Mindreading Animals: The Debate Over What Animals Know about Other Minds

264 Pages·2011·2.4 MB·English

by  Robert W. Lurz

Mindreading Animals

Mindreading Animals
The Debate over What Animals Know about Other Minds
Robert W. Lurz
A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2 011 M assachusetts Institute of Technology
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lurz, Robert W., 1968–
Mindreading animals : the debate over what animals know about other minds /
Robert W. Lurz.
p. cm. — (A bradford book)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01605-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Extrasensory perception in animals. 2. Cognition in animals. I. Title.
QL785.3.L87 2011
591.5 ′ 13 — dc22
2011001933
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Mary Jane, William, and James

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
— Shakespeare, M acbeth, act II, scene i
A tactic for embarrassing behaviorists in the laboratory is to set up experiments that
deceive the subject: if the deception succeeds, their behavior is predicable from their
false beliefs about the environment, not from their actual environment.
— Dan Dennett from “ Conditions of Personhood ”

Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xvii
1 Mindreading in Animals : Its Importance and History 1
1.1. W hy the Question of Animal Mindreading Matters 3
1.2. A Brief History of the Animal Mindreading Debate 7
1.3. C onclusion 18
2 The Logical Problem in Animal Mindreading Research 21
2.1. M indreading in Animal Social Cognition Research: The Issues 21
2.2. T he Logical Problem 25
2.3. C urrent Protocols to Test for Cognitive State Attribution in Animals 32
2.4. H are and Colleagues ’ Competitive Paradigm Experiment 32
2.5. A Complementary Behavior-Reading Hypothesis: Direct Line of Gaze 34
2.6. A re Complementary Behavior-Reading Hypotheses Necessarily Ad Hoc? 38
2.7. T he Issue of Simplicity 42
2.8. K nowledge/Ignorance Attribution in Primates 49
2.9. T hose Amazing Scrub Jays 54
2.10. R emarks on Goal-Directed/Intentional-Action Attribution in Animals 61
2.11. C onclusion 66
3 Solving the Logical Problem for Perceptual State Attribution 67
3.1. T he Case against Animal Mindreading of Any Kind 67
3.2. A General Framework for Solving the Logical Problem 76
3.3. T he Appearance– Reality Mindreading (ARM) Theory 83
3.4. H ow Animals Might Attribute States of Perceptual Appearing 88
3.5. E xperimental Protocols That Can Solve the Logical Problem 96
3.6. V isual Perspective Taking with Chimpanzees using Transparent Colored
Barriers 96
3.7. V isual Perspective Taking with Chimpanzees using Size-Distorting Barriers 101
3.8. V isual Perspective Taking with Ravens using Deceptive Amodal Completion
Stimuli 106