Online research in philosophy

Byrne & Russon propose an account of imitation that mirrors levels of behavioral organization, but they perpetuate a tendency to dismiss imitation by members of most species as the result of more primitive processes, even though these alternative phenomena are often poorly understood. They argue that the prerequisites to program-level imitation are present in great apes, but the same prerequisites appear to be present in a broad range of species. The distribution of imitative capacity across species may be more limited (...) by research methodology than by cognitive ability. (shrink)

In Herbert Roitblat, ed., _Comparative Approaches to Cognitive Sciences_ , MIT Press, 1995. Daniel C. Dennett <blockquote> Do Animals Have Beliefs? </blockquote> According to one more or less standard mythology, behaviorism, the ideology and methodology that reigned in experimental psychology for most of the century, has been overthrown by a new ideology and methodology: cognitivism. Behaviorists, one is told, didn't take the mind seriously. They ignored--or even denied the existence of--mental states such as beliefs and desires, and mental (...) processes such as imagination and reasoning; behaviorists concentrated exclusively on external, publicly observable behavior, and the (external, publicly observable) conditions under which such behavior was elicited. Cognitivists, in contrast, take the mind seriously, and develop theories, models, explanations, that invoke, as real items, these internal, mental, goings-on. People (and at least some other animals) have minds after all--they are rational agents. (shrink)