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

264 Pages·2011·2.4 MB·English
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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 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. For information about special quantity discounts, please email special_sales@ mitpress.mit.edu This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. 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

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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 f
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