Animal Minds
Edited by Colin Allen (University of Pittsburgh)
About this topic
Summary | The topic of Animal Minds is a broad interdisciplinary area with contributions by philosophers, psychologists, behavioral biologists, neuroscientists, and anthropologists. Because the notion of "mind" predates science and because the scientific definition of "cognition" is itself contested, the exact range of capacities attributable to animals and capable of empirical investigation is also contested, but these capacities include general reasoning, reasoning in specific domains such as causal inference or social hierarchies, tool use, problem solving, communicative and proto-linguistic abilities, episodic and semantic memory, spatial navigation (including cognitive maps), metacognition, self-recognition and self-awareness, and various capacities related to social cognition such as "mind reading" or "theory of mind", imitation and emulation. Questions about the existence, distribution and forms of animal consciousness, along with feelings, emotions and affective states such as pain, are also debated in this area. All of these topics also bear on the moral status of animals, both as subjects of moral concern and possibly as moral agents themselves. Comparative approaches to animal mind and cognition have contributed importantly to debates about evolution. |
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Related categories
Subcategories: See also:
Animal Consciousness (316 | 19)
Animal Cognition (216 | 17)
Animal Mind Sciences (239 | 2)
Animal Minds, Misc (142)
- Computationalism in Cognitive Science (610)
- Evolution of Cognition (609 | 80)
- Rationality and Cognitive Science (540)
- Embodiment and Situated Cognition (1,820)
- Moral Status of Animals (440)
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Editorial team
General Editors:
David Bourget (Western Ontario) David Chalmers (ANU, NYU) Area Editors: David Bourget Gwen Bradford Berit Brogaard Margaret Cameron David Chalmers James Chase Rafael De Clercq Ezio Di Nucci Barry Hallen Hans Halvorson Jonathan Ichikawa Michelle Kosch Øystein Linnebo JeeLoo Liu Paul Livingston Brandon Look Manolo Martínez Matthew McGrath Michiru Nagatsu Susana Nuccetelli Giuseppe Primiero Jack Alan Reynolds Darrell P. Rowbottom Aleksandra Samonek Constantine Sandis Howard Sankey Jonathan Schaffer Thomas Senor Robin Smith Daniel Star Jussi Suikkanen Lynne Tirrell Aness Kim Webster Other editors Contact us Learn more about PhilPapers |