Online research in philosophy

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.

In 1963 Niko Tinbergen published a paper, "On Aims and Methods of Ethology," dedicated to his friend Konrad Lorenz. Here Tinbergen defines ethology as "the biological study of behavior," and seeks to demonstrate "the close affinity between Ethology and the rest of Biology." Tinbergen identifies four major areas of ethology: causation, survival value, evolution, and ontogeny. Our goal is to attempt for cognitive ethology what Tinbergen succeeded in doing for ethology: to clarify its aims and methods, to distinguish some of its varieties, and to defend the fruitfulness of the research strategies that it has spawned.

Cognitive ethology is the comparative study of animal cognition from an evolutionary perspective. As a sub-discipline of biology it shares interest in questions concerning the immediate causes and development of behavior. As a part of ethology it is also concerned with questions about the function and evolution of behavior. I examine some recent work in cognitive ethology, and I argue that the notions of mental content and representation are important to enable researchers to answer questions and state generalizations about the function and volution of behavior.

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.