Online research in philosophy

The famous ethological maxim known as “Morgan’s Canon” continues to be the subject of interpretive controversy. I reconsider Morgan’s canon in light of two questions: First, what did Morgan intend? Second, is this, or perhaps some re-interpretation of the canon, useful within cognitive ethology? As for the first issue, Morgan’s distinction between higher and lower faculties is suggestive of an early supervenience concept. As for the second, both the canon in its original form, and various recent re-readings, offer nothing useful to cognitive ethology.

Cognitive ethology began with Donald R. Griffin's 1976 publication of The Question of Animal Awareness. More recently mutual influences can be found between cognitive ethology and comparative, developmental, experimental and cognitive psychology and philosophy of science and of mind. Present scientific work emphasizes: 1) animal cognitive capacities including discrimination, categorization, spatial knowledge, predator/prey relations such as "injury feigning" by birds, deception and attribution of intention, 2) communication, both natural systems and artificial "language" and cognition projects undertaken with apes, birds, and sea mammals and 3) the possibility of animal consciousness. For the future, one hopes for developments in those areas, more field research, conceptual and methodological bridges to other disciplines, and philosophical work on the theoretical foundations of cognitive ethology and naturalizing intentionality.

A common Western assumption is that animals cannot be persons. Even in animal ethics, the concept of personhood is often avoided. At the same time, many in cognitive ethology argue that animals do have minds, and that animal ethics presents convincing arguments supporting the individual value of animals. Although “animal personhood” may seem to be an absurd notion, more attention needs to placed on the reasons why animals can or cannot be included in the category of persons. Of three different approaches to personhood—the perfectionist approach, the humanistic approach, and the interactive approach—the third approach is the strongest. Personhood defined via interaction opens new doors for animal ethics.

Typically in the philosophical literature, kinds of minds are differentiated by the range of cognitive tasks animals accomplish as opposed to the means by which they accomplish the tasks. Drawing on progress in cognitive ethology (the study of animal cognition), I argue that such an approach provides bad directions for uncovering the mark of the human mind. If the goal is to determine what makes the human mind unique, philosophers should focus on the means by which animals interact with objects in their environments, and not on the sorts of tasks they are able to accomplish.

In this review of Allen & Bekoff's Species of Mind (1997), underlying theoretical assumptions of cognitive ethology are examined from a biological and philosophical viewpoint. In particular, the aim of the book to constitute a foundational concept for cognitive ethology is addressed. The ambiguity of theory-of-mind approaches in animal cognition is discussed as a major problem for causal explanations in behavioural biology.

Cognitive ethology cannot be done well unless its proximate philosophical underpinnings are got straight; this paper tries to help with that. Cognitive attributions are essentially explanatory—if they did not explain behavior, there would be no justification for them—but it doesn’t follow that they explain by providing causes for events that don’t have physical causes. To understand how mentalistic attributions do work, we need to focus on the quartet: sensory input, belief, desire, and behavioral output. We also need to be able to study classes of sensory inputs—one-shot deals are uninterpretable. The crucial guiding rule is, roughly: The animal’s behavior shouldn’t be explained by attributing to it the belief that P unless the behavior occurs in sensory circumstances belonging to a class whose members are marked off in some way that involves the concept of P and not in any way that is lower than that. The higher/lower distinction can be understood so that the guiding rule is helpful not only in deciding what thoughts to attribute to an animal but also in deciding whether to attribute any thoughts at all.

In recent years both philosophers and scientists have been sceptical about the existence of animal minds. This is in distinction to Hume who claimed that '...no truth appears to me more evident, than that beasts are endow'd with thought and reason as well as men'. I argue that Hume is correct about the epistemological salience of our ordinary practices of ascribing mental states to animals. The reluctance of contemporary philosophers and scientists to embrace the view that animals have minds is primarily a fact about their philosophy and science rather than a fact about animals. The recognition of this fact is the beginning of any serious effort to develop a science of cognitive ethology.