Online research in philosophy

Ramsey, Bastian, and van Schaik (RBS) have made a valiant effort to identify innovations in nature. As their theoretical perspective on innovation as a product largely conforms to Reader & Laland (2003), their novel contribution is epistemological. They may well have considered as much information as possible on the ecological, individual, and historical factors that suggest innovations in nature. However, their method does not..

There are good arguments for examining great ape communicative achievements for what they contribute to our understanding of great ape cognition and its evolution (Russon & Begun, in press a). Our concern is whether Shanker & King's (S&K's) thesis advances communication studies from a broader cognitive and evolutionary perspective.

Imitation research has been hindered by (1) overly molecular analyses of behaviour that ignore hierarchical structure, and (2) attempts to disqualify observational evidence. Program-level imitation is one of a range of cognitive skills for scheduling efficient novel behaviour, in particular, enabling an individual to purloin the organization of another's behaviour for its own. To do so, the individual must perceive the underlying hierarchical schedule of the fluid action it observes and must understand the local functions of subroutines within the overall (...) goal-directed process. Action-level imitation, copying strings of actions linearly without any such understanding, is less valuable for acquiring complex behaviour and may often have other, social functions. At present, we lack a mechanistic understanding of the abilities underlying program-level imitation that make it possible for the underlying structure of complex actions to be dissected visually and recreated in behaviour. (shrink)

In this book, field and laboratory researchers show that the Great Apes are capable of thinking at symbolic levels, traditionally considered uniquely human.