animal behaviour, in terms of unthinking 'conditioned responses', and rational explanations, which credit animals with relevant 'knowledge' or 'understanding' or 'concepts'.
  2. This paper argues that this dichotomy is both unclear and methodologically unhelpful, serving only to distract attention from serious questions about which cognitive abilities are present in which animals.
  3. We illustrate the issues by considering recent experimental work on imitation in Japanese quail.

Sections
  1. Introduction
  2. Imitation in Japanese quail
  3. The significance of sensitivity to demonstrator reward
  4. Rational versus associative explanations of the Japanese quail
  5. Morals

Paper Comment

Part II: Rational versus associative processes, Chapter 8


"Clayton (Nicola), Emery (Nathan) & Dickinson (Anthony) - The Rationality of Animal Memory: Complex caching strategies of western scrub jays"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
    Scrub jays cache perishable and non-perishable foods, and their caches may be pilfered by conspecifics. Caching and recovery by scrub jays is psychologically rational in the sense that these behaviours responded appropriately to conditions that should have changed the birds' beliefs and desires. For example scrub jays were allowed to cache worms and peanuts in a visuospatially distinct tray. At recovery, birds search initially for worms after a short retention interval because they believe that the worms are still edible, but switch to searching for peanuts at a long retention interval because they believe that worms are now degraded. If jays acquire new information after caching, such that worms are no longer edible when recovered at the short interval, this should affect their belief about the state of their caches. Jays update their cache memory, and on subsequent trials of the short interval, search selectively in peanut sites. In a second example, scrub jays cached either in private (when another bird's view was obscured) or while a conspecific was watching, and then recovered their caches in private. Scrub jays with prior experience of stealing another bird's caches subsequently recached food in new sites during recovery trials, but only when they had been observed caching. Naive birds did not. We suggest that experienced pilferers had formed a belief that observers will pilfer caches they have seen, and recache food in new sites to fulfil their desire to protect their caches. Since recaching is not dependent on the presence of the potential thief, the jays must recall the previous social context during caching, and flexibly use this information to implement an appropriate cache protection strategy, namely recache the food in locations unbeknownst to the pilferer.
Sections
  1. Introduction: Intentional and mechanistic psychology
  2. The content of desires
  3. The structure and content of cache beliefs
    … 3.1The flexibility of cache memories
  4. The rationality of caching strategies
  5. Summary and conclusions

Paper Comment

Part II: Rational versus associative processes, Chapter 9


"Call (Josep) - Descartes’ two errors: Reason and reflection in the great apes"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
    Reasoning and reflection have traditionally been considered uniquely human attributes. Many animals, including the great apes, are often regarded as masters at making associations between arbitrary stimuli while at the same time they are rarely considered capable of reasoning and understanding the causality1 behind even simple phenomena. In this chapter, I defend a view opposite to this predominant position. Apes (and possibly other animals) are actually quite good at understanding and reasoning about certain physical properties of their world while at the same time they are quite bad at associating arbitrary stimuli and responses. In other words, if two stimuli nave a causal connection (as when food inside a shaken cup makes noise) apes perform better than if stimuli hold an arbitrary relation (as when an unrelated noise indicates food), even if the contingencies of reinforcement are the same. Neither a history of reinforcement based on traditional associationism nor a biological predisposition to respond differentially to certain stimuli combinations explains these results. Instead, I postulate that subjects reason and use logical operations based on inference by exclusion to locate the hidden food. In addition to the ability to reason about physical phenomena, I argue that apes (and other animals) also have some access to their understanding of the problem. More precisely, they have rnetacognitive abilities that allow them to know what they know or do not know. Thus reasoning and reflection may not be the bastions of human uniqueness, as Descartes once thought. Rather, these skills may have evolved (or coevolved) in other animals as well because they allowed them to solve problems in the world more efficiently.
Sections
  1. Introduction
  2. On Reasoning
    … 2.1 Shaken food inside a cup makes noise
    … 2.2 Solid food under a board occupies space
    … 2.3 Arbitrary cues are hard to learn
  3. Rationality by association, biological predisposition, or logic
    … 3.1 History of reinforcement
    … 3.2 Biological predispositions
    … Knowledge, logic, and inference
  4. On reflection
    … 4.1 Monkeys and dolphins know when they are uncertain
    … 4.2 Monkeys know when they have forgotten
    … 4.3 Apes know when they have not seen
  5. Arbitrary, causal, and symbolic connections
  6. Evolution of reasoning and reflection
  7. Conclusion

Paper Comment

Part III: Metacognition, Chapter 10


"Shettleworth (Sara J.) & Sutton (Jennifer E.) - Do animals know what they know?"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
    Using well-established paradigms for studying animal perception and memory, researchers have begun to ask whether animals can monitor the status of their knowledge in a behavioural task—whether they know what they know. Generally, such metacognitive ability is tested by giving animals the opportunity to avoid (or 'escape') a test of memory or perceptual discrimination. The pattern of escapes can then be analyzed in a number of ways, including whether the subject escapes more often from difficult tests, where a correct answer is less likely, than from easy tests. A number of non-metacognitive strategies can be used by animals in these experiments, however, and it is important to control carefully for alternative explanations. Moreover, only rigorous, controlled tests will determine whether current suggestions of species differences in metacognitive abilities are correct.
Sections
  1. Introduction
  2. How can we test animals’ metacognition?
  3. Uncertainty in perceptual discriminations
  4. Monitoring the status of a memory
  5. Summary and future directions

Paper Comment

Part III: Metacognition, Chapter 11


"Proust (Joelle) - Rationality and metacognition in non-human animals"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
    The present chapter approaches the subject of animal rationality on the basis of dynamic-evolutionary considerations. Rationality is defined as a disposition that tends to be realized by a control system that can adapt to changing circumstances and that relies on cognition to do so. The specific selective pressures exerted on agents endowed with information-processing capacities are analysed. Rationality reflects the characteristics of these pressures (in particular the contingent fact that the relevant environment is variable and competitive). It is hypothesized that a primary form of rationality consists in a set of metacognitive skills. They offer an evolutionary stable response to the various demands of the internal and external flows of information in a variable and competitive environment. Metacognition provides a form of procedural reflexivity that can, but does not have to be redeployed through metarepresentations. Finally, the claim that this early form of rationality based on metacognition involves normativity is discussed.
Sections
  1. Rationality
  2. Rationality as adaptive control by cognitive means
    … 2.1 Bounded rationality in a dynamic evolutionary perspective
    … 2.1.1 Control structures
    … 2.1.2 Adaptive control
    … 2.2 Flexible control via cognition: competition, and the control of information
  3. Flexibility and informational environments
    … 3.1 The costs and benefits of flexibility
    … 3.2 The costs and benefits of cognitive flexibility
    … 3.3 Transparent vs. translucent informational environments
    … 3.4 Epistemic action: action for informational ends, by physical or informational means
    … 3.5 Metacognition: action for informational ends by informational means
    … 3.6 From the external to the internal environment
  4. From metacognition to rationality
    … 4.1 Metacognition, metarepresentation, and mind reading
    … 4.2 Metacognition as procedural reflexivity
    … 4.3 From metacognition as procedural reflexivity to metarepresentation and explicit reason-giving
    … 4.4 Rationality without normativity
  5. Summary

Paper Comment

Part III: Metacognition, Chapter 12


"Currie (Gregory) - Rationality, decentring, and the evidence for pretence in non-human animals"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
    I argue that pretence involves a capacity for what I call decentring. Because of its dependence on decentring, pretence constitutes an indication of rationality. I give a brief account of decentring, distinguish it from metarepresentation, and say something about the relations between pretence, deception and imitation. I make a suggestion about the kinds of evidence of pretence we should look for if we are considering whether a creature is capable of pretence. I consider whether Morgan's canon, or something like it, might help us in weighing the evidence. Finally, I suggest that the phenomenon of seeing-in may underlie pretence, and offer a speculation on the evolutionary history of the capacity for seeing-in.
Sections
  1. Two kinds of cognitive variation
  2. Behaviour indicative of pretending
  3. Evidence for pretence in non-human primates
  4. Pretence and Morgan’s canon
  5. Pretence and seeing-in
  6. Conclusion

Paper Comment

Part III: Metacognition, Chapter 13


"Sterelny (Kim) - Folk logic and animal rationality"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract

In this paper I argue that there are two different strategies for thinking about rationality, both of human and of non-human agents.
  1. We could treat rationality as a measure of overall cognitive efficiency: of the capacity of an agent to respond adaptively to the challenges its environment poses, even when adaptive response to those challenges must take into account quite subtle or recondite features of that agent's circumstances.
  2. Alternatively, we could develop a narrow conception of rationality: rational thinking is an evolutionary response to the dangers of misinformation and deception in social environments in which agents rely heavily on information provided by others.
In developing some ideas of Dan Sperber, I argue that folk logic is a response to this specific feature of human environments, and that theorizing about this narrow conception of rationality is more likely to be fruitful than theorizing about rationality as overall cognitive efficiency. However, the positive thesis about the evolutionary origins of folk logic is independent of the sceptical, negative thesis about rationality as cognitive efficiency. The speculation about folk logic could be wrong while the sceptical thesis is right, and vice versa.

Sections
  1. Rational animal agents?
  2. Information, detection, action
    … 2.1 Pollution
    … 2.2 Agent-sensitive response
    … 2.3 Epistemic action and its costs
  3. Human cognition
  4. The hazards of information transfer

Paper Comment

Part IV: Social behaviour and cognition, Chapter 14


"Addessi (Elsa) & Visalberghi (Elisabetta) - Rationality in capuchin monkey's feeding behaviour?"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
  • Capuchin monkeys forage in social groups. To what extent is foraging by monkeys affected by social influences and, in particular, which are the proximate processes involved? We carried out a series of experiments aimed to investigate whether capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) learn what to eat and what to avoid from the behaviour of other group members. Since capuchins are omnivorous and very socially tolerant, they are particularly well suited for this kind of study. Our studies show that capuchins' feeding behaviour is socially biased. In particular, although in the short run capuchins do not seem to take into account the full set of information provided by others' behaviour, in the long run their behaviour ends up being adaptive. In short, there is evidence that they learn with others rather than from others.
    We first show both that novel foods are eaten less than familiar foods and that they are eaten more when individuals are with group members than when they are alone. The role of social influences is then evaluated in more detail. If an individual learns about food palatability from others, we should expect the novel food, consumption of which is socially facilitated, should be of the same kind (in our experiment, of the same colour) as the food eaten by group members. We found, on the contrary, that:
    1. Eating was socially facilitated regardless of colour difference between the food eaten by the individual and by group members; and
    2. Even when given a choice between two foods, only one of which matches the colour of the food eaten by group members, the individual does not consume more of the matching than of the non-matching food.
    Although an individual is more likely to eat novel foods when group members are around, and thus to learn from its own feeding experience the palatability of a novel food, it does not eat more of a novel food when it matches the food that group members are eating. Therefore, the assumption that capuchins learn about food palatability from others is unwarranted.
  • In another experiment, we found that the nutrient content of foods plays a major role in determining individual preferences about novel foods, and that social influences do not affect these nutrient-based preferences. These and similar findings about primates suggest that individuals are equipped independently of social context with the behavioural and physiological tools necessary to select energy-rich foods and to avoid deleterious foods. Preferences for sweet foods and aversion to bitter substances (bitterness is often associated with toxic compounds), coupled with a neophobic response and food aversion learning, are effective tools that enable individuals to choose successfully among foods. To learn what to ingest and what to avoid, an individual does not need to observe other group members, who after all may often be absent or not behaving informatively in a given situation. Nevertheless, other social influences that do not take into account the whole set of information present in the behaviour of others are still at work. Social facilitation and local and stimulus enhancement increase the chances that a naive individual will feed at the same time and place as its group members, with the result that its food choices are similar to theirs. This scenario and that expected if social learning implies the whole set of information provided by group members (i.e. that they are eating a specific food) look similar. Moreover, they are impossible to distinguish unless ad hoc experiments are carried out. The scenario described above, in which individual learning is socially biased by a subset of the information present in the behaviour of group members, serves biological fitness quite well.
Sections
  1. Introduction
  2. Experimental evidence of social influences on feeding behaviour of capuchin monkeys
    … 2.1 Social influences on the response to novel foods
    … 2.2 The influence of nutrients on food choices
  3. Is capuchin monkey’s feeding behaviour PP-rational or B-rational?
  4. Socially biased individual learning
  5. Concluding remarks

Paper Comment

Part IV: Social behaviour and cognition, Chapter 15


"Connor (Richard) & Mann (Janet) - Social cognition in the wild: Machiavellian dolphins?"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
  1. Bottlenose dolphins have large brains and exhibit impressive cognitive abilities in captive studies. Observations of wild dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia suggest that these abilities are important for solving the problems dolphins face in the social and foraging domains. Dolphins must keep track of a large number of social relationships while associating in groups that often vary in composition, be able to navigate nested within-group alliances, and learn how, where, and when to forage on a wide range of prey. The social problems dolphins encounter appear especially daunting, suggesting that the Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis might apply to dolphins as well as to large-brained terrestrial mammals. With cetaceans, we are presented with a group of large, long-lived mammals that live in a habitat strikingly different from the terrestrial sphere and that exhibit striking diversity in brain size among species of comparable body size. We here review field studies of wild dolphin behaviour that is potentially relevant to the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis, describing general features of dolphin society, multilevel male alliances, female relationships, and affiliative interactions. We then explain why it is more plausible that brain evolution in dolphins was driven by social demands than by foraging demands.
Sections
  1. Introduction: general features of dolphin society
    … 1.1 Life history and reproduction
    … 1.2 General features of Shark Bay dolphin society
  2. Male alliances in Shark Bay: structure and complexity
    … 2.1 Alliance levels
    … 2.2 Shifting alliance relationships
    … 2.3 Shifting relations in ‘stable alliances’: a 17-year history
    … 2.4 Shifting relations in the super-alliance
    … 2.5 Shifting relations among the provisioned males and their allies
    … 2.6 Shifting relations among second order alliances
  3. Female relationships in Shark Bay
  4. Affiliative interactions
    … 4.1 Petting
    … 4.2 Synchrony
    … 4.3 Contact swimming: a female-specific affiliative behaviour
    … 4.4 Sociosexual behaviour
    … 4.5 Rational or emotional dolphins
  5. Discusion: brains, cognition, and behaviour
    … 5.1 Food and brains: energetics, resource distribution, and echolocation
    … 5.2 Machiavellian Intelligence in Dolphins
  6. Concluding remarks

Paper Comment

Part IV: Social behaviour and cognition, Chapter 16


"Tomasello (Michael) & Call (Josep) - Do chimpanzees know what others see - or only what they are looking at?"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
    A variety of recent experiments suggest that apes know what other individuals do and do not see. The results of each experiment may be explained by postulating some behavioural rule that individuals have learned that does not involve an understanding of seeing. But the postulated rule must be different in each case, and most of these do not explain more than one experiment. This patchiness of coverage gives this kind of explanation a very ad hoc feeling, especially since there is rarely any concrete evidence that animals actually have had the requisite experiences to learn the behavioural rule—there is just a theoretical possibility. It is thus more plausible to hypothesize that apes really do know what others do and do not see in many circumstances. Moreover, and more generally, there is no reason to assume—other than some kind of blind allegiance to behaviourism—that just because an animal has learned something, no cognitive processes are involved.
Sections
  1. Introduction
  2. Gaze following
  3. Competing for food
  4. Begging and gesturing
  5. Self-knowledge
  6. So what do chimpanzees really understand about seeing?

Paper Comment

Part V: Mind reading and behaviour reading, Chapter 17


"Povinelli (Daniel) & Vonk (Jennifer) - We don't need a microscope to explore the chimpanzee's mind"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
    The question of whether chimpanzees, like humans, reason about unobservable mental states remains highly controversial. On one account, chimpanzees are seen as possessing a psychological system for social cognition that represents and reasons about behaviours alone. A competing account allows that the chimpanzee's social cognition system additionally construes the behaviours it represents in terms of mental states. Because the range of behaviours that each of the two systems can generate is not currently known, and because the latter system depends upon the former, determining the presence of this latter system in chimpanzees is a far more difficult task than has been assumed. We call for recognition of this problem, and a shift from experimental paradigms that cannot resolve this question, to ones that might allow researchers to determine when it is necessary to postulate the presence of a system which reasons about both behaviour and mental states.
Sections
  1. Emergence of a gentle controversy
  2. Is ‘theory of mind’ anthropocentric?
  3. Concepts about behaviour versus concepts about behaviour and mind
  4. Parsimonious illusions?
  5. Retooling our research paradigms
  6. Do we really need a more powerful microscope?
  7. ‘All or none’?
  8. Current tests can (and do) implicate the presence of Sb alone
  9. Will the real sceptic please stand up?
  10. Appendix: Criticisms of Povinelli and colleagues’ seeing-not seeing studies with rebuttals

Paper Comment

Part V: Mind reading and behaviour reading, Chapter 18


"Tschudin (Alain J.-P. C.) - Belief attribution tasks with dolphins: What social minds can reveal about animal rationality"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
  1. This paper explores the question, 'Are animals rational?' Some may well be, demonstrating what different authors consider to be rationality of various forms. Other authors, however, continue to deny animal rationality, arguing that they lack language or merely demonstrate what appears to be 'clever behaviour'.
  2. Approaching the problem from a Darwinian reading of social evolution, my chapter focuses on evidence for rationality in dolphins and addresses associated methodological issues. Findings from neuroanatomical and behavioural research appear to support the Social Intellect Hypothesis in gregarious non-human animals, including dolphins and primates.
  3. Recent research in comparative social cognition has investigated the capacity for 'theory of mind' in apes and dolphins by means of non-verbal tasks, including tests for the capacity to attribute false beliefs to others. In this context, I shall focus on the results of non-verbal false belief tasks with captive bottlenose dolphins and compare these to other species. These findings are consistent with ascribing the evolution of a 'social mind' to dolphins, although further work is necessary to rule out alternative interpretations.
  4. If dolphins can continue to succeed on false-belief tasks, with increased controls against learning and cueing, this would raise intriguing further questions and have striking implications for the topic of rationality in animals.
Sections
  1. Background: Animal rationality, evolution, and social intelligence
  2. The big issue: who has beliefs about beliefs? Background and pilot study
    ‏→ 2.1 Darwin’s dolphins, intense sociality, and convergent cognitive evolution
    ‏→ 2.2 Evidence for a ‘social mind’ in dolphins? The false belief pilot study and its precursuors
  3. Subsequent experiments: methods
    ‏→ 3.1 Subjects
    ‏→ 3.2 Materials
    ‏→ 3.3 Procedure
  4. Experiment 1: Sea World, Durban
    ‏→ 4.1 Training phase
    ‏→ 4.2 False belief / true belief test phase
  5. Experiment 2: Bayworld, Port Elizabeth
    ‏→ 5.1 Training phase
    ‏→ 5.2 False belief / true belief / dud belief test phase
  6. Results of Experiments 1 and 2
  7. Possible interpretations
    ‏→ 7.1 Learning?
    ‏→ 7.2 Attributing lack of visual access?
    ‏→ 7.3 Cueing?
    ‏→ 7.4 Social mind?
  8. A window for comparison and continuing challenges
  9. Concluding reflections and future directions
  10. Appendix 1: Pilot study procedure: Sea World, Durban, April 1999
    ‏→ Pretest controls
    ‏→ False-belief task
    ‏→ Post-test cue control
  11. Appendix 2: Table of performance of dolphins on pretest controls, false-belief task and post-test cue controls

Paper Comment

Part V: Mind reading and behaviour reading, Chapter 19


"Herman (Louis M.) - Intelligence and rational behaviour in the bottlenosed dolphin"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract

A rational animal is defined as one that can perceive and represent how its world is structured and functions, and can make logical inferences and draw conclusions that enable it to function effectively and productively in that world. Further, a rational animal is able to incorporate new evidence into new perspectives of the world and can then modify its behaviours appropriately—in effect creating a new or revised model of the world in which it is immersed. Rational behaviour is necessarily built on the bedrock of general and specific intellectual capacity. Intelligence, a multidimensional trait, may appear to various degrees in various behavioural, cognitive, or social domains. Data and observations are presented on dolphin cognitive performance and on apparent rational responses within four intellectual domains within the context of a variety of empirical studies that we have conducted. These domains are:
  1. The declarative (semantic or representational) domain (does the dolphin display knowledge or understanding about things?);
  2. The procedural domain (does the dolphin exhibit competency in means, operations, or methods?);
  3. The social domain (does the dolphin reveal social awareness and appropriate responsiveness in social interactions or relations?); and
  4. The domain of the self (does the dolphin exhibit knowledge or awareness of itself?).
In each case, the particular experimental paradigms are briefly outlined and instances of apparent inferential or creative acts within each paradigm are given.

Sections
  1. Introduction
  2. Declarative and procedural domains
    … 2.1 Understanding of the semantic and syntactic components of a symbolic system: knowing what things are and how to manipulate them
    …… Evidence for rational responding
    … 2.2 Improvising an efficient strategy: fetching multiple objects at once
    …… Evidence for rational responding
    … 2.3 Tests of referential understanding: understanding references to absent objects
    …… Evidence for rational responding
    … 2.4 Understanding of representations of the real world: television scenes
    …… Evidence for rational responding
    … 2.5 Knowing how to integrate behaviours: combining multiple discrete behaviours holistically
    …… Evidence for rational responding
    … 2.6 Knowing how to improvise behaviours: understanding the concept of ‘create’
    …… Evidence for rational responding
  3. Social intelligence
    … 3.1 Joint attention: understanding human pointing and gaze
    …… Evidence for rational responding
    … 3.2 Behavioural synchrony: carrying out behaviours together
    …… Evidence for rational responding
    … 3.3 Mimicry: copying sounds and copying the motor behaviour of others
    …… Evidence for rational responding
  4. Self-knowledge: awareness of oneself
    … 4.1 Awareness of one’s own behaviour
    …… Evidence for rational responding
    … 4.2 Awareness of one’s own body-parts: displaying named body parts and using them in unique ways as instructed by symbolic gestures
    …… Evidence for rational responding
  5. General discussion
    … 5.1 Declarative and procedural domains
    … 5.2 The social domain
    … 5.3 the domain of the self
    … 5.4 Evolutionary perspectives

Paper Comment

Part VI: Behaviour and cognition in symbolic environments, Chapter 20


"Pepperberg (Irene M.) - Intelligence and rationality in parrots"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
    Studies both in the field and the laboratory demonstrate that the capacities of non-human animals to solve complex problems form a continuum with those of humans. Such measures of intelligence often imply the ability to choose the solution that human beings facing the same task would rationally choose. However, animals that are deemed intelligent by human standards may not always be deemed rational by these same human standards. Conversely, sometimes they display elements of rationality that go beyond what might be expected simply on the basis of documented cognitive ability. This chapter examines several such divergences that arise in the study of Grey parrots.
Sections
  1. Intelligence vs. rationality: convergences and divergences
  2. Label acquisition
    … 2.1 Parallels with initial learning by children
    … 2.2 Social, emotional, and neural mediation of the transition from early to later, more representational uses of labels
    … 2.3 Parrot transitions: referential mapping, sound play
  3. ‘Irrational’ but intelligent behaviour?
    … 3.1 Piagetian object permanence: surprise and anger versus prolonged search in response to being ‘tricked’
    … 3.2 Playing games?
  4. Conclusions

Paper Comment

Part VI: Behaviour and cognition in symbolic environments, Chapter 21


"Boysen (Sarah T.) - The impact of symbolic representations on chimpanzee cognition"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract

Two decades of studies with chimpanzees from the Comparative Cognition Project at the Ohio State University Chimpanzee Center suggest that the enculturation process, including the immersion of chimps in an artifact- and symbol-laden human culture and long-term, stable social relationships with human beings, affects the animals' access to attentional resources in dramatic ways. Such changes, in turn, can facilitate acquisition of complex cognitive skills by the chimpanzees and/or override behavioural predispositions that would reduce their capacity to comprehend task demands and respond 'rationally' to them. We here survey recent findings on:
  1. The effects of numerals on chimps' evaluative dispositions;
  2. The effects of numerals and symbols for 'same' and for 'different' in reaction time tasks; and
  3. The abilities of some (female) chimps to employ scale models and other representations of location to solve problems.
Sections
  1. Introduction
  2. Evaluative processes and symbolic representations
    … 2.1 Summary of earlier work with candy arrays and with numeral arrays
  3. Processing of quantity across object arrays and numerical symbols: Do mixed stimuli evoke the interference and facilitation effects?
    … 3.1 Mixed candy-numeral array experiment: design and methods
    … 3.2 Results from previous feasibility study with mixed arrays
    … 3.3 Results from mixed candy-numeral array experiment
  4. Replication of original interference and symbolic facilitation results with unmixed arrays
  5. Mechanisms of quantity judgment and evaluative processing
    … 5.1 Background and motivation
    … 5.2 Same-different experiment with numerals: design and methods
    … 5.3 Results
  6. Problem-solving by chimpanzee using a scale model and photographic representations of location
    … 6.1 Background and motivation
    … 6.2 Scale model experiment: Design and methods
    … 6.3 Results and discussion
    … 6.4 Further experiments: individual differences in use of scale models
  7. Conclusion

Paper Comment

Part VI: Behaviour and cognition in symbolic environments, Chapter 22


"Savage-Rumbaugh (E. Sue), Rumbaugh (Duane M.) & Fields (William M.) - Language as a window on rationality"

Source: Hurley (Susan) & Nudds (Matthew) - Rational Animals?


Author’s Abstract
  • The question of whether 'animals' share aspects of rational thought with human beings has been discussed from many different perspectives in this volume. We suggest that the distinction between human and animal is an overly simplistic one. This may have been missed because the important underlying distinction is between the presence and the absence of language. As "Bermudez (Jose Luis) - Animal reasoning and proto-logic" states: ' ... logic requires language. Language offers the possibility of intentional ascent—of thinking about thoughts. A thought can 'only be held in mind' in such a way that it can be the object of further thought if it has a linguistic vehicle.' It has been assumed that all humans possess language and that all animals do not, regardless of the complexity of their nervous systems, their vocal systems, their relationships to our own species, or the fact that some apes acquire human language without training when exposed to it from early infancy (Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 1986). Some species may utilize natural languages that we do not understand (Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 1996).
  • When captive animals acquire language, they also begin to display evidence of rationality that we are not able to discern or measure in their non-linguistic companions (Savage-Rumbaugh and Fields, in press). These differences are sufficiently great as to suggest that truly linguistic animals are capable of holding a thought in mind and reflecting upon it. Nonetheless, caution is warranted before making a claim that an animal has learned language. The ability to 'name' an exemplar, or to respond to a display of items, may be acquired as a learned association rather than as a context-free symbol. To operate independently as 'mind stuff,' symbols must be freed from their context of acquisition.
Sections
  1. Introduction
  2. Basic scientific findings: apes, dolphins, parrots
  3. Lexigram studies at the Language Research Center
    … 3.1 Phase I: Lana
    … 3.2 Phase II: Sherman and Austin
    … 3.3 Phase III: Kanzi
    … 3.4 Phase IV: Panbanisha and Panzee
  4. Linguistically based assessments of ape mind reading
  5. The emotional roots of language
  6. Appendix: Language acquisition in non—humans: comparison of procedures, tests, and skills
    … A1: Training paradigms
    … A2: Testing paradigms
    … A3: Blind controls and testing anomalies
    … A4: Data drawn from daily notes
    … A5: Additional skills
    … A6: Rearing variables

Paper Comment

Part VI: Behaviour and cognition in symbolic environments, Chapter 23


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