Phenomenology and the Problem of Animal Minds

2015

The minds of animals has been an abiding topic in philosophy since its earliest beginnings. Some may find this surprising. After all, a fairly common picture of the philosopher is someone (in a darkened study) ruminating on the nature of the human mind, or on the mind of God, or on some other abstruse idea, but certainly not on the minds of cats, dogs, and honeybees. As common as this picture may be, however, it does not paint an entirely accurate portrait. Philosophers have thought long and hard about the minds of animals and have held and defended significant and influential views on the topic. Moreover, in the past ten years or so there has been an unprecedented amount of interest among philosophers in animal minds, with numerous publications and conferences dedicated to the subject. The level of interest and publication has reached a critical mass and has sustained itself long enough that it is now appropriate to say that the philosophy of animal minds is a field in its own righ...

"The philosophy of non-human animal mind (henceforth “animal”) can be understood as a methodological reflection guided by the following metaphysical questions: (1) Is there an animal mind? If the answer to (1) is no, then we can stop our reflection. If the answer is yes, then a further question arises naturally: (2) What kind of mind do they have? Is their mind in some sense similar to or different from the human mind? In the current discussion the two competing models are the language-of-thought hypothesis and the iconic-thought hypothesis. A third question also addressed in this book is (3): Are animals endowed with the capacities of mindreading, metacognition, self-consciousness and emotion? http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=5574&cn=394"

This volume collects 49 original essays that provide opinionated introductions to a variety of philosophical topics concerning (nonhuman) animal minds. The essays are written by established or emerging leaders in the field, and yet are accessible to newcomers who have some experience with philosophical writing. As the volume provides a broad snapshot of the state of the art in the philosophy of animal minds, our expectation is that it will also serve as a useful reference work for more seasoned scholars.

2009

This paper considers the question of whether the Theory Theory of Mind should be welcomed by those who take seriously the existence of animal minds other than human. TToM appears friendly to the notion of animal minds because it allows mental states to enter into its explanations of animal behaviour. However, the authors argue that, at a deeper level, the theory is inimical to the notion of animal minds and that it should be treated with suspicion by those who want to change the climate of thinking about the character of minds other than our own. The authors provide some suggestions towards an alternative approach, rooted in the methodologies of Ethology and test this account against serious arguments in the philosophy of mind which contend that animals cannot be mindful in a genuine sense. The conclusion is that TToM must be rejected, and the alternative ethological approach embraced, if we are ever to take seriously the reality of other minds in a shared world.

Phenomenology and the Non-Human Animal: At the Limits of Experience, 2007

As Max Horkheimer wrote sixty years ago, Modern insensitivity to nature is indeed only a variation of the pragmatic attitude that is typical of Western Civilization as a whole. Only the forms are different.

Biology and Philosophy, 2004

The Journal of Ethics, 2007

Although 20 th -century empiricists were agnostic about animal mind and consciousness, this was not the case for their historical ancestorsthe dominance of the Darwinian paradigm of evolutionary continuity, one would not expect belief in animal mind to disappear. That it did demonstrates that standard accounts of how scientific hypotheses are overturned -i.e., by empirical disconfirmation or by exposure of logical flaws -is inadequate. In fact, it can be demonstrated that belief in animal mind disappeared as a result of a change of values, a mechanism also apparent in the Scientific Revolution. The ''valuational revolution'' responsible for denying animal mind is examined in terms of the rise of Behaviorism and its flawed account of the historical inevitability of denying animal mentation. The effects of the denial of animal consciousness included profound moral implications for the major uses of animals in agriculture and scientific research. The latter is particularly notable for the denial of felt pain in animals. The rise of societal moral concern for animals, however, has driven the ''reappropriation of common sense'' about animal thought and feeling.

Animal people are usually confident that Cartesianism is something of the past and that modern science clearly establishes that animals are sentient beings. But actually the scientific status of sentience is anything but firmly established. Not only is the subjective point of view absent from current science; it is precluded by construction from our fundamental realms of knowledge. Physics — the mother-science once we reject Cartesian dualism — is currently unable to include sentience in its account of the world. A large part of the philosophy of mind describes a mindless mind, from which subjectivity — feeling, qualia — has been stripped, leaving only in place functional relations. This situation paves the way for discourses in which sentience seems to escape the realm of knowledge to fall into that of private beliefs, which individuals can choose as freely as their religion. This is a real obstacle to having animal sentience taken seriously; as such it has been largely underestimated. We believe it necessary for the movement for animals to understand that it cannot by-pass the “mind-matter” problem. We must not allow the existence and relevance of animal sentience to be denied in the name of science. One path we are contemplating is a “Declaration on Sentience” in which scientists and other thinkers would subscribe to the following assertion: sentience is an objective reality of the world and belongs to the realm of science. Despite the current intractability of the “mind-matter” problem, we do have something on our side. Although we cannot prove the reality of sentience, we can show it impossible for anyone to disbelieve in it — just as no one can really disbelieve in the reality of the physical world. We thus have enough reasons to reject the main ways in which sentience is denied or dismissed in many realms of current philosophy or science. These reasons are based on our own situation as sentient and deliberative beings.

Relations

Are animals capable of empathy, problem-solving, or even self-recognition? Much research is dedicated to answering these questions and yet few studies have considered how humans form beliefs about animal minds. Evidence suggests that our mentalising of animals is a natural consequence of Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities. However, where beliefs regarding animal mind have been investigated, there has been slow progress in establishing the mechanism underpinning how this is achieved. Here, we consider what conclusions can be drawn regarding how people theorise about animal minds and the different conceptual and methodological issues that might limit the accuracy of conclusions currently drawn from this work. We suggest a new empirical framework for better capturing the human theory of animal mind, which in turn has significant political and social implications.