The Animal Mind

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal Cognition

Kristin Andrews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351362962
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

The philosophy of animal minds addresses profound questions about the nature of mind and the relationships between humans and other animals.

In this fully revised and updated introductory text, Kristin Andrews introduces and assesses the essential topics, problems, and debates as they cut across animal cognition and philosophy of mind, citing historical and cutting-edge empirical data and case studies throughout.

The second edition includes a new chapter on animal culture. There are also new sections on the evolution of consciousness and tool use in animals, as well as substantially revised sections on mental representation, belief, communication, theory of mind, animal ethics, and moral psychology.

Further features such as chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary make The Animal Mind an indispensable introduction to those teaching philosophy of mind, philosophy of animal minds or animal cognition. It will also be an excellent resource for those in fields such as ethology, biology, and psychology.

1

Other minds

Close your eyes, and reach for an object in front of you. Now open your eyes, and try to identify which object you touched. Easy, right? For human adults, cross-modal perception between the visual and tactile senses is natural. It’s even easy for human infants, who at one month can select a picture of a pacifier after having blindly sucked on one. Chimpanzees can also easily match objects they have touched with objects that they see. Dolphins, however, don’t appear to use their tactile sense to recognize objects (though it is very important to their social interactions), and so we shouldn’t expect dolphins to have such an easy time with this kind of cross-modal perception. Should we conclude then that dolphins lack cross-modal perception? That would be hasty. Dolphins are different from humans and chimpanzees in interesting ways. For one, dolphins use echolocation to perceive the physical world in the water (their echolocation doesn’t work in the air). Scientists have found that dolphins who echolocate on a strange shape hidden behind a screen under water will then select that object from an array when it is held in the air so they can see it (Pack and Herman 1995). The lesson is humans, chimpanzees, and dolphins all have cross-modal perception, but scientists need to use different kinds of experiments to show this given the three species’ differences in biology and ecology.

Animals clearly think and feel—after all, we are animals, and we think and feel. Members of the human species are minded beings, and if members of other species are minded beings too (and I will soon argue that they are), we should expect to see similarities as well as differences between different species of mind, given our biological and ecological differences. We shouldn’t be too surprised to find that other species can do things we can’t. For example, elephants can smell differences in quantity (Plotnik et al. 2019). Dogs, who also have excellent olfactory abilities, could be fruitfully tested using the same methods. Humans, who don’t, would likely be poor subjects in such a study.

Despite the title of this book, there is no such thing as the animal mind. There isn’t even such a thing as the human mind, given arguments for human neurodiversity and brain plasticity. Neurodiversity is the idea that the differences in neural function between humans reflect a natural variation in the species. For example, having autism is one natural way of being a minded human. Plasticity is the idea that the brain changes during development and in response to trauma, and that the functions of different brain areas can change over time. These observations show us that there is no one, right way of being minded.

Another problem with the title of the book is that there might not even be such an object as the mind. Rather than being a noun, what we identify as mentality might be a property of living systems or of complex machines, or it might be a process—being minded is a doing, not merely a having. To reflect this possibility, I will be speaking of individuals or species as being minded, rather than as having a mind.

Different animal species have different biological, environmental, social, and morphological features, and these differences help shape the different ways animals are minded. Cephalopods such as octopuses with neurons in their tentacles might have cognitive systems that are more distributed than the cognitive systems of some other animals (though the discovery of the human “gut brain”—the neurons in the stomach—and the observation that the nervous system extends throughout the body might lead you to make similar inferences about the human cognitive system). This physiological fact about the octopus can be used to develop hypotheses about how an octopus is minded. For example, maybe an octopus is multiply minded, and can split attention between the central body and the legs when solving certain tasks. Peter Godfrey-Smith describes what an octopus might be doing when navigating a transparent maze to reach food:

To solve the problem the octopus had to guide its arm through the maze with vision. Although it took a while, all but one of the octopuses in the experiment learned to get an arm through to the food. The study also noted, though, that when octopuses are doing well with this task, the arm finding the food does what looks like its own local exploration at various stages, crawling and feeling around. There may be a mixture of two forms of control here: central control of the arm’s general path and fine-tuning of the search by the arm itself. Another possibility is that, by means of attention of some kind, the octopus is exerting control over all the details of movements that might usually be more autonomous.

(Godfrey-Smith 2013)

Cetaceans—whales and dolphins—may have very different mental capacities given their unique sensory modality of echolocation. Given these special abilities, some have argued that cetacean minds are quite different from human minds and cephalopod minds. Thomas White argues that the dolphin’s ability to echolocate on other dolphins allows them to observe others dolphins’ physiology and to be directly affected by that physiology in a special way that might indicate a kind of group mentality (White 2007). If cetacean groups are minded, that might help us make sense of cetacean behaviors such as group beachings, which happens when multiple whales or dolphins leave the water and become stranded on a beach, often leading to their deaths. The biologists¹ Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell have observed whales beaching themselves after one of their group members was accidentally beached; they describe this behavior as a kind of group solidarity in which individual interests are subjugated for the group (Whitehead and Rendell 2014). White’s hypothesis suggests that the group may comprise a larger minded being, and that the individuals would rather die with the group mind than survive without the rest of their self.

Thomas Nagel famously argued that we can’t know what it’s like to be a bat because humans are so different from bats both physically and socially, and the best we can do is to imagine what it would be like for us to be bat-like (Nagel 1974). However, while animal species are clearly different from one another in some ways, in other ways they are quite similar. For example, we can categorize animals into social and solitary species. Sociality is a difference between some animal species that may impact their cognitive processes. Animals who live in complex social societies have both a social world and an ecological world to navigate. In order to keep track of those complex worlds, social species’ cognitive capacities must have evolved in ways that allow them to handle a larger degree of complexity than species who inhabit a primarily ecological world. Consider baboon communities. Most baboon species live in troops with a largely stable female hierarchy, and a more flexible male dominance hierarchy. Because these hierarchies are linear, any change in dominance between two individuals affects the status of the other individuals in the group, and when there is a rank reversal in the female line, the relatives of the baboon who lost status are also demoted, and the entire line is revised. In order to keep track of fluid changes in social status and understand who can do what given their current standing, baboons have to handle quite a bit of information, suggesting that baboons require more complex cognition than if their social lives were more simply structured.

Another way to investigate the similarities and differences between species is to examine individuals’ development. We can examine the similarities and differences between the early development of humans and other apes and, for example, find that infant chimpanzees will engage in neonatal imitation just as some human children do (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 A human infant (Meltzoff and Moore 1977) and a chimpanzee infant (Myowa-Yamakoshi et al. 2004) imitate an adult human who is protruding her tongue, opening her mouth, and pursing her lips.

If humans and chimpanzees engage in the same kind of social behavior early in infancy, yet diverge in social behavior later in life, we can examine intervening stages of social development in order to determine what might lead to the differences we see in adults.

Furthermore, while there are differences between species, differences between groups of species, and differences between stages of development, there can also be differences between individuals. Just as humans vary in our cognitive skills, our emotional intelligence, our personalities, etc., we can hypothesize that there are similar kinds of individual differences between individuals in other animal species.

So while we shouldn’t expect that there is any such thing as the animal mind, there certainly may be a variety of kinds of ways of being minded that are in some ways interestingly similar, and in other ways intriguingly different. To best understand how animals are minded, we need to ask about both similarities and differences between species.

In this chapter, we will cover three topics. First, we will briefly go over different philosophical theories about the nature of mind and mentality. For those of you who have a background in the philosophy of mind, this review should be familiar. For those of you who don’t have such a background, it will help to introduce you to the perspectives that philosophers bring to the table when studying animal minds and psychological capacities more generally. Next, we will take a brief stroll through history to see how some of the key figures in philosophy thought about animal minds. Finally, we turn to do some philosophical work and examine a classic problem in philosophy—the problem of other minds. This problem raises the question of whether we are justified in presuming that other humans have minds, since we can only observe others’ behaviors. Thankfully, there are multiple justifications for our belief in other human minds. Our work will be to examine whether we are justified in presuming that other animals have minds, too.

1.1 What we talk about when we talk about mind

Before we start investigating animal minds, we should probably try to get a handle on what we’re talking about. In one sense, we all know what is meant by mind. When we turn our attention toward our own mental lives, what is perhaps most evident is the phenomenal, or experiential, or sentient, aspect—the experience of the conscious mind which can feel (e.g. itchy), taste (e.g. salty), crave (e.g. affection), and pay attention (e.g., to music). When we look past the phenomenal aspects of mind, we can also see that there is a relationship between being minded and engaging in action—we can mentally do things, visible as behavior and invisible as thought. We remember, analyze, form associations, wonder, learn, perceive, and decide. An amazing feature of our mental processing is that it displays a reason-respecting flow. Even after a long bout of daydreaming, we can retrace our thoughts to figure out how we got to the last idea.

But in another sense, mind is mysterious to us. Mind doesn’t seem to be like a tree or a mountain, something we can touch or see—which makes thinking about the mind as an object especially puzzling. We can wonder whether the people around us are really minded, or whether they just act like they are. Furthermore, we don’t always have conscious experience of our own reasoning or sensory processes. We engage in automatic driving, tooth brushing, dish washing, and other habitual behaviors without always having any feeling of what is going on. We can’t remember whether we turned off the stove before leaving the house. We are often influenced by stimuli that we are unaware of, being generous because of the sunny weather or selfish because we feel rushed; people are more likely to pick up hitchhikers on sunny days than on cloudy days (Guéguen and Stefan 2013), and seminary students not in a rush are more likely to stop and help a person in need (Darley and Batson 1973). Because we don’t always realize what influences our actions, we are sometimes wrong about the causes of our own behaviors. We make errors. These are also things we mentally do. Mind is rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious; it remembers and forgets.

In the metaphysics of mind, philosophers investigate the nature of mental states and processes, and form theories about the relationship between mentality and physicality. One way of dividing up these theories is between dualists and monists.

Dualists think that the mental and the physical are two equally real and autonomous domains. We can identify two kinds of dualists. Substance dualists such as René Descartes take the mind to be an object made of mental stuff and the body (including the brain) to be an object made out of physical stuff. Property dualists think that there is only physical stuff, but think that objects can have two different kinds of attributes, physical ones such as shape an...