Abstract
Mentalist view began to lose its standing among psychologists mainly during the first half of the twentieth century. As a result, the enthusiasm to build an objective science began to grow among behaviourists and ethologists. The rise of cognitive sciences around the 1960s, however, revived the debates over the importance of cognitive intervening variables in explaining behaviours that could not be explained by clinging solely to a pure behavioural approach. Nevertheless, even though cognitive functions in nonhuman animals have been identified in many studies, attributing human mental properties to animals is still being criticized as anthropomorphism. Such anthropomorphic attributions have been considered as an open door to the return of subjective methodology. Representation of anthropomorphic attributions as scientific activities within the context of discovery as opposed to the context of justification casts a new light on this problem. The present analysis proposes that anthropomorphic attributions are formed based on top-down idiosyncratic intuitions on the cusp of hypothesis building, outside the context of scientific justification. In other words, an anthropomorphic attribution is a potential creative link between pure observations of behaviours and building testable hypotheses about cognition in the process of scientific discovery. Thus, serving a function within the context of discovery, anthropomorphism does not motivate the return of subjective methodology, simply because it is not inconsistent with the rule-governed path in the context of scientific justification.
Similar content being viewed by others
Availability of Data and Material:
Not applicable.
Code Availability:
Not applicable.
References
Allen, C. (1998). Assessing animal cognition: ethological and philosophical perspectives. Journal of animal science, 76(1), 42–47
Andrews, K. (2015). “A Role for Folk Psychology in Animal Cognition Research” Experimentation Collection. 66. http://animalstudiesrepository.org/acwp_arte/66
Andrews, K., & Huss, B. (2014). Anthropomorphism, anthropectomy, and the null hypothesis. Biology & Philosophy, 29(5), 711–729
Arabatzis, T. (2006). On the inextricability of the context of discovery and the context of justification. Revisiting discovery and justification (pp. 215–230). Dordrecht: Springer
Batey, M., & Furnham, A. (2006). Creativity, intelligence, and personality: A critical review of the scattered literature. Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs, 132, 355–429
Beatty, L. (1995). The Evolutionary Contingency Thesis. In G. Wolters & J. Lennox (Eds) Concepts, Theories, and Rationality in the Biological Sciences: The Second Pittsburgh–Konstanz Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press
Bekoff, M. (2000). Animal emotions: Exploring passionate natures. Bioscience, 50, 861–870
Blumberg, M. S. (2007). Anthropomorphism and evidence. Comparative Cognition and Behavior Reviews, 2, 145–146
Bolhuis, J. J., & Wynne, C. D. (2009). Can evolution explain how minds work? Nature, 458(7240), 832
Boring, E. G. (1953). A history of introspection. Psychological bulletin, 50(3), 169
Brent, P. (1981). Charles Darwin: A man of enlarged curiosity. New York: Harper & Row
Bridgman, P. W. (1927). The logic of modern physics (3 vol.). New York: Macmillan
Bruni, D., Perconti, P., & Plebe, A. (2018). Anti-anthropomorphism and its limits. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 2205
Burghardt, G. M. (2007). Critical anthropomorphism, uncritical anthropocentrism, and naïve nominalism. Comparative Cognition and Behavior Reviews, 2, 136–138
Burghardt, G. M. (1991). Cognitive ethology and critical anthropomorphism: A snake with two heads and hognose snakes that play dead. In Ristau, C. A. (Ed.), Cognitive ethology: The minds of other animals: Essays in honor of Donald R. Griffin (pp. 53–90). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Burghardt, G. M. (1985). Animal awareness: Current perceptions and historical perspective. American psychologist, 40(8), 905
Cantlon, J. F., & Brannon, E. M. (2007). Basic math in monkeys and college students. PLoS biology, 5(12), e328
Cenami Spada, E., (1997). Amorphism, mechanomorphism, and anthropomorphism. In R.W. Mitchell, N.S. Thompson, & H.L. Miles (Eds), Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes and Animals. (Albany Ž. pp. 37–50). SUNY Press
Chomsky, N. (1959). A review of BF Skinner’s Verbal behavior. Language, 35(1), 26–58
Crist, E. (2002). The inner life of earthworms: Darwin’s argument and its implications. The cognitive animal: Empirical and theoretical perspectives on animal cognition, 1985, 3
Darwin, C. (1872). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: Murray; (Reprinted Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1965 with Preface by Konrad Lorenz)
de Waal, F. B., & Ferrari, P. F. (2010). Towards a bottom-up perspective on animal and human cognition. Trends in cognitive sciences, 14(5), 201–207
de Waal, F. B. (1999). Anthropomorphism and anthropodenial: consistency in our thinking about humans and other animals. Philosophical Topics, 27(1), 255–280
de Waal, F. B. (1997). Are we in anthropodenial. Discover, 18(7), 50–53
Duckworth, R. A. (2009). The role of behavior in evolution: A search for mechanism. Evolutionary Ecology, 23(4), 513–531
Eaton, T., Hutton, R., Leete, J., Lieb, J., Robeson, A., & Vonk, J. (2018). Bottoms-up! Rejecting top-down human-centered approaches in comparative psychology. International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 31
Estany, A. (2001). The thesis of theory-laden observation in the light of cognitive psychology. Philosophy of Science, 68(2), 203–217
Feist, G. J. (1998). A meta-analysis of personality in scientific and artistic creativity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2, 290–309
Feyerabend, P. (1962). Explanation, reduction and empiricism. In Feigl, H., & Maxwell, G., Minnesota studies in philosophy of science (3 vol.). University of Minnesota Press
Fitzpatrick, S. (2008). Doing away with Morgan’s canon. Minds Lang, 23, 224–246
Griffin, D. R. (1978). Prospects for a cognitive ethology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1(4), 527–538
Griffin, D. R. (1976). The question of animal awareness: Evolutionary continuity of mental experience. Rockefeller Univ. Press
Goodrich, G., & Allen, C. (2007). Conditioned anti-anthropomorphism. Comparative Cognition & Behaviour Reviews, 2, 147–150
Hanson, N. R. (1958). Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Hausman, D. M. (1997). Causation, agency, and independence. Philosophy of Science, 64, S15–S25
Hempel, C. G. (1959). “The logic of functional analysis,” in Symposium on Sociological Theory. New York, NY: Hempel
Jaakkola, K. (2014). Do animals understand invisible displacement? A critical review. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 128(3), 225
Jimenez-Buedo, M., & Miller, L. M. (2010). Why a trade-off? The relationship between the external and internal validity of experiments. Theoria. Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia, 25(3), 301–321
Kamil, A. C. (1998). On the proper definition of cognitive ethology. In Balda, R. P., Pepperberg, I. M., & Kamil, A. C. (Eds.), Animal cognition in nature (pp. 1–29). San Diego: Academic Press
Karin-D’Arcy, M. R. (2005). The modern role of Morgan’s canon in comparative psychology. International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 18, 179–201
Keeler, J. F., & Robbins, T. W. (2011). Translating cognition from animals to humans. Biochemical pharmacology, 81(12), 1356–1366
Kennedy, J. S. (1992). The New Anthropomorphism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Kintsch, W. (2005). An overview of top-down and bottom-up effects in comprehension: The CI perspective. Discourse processes, 39(2–3), 125–128
Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago press
Lakatos, I. (1978). The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers (I vol.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Langley, P., Simon, H. A., Bradshaw, G. L., & Zytkow, J. M. (1987). Scientific discovery: Computational explorations of the creative processes. MIT press
Lieberman, D. A. (1979). Behaviorism and the mind: A (limited) call for a return to introspection. American Psychologist, 34(4), 319
Lindsay, P. H., & Norman, D. A. (2013). Human information processing: An introduction to psychology. Academic press
Losee, J. (2001). A historical introduction to the philosophy of science. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Miller, G. A., Galanter, E., & Pribram, K. H. (1960). The integration of plans. In Miller, G. A., Galanter, E., & Pribram, K. H. (Eds.), Plans and the structure of behavior (pp. 95–102). Henry Holt and Co
Mitchell, R. W., Thompson, N. S., & Miles, H. L. (1997). Taking anthropomorphism and anecdotes seriously. In Mitchell, R. W., Thompson, N. S., & Miles, H. L. (Eds.), Anthropomorphism, anecdotes, and animals (pp. 3–11). Albany, NY: SUNY Press
McClelland, J. L., & Rumelhart, D. E. (1981). An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: I. An account of basic findings. Psychological review, 88(5), 375
McNaughton, B. L., Battaglia, F. P., Jensen, O., Moser, E. I., & Moser, M. B. (2006). Path integration and the neural basis of the ‘cognitive map’. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7(8), 663–678
Moore, J. (2013). Mentalism as a radical behaviorist views it—Part 1. The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 133–164
Morgan, C. L. (1903). An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. (rev. ed.). New York: Scribner
Munck, G. L., & Verkuilen, J. (2005). Research designs. Encyclopedia of social measurement, 3, 385–395
Nersessian, N. J. (1992). How do scientists think? Capturing the dynamics of conceptual change in science. Cognitive models of science, 15, 3–44
Nemati, F. (2019). The Role of Nature and Brain in Demystifying the “Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics”. Philosophical Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2019.1646895
Nemati, F. (2017). A theoretical framework to explain the superior cognitive competence in humans: A role for the division of labour in the brain. Archives of Neuroscience, 4(1), e36107. https://doi.org/10.5812/archneurosci.36107.
Nemati, F. (2015). From parallel mathematical description of action to unparalleled outcome of abstraction: A comparative analysis. Archives of Neuroscience, 2, e2257. https://doi.org/10.5812/archneurosci.22573.
Nemati, F., Kolb, B., & Metz, G. A. (2013). Stress and risk avoidance by exploring rats: implications for stress management in fear-related behaviours. Behavioural processes, 94, 89–98
Nemati, F., & Whishaw, I. Q. (2007). The point of entry contributes to the organization of exploratory behavior of rats on an open field: An example of spontaneous episodic memory. Behavioral Brain Research, 182, 119–128
Nickles, T. (1985). Beyond divorce: Current status of the discovery debate. Philosophy of Science, 52(2), 177–206
Norton, J. (2013). Chasing the light: Einstein’s most famous thought experiment. In Brown, J. R., Frappier, M., & Meynell, L. (Eds.), Thought experiments in philosophy, science and the arts (pp. 123–140). New York: Routledge
O’keefe, J., & Nadel, L. (1987). The hippocampus as a cognitive map. Oxford, UK: Claredon Press
Pearson, K. (1911). The Grammar of Science. London: Adam & Charles Black
Penn, D. C., & Povinelli, D. J. (2007). On the lack of evidence that non-human animals possess anything remotely resembling a ‘theory of mind’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362(1480), 731–744
Pepperberg, I. M. (2015). Reply to Jaakkola (2014): “Do animals understand invisible displacement? A critical review”. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 129(2), 198–201
Pflüger, H. J., & Menzel, R. (1999). Neuroethology, its roots and future. Journal of Comparative Physiology A, 185(4), 389–392
Piaget, J. (1978). Behavior and evolution. New York: Pantheon Books
Piaget, J. (1971). Biology and knowledge: An essay on the relations between organic regulations and cognitive processes. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press
Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1969). The psychology of the child. London: Basic Books
Popper, K. R. (1963). Conjectures and refutations: the growth of scientific knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Posner, M. I., & Shulman, G. L. (1979). Cognitive science. In Hearst, E. (Ed.), The first century of experimental psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum
Povinelli, D. J. (2004). Behind the ape’s appearance: Escaping anthropocentrism in the study of other minds. Daedalus, 133(1),29–41
Povinelli, D. J., & Bering, J. M. (2002). The mentality of apes revisited. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11(4), 115–119
Redish, A. D. (1999). Beyond the cognitive map: From place cells to episodic memory. Cambridge: MIT Press
Reichenbach, H. (1966). The rise of scientific philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press
Reiss, J., & Sprenger, J. (2014). Scientific objectivity. In Zalta, E. N. (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford Universityhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-objectivity
Rocke, A. J. (2015). It began with a daydream: the 150th anniversary of the Kekulé benzene structure. Angewandte Chemie, International Edition, 54(1), 46–50. https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.201408034
Ristau, C. A. (1992). Cognitive ethology: Past, present and speculations on the future. In PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association (Vol. 1992, No. 2, pp. 125–136). Philosophy of Science Association
Ristau, C. (Ed.). (1991). Cognitive Ethology: The Minds of Other Animals. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publisher
Rivas, J. A., & Burghardt, G. M. (2002). Crotalomorphism: A metaphor to understand anthropomorphism by omission. In Bekoff, M., Allen, C., & Burghardt, G. M. (Eds.), The cognitive animal: Empirical and theoretical perspectives on animal cognition (pp. 9–18). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Rollin, B. (1997). “Anecdote, Anthropomorphism, and Animal Behavior.” In R. W. Mitchell, N. Thompson, & H. L. Miles (Eds.), In Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals (pp. 125–33). Albany: State University of New York Press
Ruse, M. (1973). The Philosophy of Biology. London: Hutchinson & Co
Schaffner, K. F. (1967). Approaches to reduction. Philosophy of science, 34(2), 137–147
Schouten, M. K. D., & De Jong, H. L. (1999). Reduction, elimination, and levels: The case of the LTP-learning link. Philosophical Psychology, 12(3), 237–62
Shettleworth, S. J. (1993). Varieties of learning and memory in animals. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 19(1), 5
Skinner, B. F. (1984). The operational analysis of psychological terms. Behavioral and brain sciences, 7(4), 547–553
Sober, E. (2005). Comparative psychology meets evolutionary biology: Morgan’s canon and cladistics parsimony. In Mitman, G., & Datson, L. (Eds.), Thinking with animals: new perspectives on anthropomorphism ( (pp. 85–99). New York: Columbia University Press
Stevens, S. S. (1935). The operational definition of psychological concepts. Psychological Review, 42, 517–527
Suppe, F. (1977). The search for philosophic understanding of scientific theories. In Suppe, F. (Ed.), The structure of scientific theories (2nd ed., pp. 3–241). Urbana: University of Illinois Press
Thompson, N. S. (1994). The many perils of ejective anthropomorphism. Behavior and Philosophy, 22(2), 59–70
Timberlake, W. (2007). Anthropomorphism revisited. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, 2, 139–144
Timberlake, W. (1997). An animal-centered, causal-system approach to the understanding and control of behavior. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 53, 107–129
Tolman, E. C. (1948). Cognitive maps in rats and men. Psychological review, 55(4), 189
Watrin, J. P., & Darwich, R. (2012). On behaviorism in the cognitive revolution: Myth and reactions. Review of General Psychology, 16(3), 269–282
Watson, J. B., & McDougall, W. (1929). The battle of behaviorism: An exposition and an exposure. WW Norton & Company
Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological review, 20(2), 158
Wynne, C. D. (2007). What are animals? Why anthropomorphism is still not a scientific approach to behavior. Comparative Cognition and Behavior Reviews, 2, 125–135
Wynne, C. D. (2004). The perils of anthropomorphism. Nature, 428(6983), 606–606
Funding
The research was not funded by any agency.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Not applicable.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflicts of Interest/Competing Interests:
The author has no conflict of interest to disclose.
Ethics Approval:
Not applicable.
Consent to Participate:
Not applicable.
Consent for Publication:
I, Farshad Nemati, thereby give consent for publication of the manuscript.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Nemati, F. Anthropomorphism in the Context of Scientific Discovery: Implications for Comparative Cognition. Found Sci 28, 927–945 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-021-09821-1
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-021-09821-1