The Philosophy of Animal Minds
Lurz (Robert), Ed.
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  • Cambridge University Press; (3 Sept. 2009)
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"Lurz (Robert) - The philosophy of animal minds: an introduction"

Source: Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds. Cambridge University Press (2009), Introduction


Author’s Introduction
  1. The minds of animals has been an abiding topic in philosophy since its earliest beginnings. Some may find this surprising. After all, a fairly common picture of the philosopher is someone (in a darkened study) ruminating on the nature of the human mind, or on the mind of God, or on some other abstruse idea, but certainly not on the minds of cats, dogs, and honeybees. As common as this picture may be, however, it does not paint an entirely accurate portrait. Philosophers have thought long and hard about the minds of animals and have held and defended significant and influential views on the topic. Moreover, in the past ten years or so there has been an unprecedented amount of interest among philosophers in animal minds, with numerous publications and conferences dedicated to the subject. The level of interest and publication has reached a critical mass and has sustained itself long enough that it is now appropriate to say that the philosophy of animal minds is a field in its own right. The purpose of this volume is to highlight the state of the art in the field by bringing together a collection of new and cutting-edge essays by the best and brightest philosophers.
  2. Since the essays in this volume have been shaped by various lines in the rich history of philosophical thought on animal minds, I provide a brief (albeit, vastly incomplete) sketch of some of the most important and influential ideas and arguments in this history, as well as a road map to the volume itself.

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"Jamieson (Dale) - What do animals think"

Source: Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds. Cambridge University Press (2009), Chapter 1


Author’s Introduction
  1. You may have noticed that the title of this essay is ambiguous. Asking what animals think could be part of an inquiry into animal public opinion, focusing perhaps on such questions as what apes think about the Endangered Species Act or whether frogs prefer Tom Waits to Leonard Cohen. Or if you read the right punctuation into the title you might see it as an exclamation of surprise: “What! Do animals think?” What I am actually concerned with in this essay is how we should think about specifying exactly what it is that a particular animal thinks on a particular occasion. Some would say that I am concerned with the problem of content as it applies to non-human animals.
  2. The first response to the question of what animals think may be to say that they think thoughts. This is harmless, so long as we do not succumb to the temptation of reading psychology or ontology directly off of the language. However, it is downright harmful if, after assimilating thinking to having a thought, we go on to suppose that having a thought is the same as having a propositional attitude. At the outset, anyway, I want to leave open a wide range of possibilities including whether animal thinking implies having propositional attitudes; and if it does, the meaning, status, and nature of these propositional attitudes. For these reasons, unless I say otherwise, I will use expressions such as “thinking” and “having a thought” in neutral, common-sense ways, and I will take believing and desiring as examples of thinking, and beliefs and desires as examples of thoughts.
  3. Why should we be interested in what animals think? I am interested in this question because of how it relates to other questions. In earlier work I have argued that a plausible theory of value is one which distinguishes things of primary value from things of derivative value. This is not a distinction in the degree or extent of value, but in the source of value. What is of primary value are those creatures who we take to be animate and sentient, and this includes many non-human as well as human animals. We owe moral duties to such creatures, but exactly which moral duties depends on the creature’s interests, and this in turn is associated with the character of the creature’s psychological life. In order to know what our duties to animals are, it is not enough to know that they think, we must also know something about what they think.
  4. An additional reason for being interested in what animals think is because it is unsatisfying to be told that we have good reasons for supposing that animals think even though we know very little about what they think. This is a little like being told that Sean is beautiful by someone who has never seen Sean. In both cases the claim could be both true and justified. There may be inductive reasons for the claim, a highly credible authority may testify that the claims are true, or the claims may follow from a well-confirmed scientific theory. Nevertheless in the normal case we expect there to be an association between the general or abstract claim, and more specific claims that bear on it directly. When this is not the case it is somewhat disconcerting.
  5. For both of these reasons my question is important. Many of the considerations I adduce are not new, but they have not often been systematically brought to bear on the question that I am asking. Moreover, I believe that some of the most important lessons of the philosophy of mind of the second half of the last century have faded, and that there is some point in being reminded of them. As we shall see, answering my question turns out to be surprisingly difficult, and may lead us to question some conventional views about what we are doing when we attribute thoughts to human as well as non-human animals.
  6. Before beginning in earnest, I want to clarify the language that I will be using and confess to some simplifications. I will sometimes use “humans and animals” to mark the same distinction as that between human and nonhuman animals. I will also assume, unless I note otherwise, that humans are language-users and non-humans are not.

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"Saidel (Eric) - Attributing mental representations to animals"

Source: Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds. Cambridge University Press (2009), Chapter 2


Author’s Introduction
  • We quite naturally attribute mental representations in order to explain actions. The cat is scratching at the door because he wants to come in the house and believes that scratching at the door will get him into the house. The dog is following me because she wants some of my food and believes that by following me she can get some of my food.
  • Some of our attributions of mental representations are without doubt fanciful (does my car really not like to start on cold mornings?), but some of these attributions are accurate. For example, some, if perhaps not all, of the actions of adult human beings are properly explained by their desires and their beliefs about how to achieve those desires.
  • What about the behavior of (nonhuman) animals? Are belief-desire explanations the right explanations of their actions?
  • I argue that some (non-human) animal behavior is properly so explained, and thus that some animals truly have beliefs and desires.
  • There are two strands of evidence which separately support this conclusion.
    1. First, behavior that is appropriately explained in terms of mental states such as beliefs and desires is behavior directed at a goal relative to which the agent is able to learn; and since human behavior meets this criterion, I argue, we should expect, on evolutionary grounds, that some animal behavior meets this criterion as well.
    2. Second, I show that a number of different scientific observations of animal behavior strongly support the hypothesis that animals engage in goal-directed behavior, behavior that is organized around a goal with respect to which they are able to learn and, hence, behavior that is justifiably explained in terms of their having beliefs and desires.

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"Rescorla (Michael) - Chrysippus’ dog as a case study in non-linguistic cognition"

Source: Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds. Cambridge University Press (2009), Chapter 3


Author’s Introduction
  • Do non-linguistic creatures think? Debate over this question tends to calcify into two extreme doctrines.
    1. The first, espoused by Descartes, regards language as necessary for cognition. Modern proponents include Brandom, Davidson, McDowell and Sellars. Cartesians may grant that ascribing cognitive activity to non-linguistic creatures is instrumentally useful, but they regard such ascriptions as strictly speaking false.
    2. The second extreme doctrine, espoused by Gassendi, Hume, and Locke, maintains that linguistic and non-linguistic cognition are fundamentally the same. Modern proponents include Fodor, Peacocke, Stalnaker and many others. Proponents may grant that non-linguistic creatures entertain a narrower range of thoughts than us, but they deny any principled difference in kind.
  • An intermediate position holds that non-linguistic creatures display cognitive activity of a fundamentally different kind than human thought. Hobbes and Leibniz favored this intermediate position. Modern advocates include Bermudez, Carruthers, Dummett, Malcolm and Putnam. Proponents may grant that our lower-level cognition resembles the mental activity of languageless creatures, but they insist that we also manifest higher-level cognition unavailable to such creatures. The main challenge facing such a view is to describe non-linguistic cognitive processes that differ in a principled way from higher-level human thought.
  • I will try to meet this challenge by exploring a putative example of non-linguistic cognition. Tolman introduced the notion of cognitive maps to explain how rats in a laboratory maze take detours and shortcuts to reach destinations. Although Tolman’s analysis proved controversial, many psychologists have followed him in proposing that human and animal navigation exploits cognitive maps. These have representational content: they represent the world as being a certain way, so we can evaluate them as veridical or non-veridical. Moreover, they are involved in rational mental processes that update them based on perception and exploit them during locomotion. Thus, cognitive maps are genuinely cognitive. Yet they differ from higher-level human thought in two crucial ways:
    1. They do not have logical form, and
    2. They do not figure in deductive inference.

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"Tetzlaff (Michael) & Rey (George) - Systematicity and intentional realism in honeybee navigation"

Source: Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds. Cambridge University Press (2009), Chapter 4


Authors’ Abstract
  • Do animals really have intentional states, or is intentional ascription merely a convenient instrument for predicting their behavior that involves no commitment to the reality of those states?
  • One way to give substance to this question is to consider the recent debate between “classical” and “radical connectionist” approaches to cerebral architecture.
  • According to the classical, realist theory of cognition, championed by Fodor, cognitive processes consist of computations defined over causally efficacious, syntactically specified representations, for example sentences in a “language of thought,” whose syntactic structure preserves the content of those representations compositionally: representations are either simple or complex, the complex ones being composed by concatenation of the simple ones in such a way that the semantic properties of the complex are a function of the semantic properties of the simple.
  • The main rival to classicism is (non-implementational, or “radical,” “distributed”) connectionism, which proposes instead that cognitive processes are computations defined over syntactically simple, distributed representations, for which the constituency relation is certainly not concatenative, nor standardly compositional. Indeed, in contrast to classical machine architectures, connectionist architectures standardly do not make available to an organism recombinable representations that might be stored in memory and deployed at different times for different tasks.
  • This air of unreality about internal representations can lend support to the aforementioned instrumentalism, as in Dennett.
  • The main literature debating these issues (e.g., Fodor, Fodor and Pylyshyn, Marcus, and Smolensky) has focused largely on human beings and the apparent systematicity of their thought. As we will understand it, systematicity may be characterized thus:
      (SYS) Ceteris Paribus: x is sensitive to the content [p] iff x is sensitive to F[p],
    the square brackets indicating the content of the expressions they enclose (see section 2.1), and “F[p]” any permissible, formal permutation of [p]. The most obvious case of syntactic structure is logical structure. Thus, someone understands [If Bill goes, then Ann or Jill stays] iff she understands, for example, [If Ann stays, then Jill or Bill goes]. An example closer to the bee examples we will discuss is: x understands [Ann is north of Bill] iff x understands [Bill is north of Ann]. Fodor argues that this condition is patently satisfied by normal, linguistically competent adults.
  • Fodor’s discussion focused, however, largely on human linguistic competence. This unfortunately confounded the discussion with issues about the systematicity of natural language, which, arguably, provides a special medium for peculiarly human thought (see Dennett). We propose to control for this confound by considering the recent literature on honeybee navigation. After a brief discussion of some background issues (section 2), we will summarize some of the substantial research on honeybees’ remarkable abilities to navigate and to convey information about various resources to other bees by means of their “waggle dance” (section 3). We will argue (section 3) that an examination of those abilities reveals that the processes underlying them are systematic, that this systematicity is best explained by presuming that honeybees implement some sort of classical language of thought (section 4), and that this explanation needs to be understood realistically (section 5).

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"Carruthers (Peter) - Invertebrate concepts confront the Generality Constraint (and win)"

Source: Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds. Cambridge University Press (2009), Chapter 5


Author’s Introduction (Excerpted)
  1. What does it take to possess a concept? Do any non-human animals have concepts? One crucial constraint on the concept concept is that concepts are the building blocks of thought. Hence no creature could count as a concept user that wasn’t capable of thinking. This mightn’t seem like a significant additional restriction, but actually it has some teeth, ruling out some otherwise concept-like phenomena. Consider the Australian digger wasp …
  2. … What the wasp actually has is an abstract, innately specified, but flexibly implementable, motor plan, which is guided in its detailed execution by perceptual information, and whose various stages are triggered and/or completed by the matching of concept-like recognitional templates against the perceptual data.
  3. From these considerations we can extract the following constraints. In order to count as having concepts, a creature needs to be capable of thinking. And that means, at least, that it must possess distinct belief states and desire states, which interact with one another (and with perception) in the selection and guidance of behavior. In addition, the belief states need to be structured out of component parts (concepts) which can be recombined with others to figure in other such states with distinct contents. Moreover, belief and desire states need to play causal roles that are sensitive to their underlying structures, figuring in simple inferences that bring to bear belief states to select actions that will enable the realization of the creature’s goals.
  4. These constraints on concept possession are by no means trivial. Nevertheless, many invertebrates actually satisfy them (or so I shall argue in section 2). This is especially clear in the case of honeybees, whose powers of thought have been intensively studied – notably their flexible use of spatial information in the service of a multitude of goals. But the constraints are probably satisfied by Australian digger wasps, too, in respect of the states that guide their navigational (but not their nest-construction) behavior. (And there is surely no requirement that all of an organism’s behavior should be guided by genuine concept-involving thoughts if any is to count as such. For much of our own routine, habitual, or “inconsequential” behavior wouldn’t pass muster, either.) I have argued for these claims in some detail elsewhere and will only sketch those arguments here. … My main focus will be on an argument purporting to establish yet further constraints on genuine concept possession (the so-called “generality constraint”), which invertebrates (together with most other animals) would turn out to fail.
  5. Let me say a word about terminology, however, before we proceed. The use of the term “concept” in philosophy is systematically ambiguous ("Margolis (Eric) & Laurence (Stephen), Eds. - Concepts - Core Readings" [2007]).
    1. It is sometimes used to designate the content of a word or a component of thought. In this usage a concept is an abstract object, often identified with a “mode of presentation” of the things that the word picks out.
    2. But sometimes concepts are intended to be mental representations, concrete components of the physical tokenings of the thoughts of which they form part.2
    In the present chapter I am concerned almost exclusively with concepts in the latter sense. Our question is whether invertebrates possess the sorts of mental representations that are the components of genuine thoughts. …

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"Camp (Elisabeth) - A language of baboon thought?"

Source: Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds. Cambridge University Press (2009), Chapter 6


Author’s Abstract
  1. Does thought precede language, or the other way around? How does having a language affect our thoughts? Who has a language, and who can think? These questions have traditionally been addressed by philosophers, especially by rationalists concerned to identify the essential difference between humans and other animals. More recently, theorists in cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and developmental psychology have been asking these questions in more empirically grounded ways. At its best, this confluence of philosophy and science promises to blend the respective strengths of each discipline, bringing abstract theory to bear on reality in a principled and focused way. At its worst, it risks degenerating into a war of words, with each side employing key expressions in its own idiosyncratic way – or worse, contaminating empirical research with a priori dogmas inherited from outmoded philosophical worldviews.
  2. In Baboon Metaphysics, Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth offer an analysis of baboon cognition that promises to exemplify the very best interaction of philosophical theory and empirical research. They argue that baboons have a language of thought: a language-like representational medium, which supports the sophisticated cognitive abilities required to negotiate their complex social environment. This claim is intended to be surprising in its own right, and also to shed light on the evolution of spoken language. Because our own ancestors likely lived in a similarly complex social environment, Cheney and Seyfarth propose that the earliest humans also developed language first as a cognitive medium, and that spoken language evolved as a means to express those thoughts.
  3. There are two potential difficulties here. First, “Language of Thought” (LOT) is a term of art, with much associated theoretical baggage and often comparatively little careful exposition. Thus, evaluating the claim requires getting clearer about just what LOT implies in this context. Second, if Cheney and Seyfarth are right, then we seem to be left with a rather surprising model, on which baboons think in a way very like we do but fail to talk. According to Cheney and Seyfarth, this is because they lack a theory of mind. But this still leaves a dramatic mismatch between the expressive potential of baboons’ postulated representational system and the complexity of the behavior they manifest in other areas. Thus, it’s worth examining whether an alternative form of thought might better explain the distinctive contours of their conceptual abilities and limitations.

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"McAninch (Andrew), Goodrich (Grant) & Allen (Colin) - Animal communication and neo-expressivism"

Source: Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds. Cambridge University Press (2009), Chapter 7


Authors’ Introduction
  1. One of the earliest issues in cognitive ethology concerned the meaning of animal signals. In the 1970s and 1980s this debate was most active with respect to the question of whether animal alarm calls convey information about the emotional states of animals or whether they “refer” directly to predators in the environment (Seyfarth et al.; see Radick for a historical account), but other areas, such as vocalizations about food and social contact, were also widely discussed. In the 1990s, ethologists largely came to a consensus that such calls were “functionally referential” (Evans and Marler) even if they did not satisfy all the semantic requirements imposed by philosophers of language.
  2. More recently, though, it has been argued that ethologists should eschew the concept of reference and return to a focus on the affective aspects of animal communication (Rendall and Owren).
  3. We propose to take a new look at this debate in the light of recent developments in the philosophy of language under the heading of “neo-expressivism” (Bar-On). This view provides two different senses in which an utterance satisfies an expressive function. We intend to use neo-expressivism to provide a philosophical framework for understanding the relationship between the affective and referential aspects of animal signals by seeing them as both acts that express some motivational state of the animal and products that express propositions with truth-evaluable content.
  4. Defending the second part of this claim requires us to reject the recent proposal that non-conceptual content is entirely adequate for understanding the cognition and communication of animals.

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"Bermudez (Jose Luis) - Mindreading in the animal kingdom"

Source: Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds. Cambridge University Press (2009), Chapter 8


Author’s Abstract
  1. Can non-human animals think and reason about what other creatures are thinking, reasoning, or experiencing? Experimentalists, ethologists, and theorists have answered this deceptively simple question in many different ways. Some researchers have made very strong claims about so-called mindreading abilities in animals. Others have been critical of such claims.
  2. Even a cursory look at the extensive literature on mindreading in animals reveals considerable variation both in what mindreading abilities are taken to be, and in what is taken as evidence for them.
  3. The first aim of this essay is to tackle some important framework questions about how exactly the mindreading hypothesis is to be stated.
    • In sections 2 and 3, three importantly different versions of the mindreading hypothesis are distinguished. The first (which I call minimal mindreading) occurs when a creature’s behavior covaries with the psychological states of other participants in social exchanges. The second (which I call substantive mindreading) involves attributions of mental states.
    • In section 3, substantive mindreading is further divided into propositional attitude mindreading and perceptual mindreading.
    • In section 4, I present reasons for thinking that the role of propositional attitude psychology in human social life is very much overstated and show that this very much weakens the analogical case for identifying propositional attitude mindreading in non-linguistic creatures.
    • And in section 5, I present a revised version of an argument I have given elsewhere to show that the most sophisticated form of substantive mindreading (the type of mindreading that exploits the concepts of propositional attitude psychology) is only available to language-using creatures.

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"Proust (Joelle) - The representational basis of brute metacognition: a proposal"

Source: Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds. Cambridge University Press (2009), Chapter 9


Author’s Introduction
  • Self-confidence is based on two sources. One is the current evidence on which our judgments are built – i.e., on the way the world is. A second source of confidence comes from evaluating one’s past ability to reach true judgments. Is such a reflexive ability uniquely human? Surprisingly, the answer is no: there is growing evidence that some non-human animals who have not evolved any mindreading capacity, such as macaques and dolphins, are able to evaluate appropriately their self-confidence level in perceptual and memory tasks. This result is quite surprising, and suggests interesting new hypotheses about the evolution of the mind, the role of non-conceptual content in self-knowledge, the foundations of rational decision-making, and epistemology.
  • The set of dispositions that allow self-confidence to develop over time as a consequence of prior mental exercise has been studied in detail by experimental psychology, under the heading “Metacognition.” This term, however, has also been used independently by philosophers and cognitive scientists interested in the philosophy of mind to designate the ability to form mental concepts referring to one’s own intentional states or to oneself as a cognitive agent. Thus the two communities are presently using the word “metacognition” to refer, respectively, to the ability to control and monitor one’s own cognition, and to the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others. This equivocacy can only encourage some researchers to make inappropriate generalizations, either using mindreading as a criterion for the control of subjective uncertainty (thus excluding a priori the possibility of non-human self-confidence), or taking mindreading capacities to be necessarily mastered by self-confident animals and humans (thus overattributing mindreading capacities to them). To prevent ambiguity, I will use “mindreading” to refer to mentalizing abilities and “metacognition” to refer to the control and monitoring of one’s cognitive capacities.
  • My present aim is not just to dispell the various misunderstandings associated with the use of the same term for different purposes. It is, in addition, to clarify the nature and semantic properties of metacognition in non-humans. As is the case for every philosophical inquiry concerning animal minds, studying animal metacognition should provide new perspectives on the structure of mental content and on mental activity in general.
  • This exploration will proceed in four steps.
    1. First, the experimental evidence for animal metacognition will be briefly presented (section 2) and the difficulties of a metarepresentational view on metacognition summarized.
    2. Second, the possibility of alternative, non-propositional semantic structures will be discussed (section 3).
    3. A specific representational format that might be sufficient for animal metacognition to develop will be examined (section 4).
    4. Finally, some objections will be addressed, and further developments of the proposal will be considered (section 5).


"Gennaro (Rocco) - Animals, consciousness, and I-thoughts"

Source: Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds. Cambridge University Press (2009), Chapter 10


Author’s Introduction
  1. I-thoughts are thoughts about one’s own mental states or about “oneself ” in some sense (Bennett ). They are closely linked to what psychologists call “metacognition”: that is, cognitions about other cognitions or mental representations (Metcalfe and Shimamura; Koriat). There seems to be growing evidence that many animals are indeed capable of having I-thoughts as well as having the ability to understand the mental states of others (Hurley and Nudds; Terrace and Metcalfe).
  2. There is also a relevant philosophical theory of consciousness: namely, the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness which says that what makes a mental state conscious is the presence of a suitable higher-order thought about that state (Gennaro; Rosenthal). For various reasons, such thoughts are typically understood to take the form “I am in mental state M now.” A higher-order thought, then, is a kind of metacognition. It is a mental state directed at another mental state. So, for example, my desire to write a good book chapter becomes conscious when I am (non-inferentially) “aware” of the desire. Intuitively, it seems that conscious states, as opposed to unconscious ones, are mental states that I am “aware of ” in some representational sense (Lycan). In a case of subliminal perception, I am not aware that I am in that perceptual state. Thus, it is unconscious. However, when I become aware that I am having that perception, it becomes conscious.
  3. An often cited problem, however, is that the HOT theory rules out animal consciousness because animals (or at least most animals) are incapable of having such thoughts; they do not possess such sophisticated “I-concepts” and “mental concepts.” This is a common objection normally offered by non-HOT theorists, such as Fred Dretske, Robert Lurz, and Bill Seager. Moreover, one prominent HOT theorist, Peter Carruthers, actually embraces this alleged consequence of the HOT theory. I have had my say elsewhere on Carruthers’ contention that animal consciousness is very unlikely given the truth of some form of HOT theory. I won’t repeat those arguments here except to say that a higher-order thought need not be as sophisticated as it might seem. Since most of us believe that many animals have conscious mental states, a HOT theorist must explain how animals can have the higher-order thoughts necessary for such states. One reason most of us believe that animals have conscious states is simply because our folk psychology is a theory of conscious mental states and it works well in explaining and predicting much of animal behavior.
  4. Thus, there is a three-way tension among the following claims that needs to be relieved:
    1. Most animals have conscious mental states (i.e., there are generally positive common-sense grounds for believing that animals have conscious states);
    2. TheHOT theory is true, which, in turn, entails having I-thoughts; and
    3. Few (if any) animals are capable of having I-thoughts based on various empirical and theoretical considerations.
  5. Carruthers rejects (a) and embraces (b) and (c), whileDretske, Lurz , and Seager endorse (a) and (c) but reject (b). I reject (c) and accept (a) and (b). Thus, this chapter has a double purpose: to discuss and elaborate upon the evidence for higher-order thoughts (or I-thoughts) in animals but also to show that the HOT theory is indeed consistent with animal consciousness.
  6. In section 2, I will argue that recent experimental evidence on animal memory and metacognition strongly suggests that many animals have the self-concepts and mental-state concepts necessary to form I-thoughts. In section 3, I reply to the claim that having I-thoughts requires having thoughts (and thus concepts) directed at others’ mental states. The stakes are high because if the HOT theory is true, any evidence indicating the absence of I-thoughts would also cast doubt on animal consciousness itself.
  7. It is also crucial at the outset to note one important subtlety of the HOT theory. When a conscious mental state is a first-order world-directed state, the higher-order thought is not itself conscious. When the higher-order thought is itself conscious, there is a yet higher-order (or third-order) thought directed at the second-order state. In this case, we have introspection which involves a conscious higher-order thought directed at an inner mental state. When one introspects, one’s attention is directed back into one’s mind. For example, what makes my desire to write a good book chapter a conscious first-order desire is that there is an (unconscious) higher-order thought directed at the desire. In this case, my conscious focus is directed at the entry and my computer screen, so I am not consciously aware of having the higher-order thought from the first-person point of view. When I introspect that desire, however, I then have a conscious higher-order thought (accompanied by a yet higher, third-order, thought) directed at the desire itself. An additional rationale for this aspect of the HOT theory is to serve as a reply to the objection that it is circular or leads to an infinite regress. It might seem that the HOT theory results in circularity by defining consciousness in terms of higher-order thoughts. It also might seem that an infinite regress results because a conscious mental state must be accompanied by a higher-order thought, which, in turn, must be accompanied by another higher-order thought ad infinitum. The standard reply is to remind the objector that the initial higher-order thought need not itself be conscious.
  8. Of course, the very concept of “consciousness” is notoriously ambiguous, but perhaps the most commonly used contemporary notion of a “conscious” mental state is captured by Thomas Nagel’s famous “what it is like” sense. When I am in a conscious mental state, there is “something it is like” for me to be in that state from the subjective or first-person point of view. This is how I will use the term.

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"DeGrazia (David) - Self-awareness in animals"

Source: Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds. Cambridge University Press (2009), Chapter 11


Author’s Introduction
  1. Many animals are self-aware. At any rate, I claim, the cumulative force of various empirical data and conceptual considerations makes it more reasonable to accept than to deny this thesis.
  2. Moreover, there are importantly different sorts of self-awareness. If my arguments are on the right track, then scientists and philosophers have significantly underestimated the case for animal self-awareness.

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"Roberts (Robert C.) - The sophistication of non-human emotion"

Source: Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds. Cambridge University Press (2009), Chapter 12


Author’s Introduction
  • I am going to explore the nature of emotions or their counterparts as exemplified in the lives of non-human animals.
  • Emotion is a somewhat indeterminate concept, as is that of sophistication. So I will start with a concept of emotion that I have proposed in the past as useful in human moral psychology, and with several dimensions of sophistication that we find in human emotions as so understood.
  • Then, by considering some observations about some animals’ capacities, I will estimate the degrees to which such animals approximate such sophistication.

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"Sober (Elliott) - Parsimony and models of animal minds"

Source: Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds. Cambridge University Press (2009), Chapter 13


Author’s Abstract
  • Dennett’s ideas about the intentional stance have elicited different reactions from philosophers and scientists. Philosophers have focused on Dennett’s alleged anti-realism about the mental while scientists have focused on his three-way distinction among zero-order, first-order, and second-order intentionality. For most philosophers, anti-realism (at least concerning the mental states of human beings) is a no-no; for most cognitive scientists, the three-way distinction is useful. This contrasting reaction is typical of a larger pattern: philosophers are more inclined to cite work with which they disagree while scientists are more inclined to cite work on which they wish to build.
  • Dennett has denied that he is an anti-realist, but that has not stopped philosophers from continuing to affix a scarlet letter “A” to his work. Nor has the specter of anti-realism stopped cognitive ethologists from using the three-way distinction to articulate a central methodological principle, which they call “the principle of conservatism.” According to this principle, hypotheses that explain an organism’s behavior by attributing lower-order intentionality are preferable to hypotheses that explain the behavior by attributing higher-order intentionality (see, for example, Cheney and Seyfarth).
  • My subject here is the principle of conservatism. What, exactly, does it say and what is its justification? Cognitive scientists often regard the principle as an instance of a more general methodological maxim, namely the principle of parsimony, a.k.a. Ockham’s razor. They reason as follows: since Ockham’s razor is a sound principle of scientific inference, there is no special question about why the principle of conservatism should be used in cognitive science. My main goal in this essay is to trace how the general principle is related to the specific one. This tracing suggests that the principle of conservatism needs to be refined. Connecting the principle in cognitive science to more general questions about scientific inference also will allow us to revisit the question of realism versus instrumentalism. Realist philosophers of science often have no problem with the principle of parsimony. Maybe they should not be so sanguine. Finally, connecting the principle of conservatism to more general inferential issues suggests that the principle can be more than a qualitative tie-breaker. If two explanations fit the observations equally well, one is told to prefer the explanation that is more parsimonious. The view of parsimony that I’ll describe also allows theories to be compared that fit the data unequally well. If a complex theory fits the data better than a simpler theory does, which theory is better overall? Many philosophers think there can be no principled answer to this question; they think it is a matter of taste how much weight you put on simplicity compared with goodness-of-fit. The view of parsimony provided by the part of statistics called “model selection theory” suggests that there is room for skepticism about this conventionalist view.
  • I have argued in earlier publications that invocations of parsimony in science often should be viewed as expressions of subject-matter-specific background theories; it follows that different invocations in different scientific problems may rest on very different foundations. Thus conceived, the way to understand the use of parsimony in a given scientific domain is to uncover the background theory in play. Fitzpatrick (chapter 14) adopts this strategy to assess the principle of conservatism. This is not the strategy I will pursue here. The framework deployed in model selection theory is very general; it is not specific to the subject matter of any one science (which is not to say that there are no assumptions that must be satisfied for the apparatus to apply). How does that general framework help clarify the principle of conservatism?

Paper Comment

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"Fitzpatrick (Simon) - The primate mindreading controversy: a case study in simplicity and methodology in animal psychology"

Source: Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds. Cambridge University Press (2009), Chapter 14


Author's Abstract
  1. What, if anything, do non-human primates (henceforth, “primates”) understand about the minds of other agents? Can they mentally represent and reason about the mental states of others? If they can, what kinds of mental states can they represent (e.g., perceptions, goals, intentions, beliefs) and what kinds of reasoning about mental states are they capable of? These are the central questions in the field of primate “mindreading,” or “theory of mind.” However, some thirty years after Premack and Woodruff (1978) posed such questions, there remains very little consensus on how we should answer them.
  2. Much of the recent debate has centred on an ongoing controversy over whether primates are capable of reasoning about basic aspects of the visual perspective and perceptual awareness of others. Several researchers claim that recent behavioral experiments provide strong evidence for such a mindreading capacity in several primate species. Other prominent researchers, however, vigorously deny that these studies provide any evidence at all for mindreading.
  3. One issue that has played a prominent role in this controversy and throughout the history of the debate over primate mindreading concerns the relative “simplicity” or “parsimony” (these terms are typically used interchangeably) of mindreading and non-mindreading explanations of behavior. In interpreting the available data, both proponents and skeptics about primate mindreading have argued that their chosen explanation is “simpler” or “more parsimonious” than the alternatives, and hence should be preferred. In both instances, considerations of simplicity have been invoked to bolster the case for a particular hypothesis in the face of seemingly equivocal data.
  4. My aim in this chapter is to look at the role that such appeals to simplicity have played in this controversy as a case study for thinking about the proper place of simplicity considerations in inferring cognitive processes in nonhuman animals, and in science more generally (see also Sober, chapter 13).
  5. After providing some background to the controversy and describing the appeals to simplicity that have been made, I will pose some problems for such appeals, which call into question the appropriateness of bringing in simplicity considerations when evaluating behavioral data. I will then outline a general philosophical account of simplicity, which, I will argue, makes the best sense of what is going on in the recent controversy over primate mindreading. In doing this, I hope to shed new light on the nature of the evidence for primate mindreading, and on how future work might be able to resolve this controversy.

Paper Comment

For the full text, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File1.


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