WORKSHOP 1: Kristin Andrews:
(Tuesday, June 26, 7:30pm)
Mind-reading, or the ability to attribute mental states to others, is a familiar and significant ability for adult humans, and the investigation into whether humans are alone in this capacity has been a vexed topic over the last forty years. There are three key complexities to the investigation: one, there are a host of different kinds of content that could be mind-read (e.g. perceptual states, emotions, beliefs); two, there are a host of different kinds of methods for coming to learn about others’ mental content (e.g. perception, cognitive attribution, mirroring plus interoception); three, we lack a good understanding of these capacities in humans, and false assumptions can lead the investigation into animal mind-reading astray. With these complexities on the table, we can turn to the recent research suggesting that great apes attribute false belief to others (Krupenye et al. 2016; Buttelmann et al. 2017). I will argue that these studies do not provide converging evidence that apes have the concept of belief or can attribute belief to others, and that likewise the infant studies that these experiments are based on fail to offer evidence of belief attribution, at least on familiar representational accounts of what a belief is. I will present an alternative function for belief attribution, namely, the explanation of anomalous behavior. I’ll discuss the extent to which other species might have this capacity, and what sorts of studies we could do in order to better investigate the question of mind-reading belief across species. I will also discuss the importance of looking at the ways different species may solve their own versions of the other minds problem.
Andrews, K., & Huss, B. (2014). Anthropomorphism, anthropectomy, and the null hypothesis. Biology & Philosophy, 29(5), 711-729.
Andrews, K., & Gruen, L. (2014). Empathy in other apes.
Andrews, K., & Radenovic, L. (2008). Animal cognition. The International Encyclopedia of Ethics.
Andrews, K., Crozier, G., Donaldson, S., Fenton, A., Johnson, L. S. M., Jones, R., ... & Rocha, J. (2018). The Philosophers' Brief on Chimpanzee Personhood.
Domes, G., Heinrichs, M., Michel, A., Berger, C., & Herpertz, S. C. (2007). Oxytocin improves “mind-reading” in humans. Biological Psychiatry, 61(6), 731-733.
In this session, the ethical problem with giving more important ethical responsibility of humans to non-human animals who are more intelligent than others was raised, with the argument that the individuals most in need of care and towards whom we have the greatest ethical responsibility are often those individuals who are not intelligent or are unable to demonstrate their intelligence.
ReplyDeleteWhile Andrews says that only consciousness (and perhaps not even consciousness) would be a requirement for some sort of ethical responsibility towards non-human animals, I was wondering exactly what the role of intelligence is in her evaluation of the ethical responsibility of human animals towards non-human animals, as I felt it was left somewhat unclear.
I was also wondering how this plays into the Aristotelian distinction between basal instincts and the higher faculty of reason or understanding. Is the distinction between humans as "rational animals" and non-human animals functioning in an implicit way in the false-belief investigation?
Hi Jeremy,
DeleteI'm not sure what is necessary for moral considerability, since lots of non-persons might be morally considerable (e.g. works of art, ecosystems, cultures, etc.). I discussed one sufficient property for moral considerability--personhood--which I think is a cluster concept that consists of a number of properties, including consciousness and autonomy.
When we turn to talk about other cognitive faculties, such as the ability to attribute beliefs to others, the moral upshot is that we may harm animals differently given these cognitive abilities. For an animal who cares about how others think about them, for example, we should be careful when doing playback experiments using that animal's alarm cry in a way that might undermine their reputation. In order to know what matters to an animal, we need to know what sorts of things that animal can consider.
Despite the evidence that we get from comparative neurobiology and cognitives sciences, if their is still a reasonable doubt about the sentience of some species, the best bet would not be anyway to assume that they are sentient? Using some kind of "precautionary principle", we do not need anymore to break our solipsism to adjudicate the legitimacy of a moral consideration about a given species, whether or not they really are sentient at the end.
ReplyDeleteSteven, near the very end, when you mentioned the word "ouch" I understood from it that you meant we should focus more on the ridiculous amount of slaughtering going on worldwide (and even more urgently on the atrocious way it's more than often being done), daily, and less on questions like whether pets should be given citizenship... and other much more trivial matters of that sort. Did I get that right or am I overinterpreting?
ReplyDeleteIf I understood the explanation M. Harnad gave, I think this syllable doesn’t only include physical pain, but psychological pain also (like animals in cages, separated from their babies, etc.). The slaughtering of animals sure is an important topic, but we shouldn’t minimize the way animals feel and how deprivation and imprisonment is a form of cruelty.
Delete"Ouch" includes all forms of harm and suffering.
DeleteYes, causing gratuitous suffering (not necessary for human survival and health) is the worst.
As a philosophy undergrad, I would love to know Ms. Andrews thoughts on Ludwig Wittgenstein's infamous quote "If a lion could talk, we would not understand him". As a sort of crossover between philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, does this statement makes sense when talking about animals? Is language an epistemological limitation when trying to understand other life forms? Was Wittgenstein right or wrong? Thank you for your input!
ReplyDeleteAs I read Wittgenstein on this point, we might not share concepts with the lion, because our forms of life might be very different. I am not a pessimistic as W about how much we differ from lions. We share an evolutionary history, a mammalian physiology, a set of sensory systems, sociality, and probably more. We can approximate what a lion might be thinking, and translate what a lion might be saying, as we translate vervet monkey alarm calls and ape gestures--and other human languages.
DeleteInteresting! Though I unfortunately couldn't find the original quote. Some sites claim he said "couldn't" rather than "wouldn't". Supposing that he really went with "wouldn't" as you quoted, instead of "couldn't", then it seems far more prudent... and even compatible with Kristin Andrews's view. Yet at the same time, it also sounds to me like he's just stating the obvious... a bit like saying "if aliens came to Earth, we would not understand them". Probably not the most "profound" statement to make? Of course at first we wouldn't... but supposing these aliens are peaceful and well intentionned enough, I'm confident that we'd inevitably figure out a way to decrypt their efforts at communicating, and same goes for those hypothetical talking lions.
DeleteIf a lion could talk, we could understand everything he said. That is because of the nature of language, not our nature or the lion's.
DeleteAll languages are intertranslatable. There are no languages in which you can say this but not that (if you can say anything at all).
W might have meant that we could not understand what another species was feeling (as with the bat) but even there, language could approximate it, as in talking about what things look like to someone who is congenitally blind.
So it is the counterfactual premise "If a lion could speak" that is problematic: Into counterfactual suppositions one can project any conclusion or its opposite.
Votre soussignée est maître en droit, ayant également réalisé d'autres études de 2e cycle en bioéthique. À ce titre, je ne peux m'empêcher de souligner un malentendu important entre philosophes et juristes. Le concept de personne réfère essentiellement au concept de personnalité juridique. En voulant attribuer un statut de personne non-humaine à certaines espèces animales en fonction de la possession de certains attributs cognitifs et culturels, les philosophes ne réalisent pas assez selon moi le caractère utopique du volume de travail juridique que ce statut impliquerait sans que nous n'ayons pour autant plus de résultats significatifs. En pratique, il est irréaliste de penser qu'un état pourrait rédiger, appliquer et sanctionner de façon effective un code civil, déontologique et criminel propre à chaque espèce, ou même à un groupe d'espèces, selon son degré de cognition sur un continuum. Nous pourrions cependant concevoir plusieurs façons d'assurer une protection souple, personnalisée et effective des espèces animales via un principe moral légalisé et rédigé en termes larges tel que par ex. ceux la loi BÊSA au Québec. À titre de juriste, les débats sur la personnalité juridique non-humaine m'ont toujours semblé artificiels. Nous risquerions ainsi de soumettre, et même de limiter, à des règles déontologiques ce qui devrait ne relever que de l'éthique pure. La seule question à se poser pour considérer l'être vivant de ce point de vue est: Peut-il souffrir? À ce titre, j'adhère à 100% au point de vue souvent exprimé par le Dr Harnad (principe du "Ouch!").
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ReplyDeleteThank you very much for the talk, it was very interesting.
ReplyDeleteIn human studies, Schulte-Rüther, Markowitsch, Fink, and Piefke (2007) found a significant correlation between the neural substrate of Theory of Mind and Empathy. Could the fact that empathy related behavior has been observed in many non human mammal species (de Waal & Preston, 2017) be an indicator of the presence of theory of mind in those mammals (or any other animal species)?
de Waal, F. B. M., & Preston, S. D. (2017). Mammalian empathy: behavioural manifestations and neural basis. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 18, 498. doi:10.1038/nrn.2017.72
Schulte-Rüther, M., Markowitsch, H. J., Fink, G. R., & Piefke, M. (2007). Mirror neuron and theory of mind mechanisms involved in face-to-face interactions: a functional magnetic resonance imaging approach to empathy. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 19(8), 1354-1372.
Hi, Kristin! I think your concept of "intersubjectivity" is decisive for your argumentation, and if it is defined
ReplyDeleteas "psychological relations between individuals", can it be directly matched to the markers of intersubjectivity observed and measured by scientists?
In relation to the summer school question, what do other animals feel...
ReplyDeleteI know how I feel, and think and assume fellow humans have similar experiences. But I can not imagine what it would be like to function with half of my brain active, while the other half would be asleep!
When considering that dolphins do that without any problems, does this mean that they really only need half of their brain to function adequately or that they give up something when they are not using it all?
Does this mean that when they are using only half their brain, they are half as sentient as when it is all active?