The Animal Mind 2.0
I'm excited to see that the book has a cover, and that it will be out before the summer of 2020. You can preorder or ask for a reviewer copy from Routledge. In the meantime, I offer the introduction to the second edition of The Animal Mind.
A monkey walks along a wire high above the empty tracks at a train station. As electricity goes through the line, the monkey is shocked and falls onto the tracks, tumbling down into a chasm. Two other monkeys quickly run across the tracks to their companion, but find only a limp body. One of the monkeys hauls the body up out of the pit, shaking the lifeless form. Though the injured monkey looks dead, after a few moments, life returns, and the three monkeys escape the railway tracks. In news reports, the rescuing monkey is called a hero.
A dog gently grasps a sled with their mouth, and pulls the sled up a snowy hill. At the top of the hill the dog steps onto the sled and rides it down to the bottom. Again, and again, the dog drags the sled to the top of the hill, riding it down like any young human might. A crow sleds downs a snowy rooftop on a plastic lid, flapping their wings to control speed and direction, and then carries the sled up to the peak for another run.
An octopus walks along the ocean floor dragging two halves of a coconut shell. At some point the octopus has had enough, stops, and drops one half on the floor. The octopus eases their body into the shell, and then pulls the other half of the shell on top, making a cozy house.
It’s hard to avoid clever and brave animal stories these days. Social media is full of videos of rats running obstacle courses, hippos intervening in crocodile attacks, an adult elephant helping a baby elephant out of a muddy pit, an orangutan rescuing a downing baby bird, and a dog splashing water on a beached fish. We also hear reports about New Caledonian crows bending metal wire into hooks to fish food out of a tube, orangutans using sticks to measure the depth of water in a river, bumblebees learning how to pull a string to get a sweet treat after watching other bumblebees do so.
It’s easy to watch these videos, and hear these stories, and take the subjects to belike little humans. The monkey who rescues a hurt companion is a brave hero, the dog and crow are playing, the octopus wanted to carry a house around for protection. We easily anthropomorphize—attribute human characteristics—when we hear these stories. This is especially true when we start interpreting why the animals act the way they do. When we describe the injured monkey and his cohorts as friends, and the hero as wanting to help a friend, we are offering rich descriptions that may not reflect the kinds of thoughts and feelings actually had by those monkeys. Maybe monkeys don’t have relationships that can be described as friendships. Maybe the monkey who shook the injured individual performed a species-typical behavior in the face of death. Maybe the monkey doesn’t have thoughts or feelings at all. How can we know what kind of description best captures this incident?
When we hear about crows making tools, orangutans measuring river depth, and bees learning from one another, we might also think that these animals are smart. After all, only a smart individual can solve problems, come up with new technologies, and learn. But it is not entirely clear what we mean by “smart.” In the past we used the word to describe a quality of mental capacities, but since we have smart phones and smart cars that presumably lack minds, it isn’t clear that we are talking about natural mental capacities. Furthermore, if the behavior is one that an animal can’t help but do, we might not want to call it “smart” even if it looks clever. The starfish’s trick of growing back lost legs is a good solution to a problem, but it might not be a smart trick because it isn’t something the starfish has any control over.
The first motivation for writing this book is to help readers understand what these videos and reports are telling us about animals. In order to better understand what’s going on, in any case of animal behavior, we need context for the individual being, information about the species, and scientific and philosophical tools.
To understand the context, we can ask about the animal’s age and rearing history. Take age, for example. If a three year-old promises to make you dinner, you’re not going to get your hopes up. But if an adult makes you the same promise, you’ll naturally expect some kind of nutritious or tasty meal. And, take rearing history. Did the sledding dog observe a child using the sled, and copy the child’s behavior? Did the dog accidentally step on a sled at the top of the hill and slide down? Or is the dog merely a reluctant participant in a viral video, sledding only because a human trained him by offering food rewards?
We also need to know what is typical for the species. Do all octopuses carry objects to hide in, or is this a trick that was discovered by one octopus and copied by others? Is it only amazing because we didn’t know that octopuses carried their homes? Snails and turtles do this, but we do not marvel at it.
With more information, we can use the tools provided by scientists and philosophers to better understand what animals might be doing, how they might be doing it, and why. And in turn, by critically examining the mental processes of other animals, we can come to better understand our own mental processes. Questions about animal minds are addressed across academic disciplines, with psychologists, biologists, anthropologists, ecologists, ethologists, primatologists, welfarists, and philosophers—among others—engaged in answering overlapping sets of questions using a variety of methods. The scientific methods are used to develop and test hypotheses related to animal minds, and the findings can help us interpret animal behavior in a scientific, rather than sentimental, way. The philosophical methods are used to clarify the hypotheses, the questions, and the answers by examining the concepts used by scientists, and by critically examining the scientist’s methods. It can be tricky for philosophers and scientists to talk to one another, given that they don’t use the same methods, don’t always share a technical vocabulary, and, worse yet, sometimes use the same words to refer to different concepts. However, the possibility of increasing overall understanding makes it worth the extra effort, and one goal of this book is to bridge the various disciplines of animal cognition so that scientists and philosophers can better work together.
Within the sciences, the study of animals is already interdisciplinary. Scientists work in laboratories, zoos, sanctuaries, wild rehabilitation centers, forests, oceans, savannahs, and city streets. Psychologists, neuroscientists, and biologists often work with captive animals, investigating questions about the cognitive mechanisms involved in perception, memory, reasoning, categorization, metacognition, spatial cognition, numerical abilities, learning, future planning, social intelligence, communication, and so forth. Primatologists, biologists, ethologists, and psychologists also work in wild settings and are interested in documenting what different species do, how they learn to do what they do, and whether there are individual or group differences in what they do. Some scientists emphasize the evolutionary history of the species, and seek to understand how the observed behaviors might offer reproductive benefits. Some scientists focus on individual differences, taking a psychometric approach in order to understand how different capacities relate to each other, whether there is some form of general intelligence, and the impact of personality differences. Some scientists take a developmental perspective, studying changes in behavior from infancy until adulthood and looking for the effects of rearing differences in infancy on adult behavior. Some scientists take a comparative perspective, and design experiments in the forms of puzzles that are given to animals of different species (very often these species are chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and humans). Some scientists focus on the brains of , and test animals’ capacities, like perceptual or social, before and after lesioning or during brain stimulation.
Within philosophy, the study of animal minds also crosses traditional boundaries. Some philosophers engage closely with the scientific research on animals within the domain of philosophy of science–examining the methods used by scientists, and the conceptual clarity of their hypotheses and interpretations. Others examine animal minds from a more conceptual perspective. Philosophers of mind may ask about animal consciousness, belief, rationality, metacognition, emotions, social cognition, and memory. Philosophers of language may ask about animal communication, the relationship between language and thought, and the content of concepts. Ethicists might ask about animal empathy, sensitivity to morally relevant features of the world, sociality, emotions, pain, and personhood. Philosophers of biology might investigate issues of animal culture, innateness, consciousness, and evolution of mental capacities.
With more information about the cute videos, and with the tools of science and philosophy, we will be better positioned to understand the minded beings around us. Not all species are the same, so the motivations, mental processes, and actions one species uses to engage in a behavior may be very different from those of another species, even if the behaviors look, to us, to be very similar. And, of course, not all individuals are the same either.
The fact that we’re not naturally good at interpreting animal behavior shouldn’t surprise us, since humans have a problem interpreting our own behaviors, and understanding our own motivations. The last decades of research on humans demonstrate a wide variety in human psychological processes, with cross cultural differences in perception, social thinking, concepts, teaching, commitments to truth and knowledge, morality, and concepts of the self and community, among other things. Social scientists have also found that humans are not as rational, not as transparent, and not as good as we think we are. If 80% of us think we are above average, then something has gone wrong.
The second motivation for writing this book is to help provide people interested in animal ethics relevant information about animal psychologies, given that there are ethical implication for whether or not other animals have mental capacities of various sorts. If, for example, consciously experiencing is enough for moral standing, then if fish are conscious, then fish have moral standing. On utilitarian moral theories, any being that can feel in this way is going to be of moral import. Some humans have been keen on identifying what makes humans special, and many of the topics we discuss--conscious experience, rationality, communication, social understanding, cooperation, teaching, culture, moral agency—have been touted as capacities that only humans have. As the science has progressed, particular claims of human uniqueness have been dismantled. Back in Darwin’s day, for example, a proposed unique human capacity was mirror self-recognition. In the 1970s, the psychologist Gordon Gallup reported experimental evidence showing that chimpanzees recognize themselves in mirrors, something that had long been observed in non-experimental contexts. For several years, chimpanzees were the only animal known to pass the test, which helped confirm the common attitude that chimpanzees are special, since they are the species most closely related to humans (humans share 98.7% of our genes with chimpanzees). But now we know that many species will touch a mark on their body after seeing it in a mirror, or, lacking hands, will direct the marked part of the body in front of a mirror—all the great apes, bottlenose dolphins, orcas, Asian elephants, Eurasian magpies, and even ants have all reportedly passed the mirror test. Tool use was another early property thought to be uniquely human, but after it was found that chimpanzees uses tones as hammers to crack nuts, the criterion was modified from tool use to tool construction. But that one got dropped after we saw chimpanzees make good ant dipping wands from grass, and even saw them making tools that are used to make new tools. For every proposed uniquely human property so far, we have found some version of the property in another species. The more we learn about other species, the more continuity we find between human animals and nonhuman animals.
Human uniqueness claims sound exciting, as if we are discovering something deeply important about how special we are compared to other animals. I am often asked what makes humans unique if we have so much in common with other species. My response is to wonder why we are asking that question. All species have their own special practices and capacities. Eagles fly, frogs catch flies with their tongues, grizzly bears swipe salmon out of fast moving rivers, birds build intricate nests, and bees make honey. Most humans can’t do any of those things. It is just as good a question to ask, “Why do humans build cities out of wood, and stone, and metal, and glass?” then to ask, “Why do bowerbirds build elaborate structures out of sticks and decorate them with found objects?” We can approach these questions in the same way, suggesting that the species engages in that behavior in order to promote the continuation of their biological lineage. Instead, we might try to figure out the social and psychological motivations behind those actions, or the cognitive capacities that support them. Here, we should expect to find similarities as well as differences.
There is a dark side to the obsession with human uniqueness. When psychologists give people newspaper stories claiming to provide evidence of human uniqueness, subjects are more likely to discriminate against vulnerable human groups (Costello and Hodson 2010). On the other hand, if people read newspaper stories about psychological continuity of humans with other animals, then they are more likely to respond in an egalitarian way toward other humans, as well as toward other species. There is something in humans that is sensitive to tribal thinking, and when presented with reason to justify tribalism, such as thinking that there is a difference in kind between different groups, exceptionalist thinking gets triggered (such as thinking humans are special or my culture is the best). But there is also something in humans that is sensitive to communal thinking, and when presented with evidence of cross-species continuity, that side of us comes out. These facts about humans makes it all the more important to think critically and carefully about talk of ‘human uniqueness,’ and to be clear about what it presumes, as well as what motivates the question if you choose to ask it.
Philosophy of animal minds can help us see that animals are the sorts of beings that are morally considerable. It can also help us understand the different interests various species have, given their different psychological profiles. When an individual has moral standing, it doesn’t mean that the individual should be treated just like you. You might have an interest in learning philosophy or science, you might have interests in setting and planning long term goals, and you might have an interest in participating in your nation’s political system. These are not going to be the same interests that we find in a spider, a dolphin, or a gorilla. Returning to the clever animal videos, it is easy to see the monkeys as having an interest in their companion’s survival, or the bird’s and dog’s interest in enjoying sledding. But we also can be wrong about what an animal wants, simply because we don’t understand the species, or the individual. To see this, just sit beside a zoo enclosure for a few hours, and listen to what people say. They can’t all be right, because their interpretations of the animal’s behaviors are so widely different. This isn’t only true of other species; we can also fail badly at interpreting what other humans want, too.
In addition to these moral imperatives for examining animal psychological properties, there is a pragmatic reason for engaging in this investigation. The study of animal minds helps us to better understand the psychological terms we use. We think that humans are conscious, rational, teach and cooperate, punish, and follow norms. And, we think humans have a mind. But what do these claims amount to? What is a mind? If we can’t explicate these claims, then what look like statements of knowledge are just empty clichés. It is both an empirical and a conceptual task to better understand what we’re talking about when we talk about the mind, and to throw out the useless concepts to improve the communicative function of our language. As an empirical task, it requires that we study subjects. The history of psychology is a short one, and it is one that has not been very successful at taking a wide-angle approach. The focus of psychology has been primarily on humans, and even more narrowly on white, rich, industrialized, northern, western, and young humans. If the British naturalists had likewise focused on such a narrow subject pool we would have never got the theory of evolution by natural selection. The proper subject of psychology includes animals and humans in all their diverse expressions.
In this book, I begin by offering you three sets of tools, one in each of the first three chapters. Chapter 1 presents the philosophical tools that are most useful for examining other minds. Here, I present what philosophers variously mean by “mind,” make a quick tour through the history of philosophical views about animal minds, and discuss a classic problem of philosophy – the problem of other minds. After presenting a number of responses to the problem, I conclude that we have good reason to accept the existence of animal minds.
Chapter2 offers tools derived from the philosophy of science’s work on the nature of scientific theories, interpretation, and explanation. Here we start with a discussion of how to describe animal behavior, and confront worries about folk psychological explanations and anthropomorphic descriptions. I then propose two philosophical methods for studying animal minds: the calibration method for examining concepts and the Sherlock Holmes method for testing concepts against scientific observations. With the problem of other minds dismissed, we can use calibration and seek to offer good explanations and interpretations using these traditional philosophical methods.
Chapter3 offers a sketch of the different scientific methods that have been used to empirically investigate animal mental capacities. These start with the anecdotal anthropomorphism common until the 19th century, and the development of more rigorous scientific methods in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which lead to the rise of behaviorism. At the same time, we find the rise of ethology as a new kind of naturalism that combines observational and experimental methods on animals in their typical environment, in contrast to the behaviorist’s focus on rats and pigeons in cages.
The cognitive turn of the 1960s in human psychology was slow to reach animal psychology, but now it is a thriving research program, alongside biological and anthropological approaches. These different methods of study have their own strengths and weaknesses, and, in Chapter 3, I defend a pluralist approach as the best way to have a fecund science of animal minds.
The first three chapters are designed to introduce readers to the topic—Chapter 1introduces readers to concepts and methods from the philosophy of mind, Chapter2 introduces readers to concepts in the philosophy of science, and Chapter 3introduces readers to the history of the sciences studying animal minds.
In chapters 4 to 9, we confront specific questions about animal minds. In each of these chapters, we have conceptual work to do. Chapter 4 explores how to ask whether animals are conscious, and after clarifying that sentience, or feeling something, is sufficient for consciousness, I argue that we have sufficient reason to accept consciousness widely across species. After having established that animals are minded in Chapter 1, and conscious in Chapter 4, we are now justified to ask additional questions about animal psychology. In Chapter 5 we turn to the question of whether and how animals think. Chapter 6 asks whether and how animals communicate. Chapter 7 asks what sorts of social understanding other animals might have. Chapter 8 asks whether animals have a cultural mind. Chapter 9 starts with a brief introduction to arguments for animal moral standing, and then turns to the question about whether animals have moral minds.
Using the tools introduced in the first three chapters, we can investigate specific questions about what kinds of cognitive capacities different species might have, at the same time investigating what we mean by the concepts. We will then be in a better position to ask new and richer questions, to better understand what other animals want, and how we can best interact with them.
It is my hope that these chapters help you think more deeply about animals and our relationships with them.
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