Think Twice, It's All Right: Animalism, Disunity and the Self

This essay analyzes how the Modularity of Mind impacts the anthrozoological argument that non-human animals are persons. Comparative research on human and animal minds suggests that human and other-than-human minds differ in their mental architecture such that animal cognition is largely modular whereas human thought fluidly integrates contents across modules. If animal minds are modular, then the idea of non-human personhood is challenged. Specifically, an animal with a modularized mind would not be one person facing the world and reflecting on itself in an integral manner, but would be an individual made of many persons: The animal would experience one reality and one self pertaining to each module (or partly-integrated domain of thought) and thus “be“ one distinct person in each of these worlds. Yet, within the framework of human-animal encounters, animal personhood can be meaningfully construed despite modularity of animal minds. On this account, animal personhood is conceived by virtue of the human ability to meta-integrate mental contents: The human mind meta-integrates the animal mind's modularized experience for the animal. Thus, in human-animal interactions, humans face the animal as a functional whole, as an integral animal person.

2016

I am enormously grateful to all those who took the time to respond to my target article Are animals persons? These responses of mine are offered in this spirit of gratitude. While I find myself in agreement with many of the commentators, various areas of disagreement undoubtedly exist, and I am delighted to have this opportunity to clarify or reinforce my position. I have organized my comments by way of certain prevailing themes that emerged in the respondents' comments rather than on a respondent-by-respondent basis. To begin, let me recap some of the central ideas of the paper. First, there are three common assumptions – one of which I accept, the other two I challenge. 1. A person, I accept for the sake of argument, is a unified mental life. This assumption is contestable. On the one hand, there are those who think a person is not an essentially psychological entity at all, but a physical entity. Such a person, however, is far less likely to be hostile to the idea that animals are persons. On the other hand, there are those (e.g. Parfit 1984) who think that having unified mental life is not sufficient for being a person. This latter position is beyond the scope of the paper, and I merely note this and move on. The core of the paper concerns self-awareness rather than personhood as such. 2. It is common to assume that unity is something added to a mental life. On the one hand there is a mental life – a succession of thoughts, feelings, emotions and the like. On the other, there is the question of whether this succession of thoughts, feelings and emotions forms a unified whole. There could be a mental life that was merely a jumble of disassociated mental states. For a mental life to be unified, something extra must be added, over and above the mere presence of mental states and processes. 3. The additional element, it is equally common to assume, is provided by reflective self-awareness. When someone is reflectively self-aware, she has a mental state that is either about (1) herself, (2) a bodily state of hers, or (3) another mental state of hers. Herself, the bodily state or the mental state is the intentional object of her mental state. For example, if I think I'm getting old, that my knees are not what they used to be, or that I am in pain, I am reflectively self-aware. Crucial to reflective self-awareness is the existence of an intentional state that is directed towards the person, or some or other facet of the person, who has it. When Locke says that a person is able to consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing from one time to another, it is tempting (and common) to understand Locke's claim as one of reflective self-awareness: a person is able to think of itself as itself, etc.

Qualitative Sociology Review , 2007

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Although questions about nonhuman animal mind and selfhood have been a long-standing interest of philosophers, psychologists, biologists, and cognitive ethologists, sociologists have been reluctant to acknowledge the importance of such questions. This is due, in part, to George Herbert Mead's denial of consciousness, especially self-consciousness, in animals. Indeed, the exclusion of nonhuman consciousness was a fundamental axiom of Mead's very conceptions of mind and self. However, recently a growing number symbolic interactionists have begun to build a body of research that demands a reconsideration of Mead's anthropocentric and phonocentric definitions of mind, self, and the nonhuman participants who cohabit the everyday world of social life AU :2 . Here we provide a brief account of their work and present evidence from evolutionary biology, cognitive 1 3 5 7 467 ethology, and neuroscience that strongly validates their contention that the processes of consciousness and self, which constitute the cornerstone of meaningful social action and interaction, can no longer be denied to several species of nonhuman animals.

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Analytic Philosophy, 2023

Various cases of conjoined twinning have been presented as problems for the animalist view that we are animals. In some actual and possible cases of human dicephalus that have been discussed in the literature, it is arguable that there are two persons but only one human animal. It is also tempting to believe that there are two persons and one animal in possible instances of craniopagus parasiticus that have been described. Here it is argued that the animalist can admit that these are cases in which human persons are not animals, without forfeiting the title “animalist.” It is also shown that this is not only an option but also a well-motivated and plausible option for the animalist. Seeing this requires getting clear on what the word “we” should be thought to include in the animalist's claim that we are animals. Here animalism is defended against twinning objections by figuring out how to view the scope of the animalist's identity claim.

Animalism claims that we are 'animals', i.e. biological organisms of the primate species Homo sapiens. If there is a case in which the number of persons differs from the number of organisms, then animalism is false. Timothy Campbell and Jeff McMahan [2] hold that there are, at least, two such cases: the dicephalus and the cephalopagus conjoined twinning cases. Recently, Eric Olson [7] argued that either Campbell and McMahan's arguments assume the point at issue, rely on undefended assumptions, or constitute paradigmatic anti-animalist claims. After characterising animalism, we address Campbell and McMahan's arguments and

The view known as “animalism” asserts that we are human organisms—that each of us is an instance of the Homo sapiens species. The standard argument for this view is known as the “thinking animal argument.” Here I offer a second argument for animalism: the “animal ancestors argument.” This argument illustrates how the case for animalism can be seen as piggybacking on the credibility of evolutionary theory. Two related objections are considered and answered.