Mindreading Animals

by Lurz, Robert W.

• ISBN13: 9780262016056
• ISBN10: 0262016052
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-07-29
• Publisher: Bradford Books

Summary

Animals live in a world of other minds, human and nonhuman, and their well-being and survival often depends on what is going on in the minds of these other creatures. But do animals know that other creatures have minds? And how would we know if they do? In Mindreading Animals, Robert Lurz offers a fresh approach to the hotly debated question of mental-state attribution in nonhuman animals. Some empirical researchers and philosophers claim that some animals are capable of anticipating other creatures' behaviors by interpreting observable cues as signs of underlying mental states; others claim that animals are merely clever behavior-readers, capable of using such cues to anticipate others' behaviors without interpreting them as evidence of underlying mental states. Lurz argues that neither position is compelling, and proposes a way to move the debate, and the field, forward. Lurz presents a new approach to understanding what mindreading in animals might be, offering a bottom-up model of mental-state attribution that is built upon cognitive abilities that animals are known to possess rather than on a preconceived view of the mind applicable to mindreading abilities in humans. Lurz goes on to describe an innovative series of new experimental protocols for animal mindreading research that overcome a persistent methodological problem in the field, known as the "logical problem" or "Povinelli's challenge." These protocols show in detail how various types of animals--from apes to monkeys to ravens to dogs--can be tested for perceptual state and belief attribution.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xvii
Mindreading in Animals: It Importance and History	p. 1
Why the Question of Animal Mindreading Matters	p. 3
A Brief History of the Animal Mindreading Debate	p. 7
Conclusion	p. 18
The Logical Problem in Animal Mindreading Research	p. 21
Mindreading in Animal Social Cognition Research: The Issues	p. 21
The Logical Problem	p. 25
Current Protocols to Test for Cognitive State Attribution in Animals	p. 32
Hare and ColleaguesÆ Competitive Paradigm Experiment	p. 32
A Complementary Behavior-Reading Hypothesis: Direct Line of Gaze	p. 34
Are Complementary Behavior-Reading Hypothesis Necessarily Ad Hoc?	p. 38
The Issue of Simplicity	p. 42
Knowledge/Ignorance Attribution in Primates	p. 49
Those Amazing Scrub Jays	p. 54
Remarks on Goal-Directed/Intentional-Action Attribution in Animals	p. 61
Conclusion	p. 66
Solving the Logical Problem for Perceptual State Attribution	p. 67
The Case against Animal Mindreading of Any Kind	p. 67
A General Framework for Solving the Logical Problem	p. 76
The Appearance-Reality Mindreading (ARM) Theory	p. 83
How Animals Might Attributes States of Perceptual Appearing	p. 88
Experimental Protocols That Can Solve the Logical Problem	p. 96
Visual Perspective Taking with Chimpanzees using Transparent Colored Barriers	p. 96
Visual Perspective Taking with Chimpanzees using Size-Distorting Barriers	p. 101
Visual Perspective Taking with Ravens using Deceptive Amodal Completion Stimuli	p. 106
Visual Perspective Taking with Chimpanzees using Deceptive Amodal Completion Stimuli	p. 116
Visual Perspective Taking with Dogs using Deceptive Amodal Completion Stimuli	p. 121
Conclusion	p. 129
Solving the Logical Problem for Belief Attribution	p. 131
DavidsonÆs Argument against Belief Attribution in Animals	p. 131
BermúdezÆs Argument against Belief Attribution in Animals	p. 138
The Empirical Studies	p. 144
From Perceptual Appearing Attribution to Belief Attribution	p. 157
A Simple Appearance-Reality Screening Test	p. 164
Revisability Belief-Attribution Protocol No. 1	p. 170
Revisability Belief-Attribution Protocol No. 2	p. 176
Representation of Abstract Relations by Primates	p. 184
Abstract Belief-Attribution Protocol	p. 186
Conclusion	p. 193
Epilogue	p. 195
Notes	p. 197
References	p. 219
Index	p. 243
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