Abstract
Can empathy be a tool for obtaining scientific knowledge or is it incompatible with the detached objectivity that is often seen as the ideal in scientific inquiry? This paper examines the views of Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz and American comparative psychologist Daniel Lehrman on the role of intuition and empathy in the study of animal behavior. It situates those views within the larger project of establishing ethology as an objective science. Lehrman challenged Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, the main founders of this field, to clarify their epistemological positions regarding how to deal with the subjectivity of the animals they studied as well as the scientist’s own subjectivity. I argue that there was a tension between their desire to eliminate the subjectivities of ethological researchers (and of their subjects) and the public perception that Lorenz had a remarkable ability to enter into the lives of the animals he studied. I explain why Lorenz rejected empathy as valid in scientific inquiry, showing that his epistemological position was grounded in his ideal of science and his proposed ontology for ethology. Yet, Lehrman insisted that full detachment was neither possible nor desirable.
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Notes
For reasons of space, I do not cover here their scientific practices. Further work on this area will be needed to explore whether their actual observation practices and experiments exemplified their positions about the role of empathy in epistemology and methodology or whether they departed from their programmatic claims.
On the history of ethology, see Burkhardt et al. (1997), Burkhardt (2005) and Dewsbury (1985). On the ethologists’ views about human behavior, see Vicedo (2013, 2018a, 2018b), Milam (2019) and Weidman (2021). On Lorenz’s life, see Taschwer & Föger, (2003). For philosophical examination of Lorenz’s ideas, see Griffiths (2004) and Brigandt (2005). On Tinbergen’s life and work, see Kruuk (2003), Röell (2000) and Lundl (2015). On Karl von Frisch, see Munz (2016). Over the years, ethology evolved in ways that departed from what is what called “classical ethology.” See Gräfe and Stuhrmann (2022) on the evolution of different approaches and theoretical premises within ethology over time. Here I focus on Lorenz’s and Tinbergen’s views during the period of classical ethology.
On different notions of observation in the sciences, see Daston and Lunbeck (2011).
Gräfe (2022, pp. 69–70) notes that Lorenz not only started his own photo and film collection in 1935, but he also promoted the institutionalization of an international film collection for comparative ethological studies, the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica, initiated in 1952 at the Institute for the Scientific Film (IWF) in Göttingen. On the significance of film for the early ethological studies, see also Mitman (1999), Burkhardt (2005), Munz (2005) and Scholz (2021). On animals in film more generally, see Burt (2003).
On changing notions of objectivity, see also Megill (1994).
On the construction of a scientific persona, see Daston and Sibum (2003).
CBS Adventure Series, Animal Communication and Behavior, 23 January 1955. Available through The American Museum of Natural History Film Archives.
“He talks baby ducks into thinking he’s mother,” New York Herald Tribune, 23 January 1955; “An adopted mother goose,” Life, 39 (July/August 1955), pp. 73–78.
In her analysis of German sources, Kaufmann (2018, p. 30) has written that: “The general readers appreciated the scientist Lorenz precisely because of his empathetic closeness to animals and his depictions of their emotional and cognitive abilities” (my translation).
Vicedo (2009, 2013) has shown that Lorenz’s work on imprinting played a key role in the development of the psychoanalytic conception of the good mother as the natural mother who could respond empathically to her children in an instinctive way. Lorenz’s studies on imprinting influenced the work of John Bowlby, René Spitz, Therese Benedek and many other psychoanalytic students of the mother–child relationship.
Dewsbury (1997, p. 376) notes that in his popular writings “Tinbergen expressed his analysis with a sense of empathy that conveyed concern for, and frustration with, the birds’ behavior, rather than merely reporting his observations.”.
In her study of field primatology, Rees (2007, p. 886) also highlights this tension:
“A potential contradiction is evident between the researcher’s goal of physically integrating with the group and being treated by the other primates as ‘just’ another animal, and that of producing accounts of ‘natural’ behaviour unaffected by human interference.” She goes on to show how “strong emotional and empathic identification with the animals is consistently evident in their popular writings.” This, she argues, is especially the case in the work of Jane Goodall, Birutė Galdikas and Dian Fossey (p. 889).
The idea of ‘participant observation’ as a scientific method is central to discussions of modern anthropology, and variously attributed to Frank Hamilton Cushing and Bronislav Malinowski. The same issues of empathy and tension between total objectification and identification with the subject are discussed in the literature on anthropological methodology. See Baker (1987) for Malinowski, and LaCapra (2019), ch. 4 for a more recent discussion of these issues focused on Cushing.
Tinbergen claimed to have tried to instill pre-analytical intuition into his students, in a way reminiscent of Lorenz’s argument: “What I have always tried to teach my boys … is an approach from the intuitive-gestalt-observing side, which one then later analyses into components.” Tinbergen to John Newson, 29 March 1973, folder D.5, Nikolaas Tinbergen Papers (henceforth, Tinbergen Papers), NCUACS 27.3.91, Department of Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
Niko Tinbergen to Stroh, 5 December 1970, folder D.1, Tinbergen Papers.
This is how Lorenz told René Spitz he was called, and how Spitz introduced Lorenz in a conference. In “Introduction,” p. 1, Box M2116, Folder 7 (“Lorenz 1970”), René Spitz Papers, Archives of the History of American Psychology, Akron, OH.
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I am grateful to Richard W. Burkhardt, Juan Ilerbaig, Mark Solovey, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions to improve this paper.
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Vicedo, M. Epistemological discipline in animal behavior studies: Konrad Lorenz and Daniel Lehrman on intuition and empathy. HPLS 45, 6 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-023-00558-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-023-00558-7