Drawing on ethnographic, ethological, and historical data, we examined the relationships between orangutans and caregivers at Auckland Zoo. Caregivers displayed high levels of empathy and adjusted their husbandry routines to their interpretations of the orangutans’ moods. Caregivers experienced conflicts arising from their efforts to empathize. Although they agreed their husbandry approach improved welfare, they worried their interpretations of orangutan behavior were inaccurate anthropomorphic projections. However, caregivers’ interpretations aligned well with ethological observations and with current knowledge of orangutan behavior. Caregivers’ shared (...) view of great apes as moral persons led to personal conflicts about the ethics of sacrificing individual orangutans’ freedom for the greater good of the species. By exploring caregivers’ personal conflicts, we aimed to inform debates about the politics of empathizing with animals, the role of zoos, and the ethics of keeping great apes in captivity. We argue the use of empathy is essential for engaging in intersubjective relationships. (shrink)

The charge that anthropomorphizing nonhuman animals is a fallacy is itself largely misguided and mythic. Anthropomorphism in the study of animal behavior is placed in its original, theological context. Having set the historical stage, I then discuss its relationship to a number of other, related issues: the role of anecdotal evidence, the taxonomy of related anthropomorphic claims, its relationship to the attribution of psychological states in general, and the nature of the charge of anthropomorphism as a categorical claim. I then (...) argue that the categorical reading of anthropomorphism cannot work and that it misrepresents what is being claimed when one claims that traits are shared between humans and nonhumans. We should think of such claims not as anthropomorphic per se– because that implies the trait is intrinsically human and only derivatively nonhuman. Instead, traits shared with mammals are mammalomorphic, for example, or primatomorphic when shared by primates. (shrink)

Whereas Darwin insisted upon the continuity of human and nonhuman animals, more recent students of animal behavior have largely assumed discontinuity. Lloyd Morgan was a pivotal figure in this transformation. His "canon, " although intended to underpin a psychological approach to animals, has been persistently misunderstood to be a stark prohibition of anthropomorphic description. His extension to animals of the terms "behavior" and "trial-and-error, " previously restricted to human psychology, again largely unwittingly devalued their original meaning and widened the gulf (...) between animals and humans. His insistence that knowledge of animal psychology could be trusted solely to "qualified" observers initiated the exclusion from science of the informal and intimate knowledge of animals gained by pet owners, animal trainers, and other scientific outsiders. The presumption, however, that animals, in contrast to people. are to be understood solely as "strangers, " begs, rather than addresses, the question of animal-human continuity. (shrink)

Preston & de Waal are understandably cautious in applying their model to autism. They emphasise multiple cognitive impairments in autism, including prefrontal-executive, cerebellar-attention, and amygdala-emotion recognition deficits. Further empirical examination of imitation ability in autism may reveal deficits in the neural and cognitive basis of perception-action mapping that have a specific relation to the empathic deficit.

There is a diffuse sentiment that to anthropomorphize is a mild vice that people tend to do easily and pleasingly, but that an adult well educated person should avoid. In this paper it will be provided an elucidation of ``anthropomorphism'' in the field of common sense knowledge, the issue of animal rights, and about the use of humans as a model in the scientific explanation. It will be argued for a ``constructive anthropomorphism'', i.e., the idea that anthropomorphism is a natural (...) attutude to attribute human psychological features to other individuals, no matter they are actually rational agents, or not. If we know the ``grammar'' of this attutude, we can avoid the risks in overestimating the environmental inputs towards anthropomor­phism and, at the same time, take the heuristic advantages of anthropomor­phism in the use of human mind as a model for both everyday circumstances and scientific enterprise. (shrink)

ArgumentIn recent decades, through the work of Jane Goodall and other ethologists, the practice of giving personal names to nonhuman animals who are the subjects of scientific research has become associated with claims about animal personhood and scientific objectivity. While critics argue that such naming practices predispose the researcher toward anthropomorphism, supporters suggest that it sensitizes the researcher to individual differences and social relations. Both critics and supporters agree that naming tends to be associated with the recognition of individual animal (...) rights. The history of the naming of research animals since the late nineteenth century shows, however, that the practice has served a variety of purposes, most of which have raised few ethical or epistemological concerns. Names have been used to identify research animals who play dual roles as pets, workers, or patients, to enhance their market value, and to facilitate their identification in the field. The multifaceted history of naming suggests both that the use of personal names by Goodall and others is less of a radical break with previous practices than it might first appear to be and that the use of personal names to recognize the individuality, sentience, or rights of nonhuman animals faces inherent limits and contradictions. (shrink)

Few areas of scientific investigation have spawned more alternative approaches than animal behavior: comparative psychology, ethology, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, behavioral endocrinology, behavioral neuroscience, neuroethology, behavioral genetics, cognitive ethology, developmental psychobiology---the list goes on. Add in the behavioral sciences focused on the human animal, and you can continue the list with ethnography, biological anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology (cognitive, social, developmental, evolutionary, etc.), and even that dismal science, economics. Clearly, no reasonable-length chapter can do justice to such a varied collection. We (...) have opted therefore to focus on three of these subdisciplines and to provide a somewhat historical tour of them, mentioning along the way the philosophical points that are of particular interest to us, but allowing the development of these points to be limited only by the imaginations of our readers. For readers seeking a more-traditional historical survey, see Dewsbury (1984a, b) and Burghardt (1985a). Our chosen brief is to write about comparative psychology, ethology, and cognitive ethology, although other approaches, especially neuroscience, will be mentioned where appropriate. These sciences are philosophically significant because they are enmeshed in ancient philosophical questions about the nature of mind and purposeful action and about the differences between humans and other animals. These sciences are also clustered because of their attention to mechanistic explanations of individual animal behavior as opposed to attempting to capture regularities at a population level, such as the game-theoretic strategic models popular among behavioral ecologists. (shrink)

If there is to be a natural theory of consciousness that would satisfy both philosophers and scientists, it must be based on naturalistic data and minimal clutter accumulated from semantic arguments. Carruthers offers a 'natural' theory of consciousness that is rather myopic. To explore the evolutionary basis of consciousness, a natural theory should include comparative psychological and neurological data that encompass nonlinguistic measures. Such an approach could provide a clearer picture of the adaptive function, mechanisms, and origins of consciousness.