Can Animals Think? (2)

Preview of things to come

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Can animals think?

THINKING (examples, features)

1. Flexible, adaptive
2. Can solve diverse and novel problems
3. Figuring it out, deliberation
4. Believing and desiring 
5. Insight, reasoning
6. Often conscious

NOT THINKING (examples, features)

1. Modules, not global workspace
2. Fixed action patterns, instincts
3. Trial and error
4. Automatic information processing
5. Can be complex and representational
6. Often unconscious

Human mind: How much is thinking? How much is not thinking?

1. Descartes--mind = conscious thought
2. Cognitive science today today -- much cognition is unconscious, in "modules"-- thinking is the "tip of the iceberg"
3. So animal minds can be a lot like ours whether or not animals can think

Can animals think?

• Scientists divided--
• Skeptical: Celia Heyes, Peter Carruthers, Euan MacPhail, Clive Wynne
• Open: Frans DeWaal, Gordon Gallup, Kristin Andrews
• Eager: David DeGrazia, Mark Bekoff, Jane Goodall

• YOU are probably divided

• thinking apes, yes
• thinking spiders, no

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Experimental evidence

1. Chimpanzees and crows:  Inside the Animal Mind I 17:23 – 26
2. Animal architects (birds, bees, wasps, beavers, spiders): are they on "automatic" or do they solve new problems as they arise?  Japyassu and Laland -- they solve new problems as they arise
   
   

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A philosophical problem with attributing thought to animals

Background

Folk psychology--predicting and explaining behavior using belief-desire psychology 

• Predicting. John desires some pizza and beliefs there's pizza in the fridge. What will he do?
• Explaining. Mary normally prefers pizza but chose the leftover pasta. Why? She believed they were both old and prefers old pasta to old pizza. 

• Standing vs. occurrent 

Propositional attitudes--beliefs and desires and other states are attributed with a that-clause. She believes THAT it is raining.

Most propositiional attributions are "opaque"--coreferential terms are not interchangeable inside the that-clause

1. Lois believes that Superman is brave. (true)
2. Lois believes that Clark Kent is brave. (false) 

            There is also a referentially transparent way of talking about beliefs.

1. Lois believes, of Superman, that he is brave. (true)
2. Lois believes, of Clark Kent, that he is brave. (true)

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Steven Stich, "Do Animals Have Beliefs?"

1. Of course animals have beliefs and desires
2. Of course animals don't have beliefs

Why think 2? Because there is no way to characterize the contents of their beliefs

Fido is digging in the backyard because he desires a meaty bone and believes that his human buried a bone in the backyard.

What is the right way out of this dilemma?

1. Armstrong's way out. Transparent attributions.  
• Fido believes there's a bone in the backyard ==>
• Fido believes, of the bone and the backyard, that IT is THERE.
• Stich: this trick won't always work.
• Fido believes that his food is disgusting.
2. Concept psychology way out.  
• Fido believes that the bone is in the backyard ==>
• Fido believes there is something with properties A, B, C, D, E, F...in something with properties G, H, I, J, K.
3. Stich's way out.  Animals have representations that are belief-like, but aren't beliefs.

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Next week: social animals, social skills

• Knowing social status of self and others
• Imitation
• Culture
• Mind reading

How do social animals comprehend their own social status in a hierarchical society?

1. Do they think about social status? Do they have beliefs about it?
2. More important: how do they represent the information they use?

Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics (chapter assigned for next week)

Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of Social Mind from Penn Arts & Sciences on Vimeo.

What do baboons know?

• They know about the dominance relationships in the diagram below (from Andrews)

• They can reason: IF D12 defeats B4, then D13 has higher status than B5

How do they represent this knowledge?

1. Seyfarth and Cheney: with the sentences of a language of thought
2. Elisabeth Camp: better to say they have diagrams
• diagrams are domain specific
• this accounts for the fact that they can reason like this ONLY about dominance hierarchies