Theory of Animal Minds

Caroline E. Spence, Magda Osman, and Alan G. McElligott, ‘Theory of Animal Mind: Human Nature or Experimental Artefact?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21 (2017), 333-43.

This has something in common with an earlier post about the use of the word ‘fear’? It’s about the terms used in psychology, and the care required to understand the question before heading for an answer. I’ve mentioned an interest in animal minds before (in this post a year ago). Spence et al. are interested in whether animals are ‘capable of empathy, problem-solving, or even self-recognition’. But here they consider the problem of understanding our own mechanisms for theorizing about the content of animal minds. Is this ‘a natural consequence of Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities’, i.e. do we just ‘mentalize’ them as if they were like humans? Much of the article is concerned with structural, methodological questions, about how to go through the steps required to establish a good conceptual framework. Frans de Waal, whose work featured in the post mentioned above, used the term ‘anthropodenial’ as an alternative to ‘anthropomorphism’ (in an essay called ‘‘). How do we steer a sure course between what may be a slack habit of mind, and what may be an over-scrupulous avoidance of what might be rather significant evolved resources? The thing that caught my eye was the ethical dimension of the process by which we do, or don’t, attribute certain kinds of mental life to animals. Being really rigorous about not getting into anthropomorphic fallacies might make it less likely that it will seem that animals should have rights (which seems like a bad thing to me), but there are many complexities and subtleties.

Philosophical Topics, 27 (1999), 255-80 … and in a book called The Ape and the Sushi Master
E-mail me at rtrl100[at]cam.ac.uk

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