## 1. What is Animal Cognition?



Cognition is often understood to be what permits flexible
goal-oriented behavior through information processing. Comparative
cognition research examines which animal behaviors are cognitive, and
what sort of cognitive mechanisms or processes permit that behavior.
Questions include: What sort of representations do animals need to
solve particular tasks; do they have mental maps, metacognition, or
number concepts? How do animals learn; do they only have associative
learning processes, or do they also learn through trial-and-error,
play, insight, or social imitation? How do animals solve problems; do
they engage in logical reasoning, causal reasoning, future planning?
Philosophers take up these questions, and complement them with
questions of their own, such as: Do animals have beliefs? Which
animals are conscious? What is the relationship between language and
thought? Are animals rational? Answering any of these questions
requires both scientific investigation into the phenomenon and
conceptual analysis of the psychological property at stake. The
philosophy of animal minds promises to help us gain a deeper
understanding of familiar concepts by exploring them in a new and
sometimes foreign context--in the lives and communities of other
species.



Videos of animals engaged in surprising behaviors, such as an
orangutan washing clothes and sawing wood or a dog using buttons to
"speak" (see
 Other Internet Resources),
 might suggest that these animals are smart or intelligent. The idea
that some animals are smarter than others might also lead you to
expect that research in animal cognition focuses on animals such as
chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, dogs, or ravens--all species
that often make the news with reports of their amazing abilities. But
animal cognition research is just as interested in research on worms,
honeybees, snakes, stickleback fish, chickadees, and spiders, though
there remains quite a bit of cognition research on the behaviorist
standbys of pigeons and rats.



Furthermore, animal cognition research tends to eschew questions of
which animals are smarter than others, focusing instead on more
specific questions like the ones above. Scientists often say that they
are more interested in how well an animal evolved to thrive in their
environment, rather than in how smart they are. This way of thinking
about intelligence makes comparing intelligence between species moot
(though it is a topic that is largely unexplored by philosophers of
animal minds).



Contemporary research in animal cognition has as its roots Charles
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, and
Darwin's thesis of the continuity of the mental across
species:



> 
> 
> the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it
> is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. (Darwin 1874: 126,
> with a minor variation 1871: 105)
> 
> 
> 



In *On the Origin of Species* (1859), he avoided comparing
humans with other animals, as well as foregoing any discussion of the
evolution of psychological capacities. In his follow up book, *The
Descent of Man* (1871 [second edition 1874]), Darwin turned to
compare the psychological capacities across species. In introducing
Chapter 3 (chapter 2 in the first edition), he wrote:



> 
> 
> If no organic being excepting man had possessed any mental power, or
> if his powers had been of a wholly different nature from those of the
> lower animals, then we should never have been able to convince
> ourselves that our high faculties had been gradually developed. But it
> can be shewn that there is no fundamental difference of this kind. We
> must also admit that there is a much wider interval in mental power
> between one of the lowest fishes, as a lamprey or lancelet, and one of
> the higher apes, than between an ape and man; yet this interval is
> filled up by numberless gradations. (Darwin 1874: 65, with a couple of
> minor variations 1871: 34-35).
> 
> 
> 



Darwin's talk of higher and lower suggests that some animals are
less intelligent than others, and that humans, with our advanced
mental powers, are on top. But that interpretation is in contrast with
how comparative psychologists like to think about animals, as
different rather than as higher or lower. Furthermore, in *The
Origin* Darwin insisted that evolution by natural selection is
non-hierarchical--just changes in response to the environment
rather than a gradual improvement from lower to higher beings.



While Darwin is known for his thesis that there is continuity between
humans and other animals in their morphological and psychological
properties, one might be forgiven for thinking that Darwin was
sometimes overly hasty in ascribing some human properties to animals.
In *The Descent*, Darwin discusses cases of horses and dogs who
are ill-tempered and sulky, a baboon and a dog who recognized friendly
people after years apart, dreaming canaries, elephants who blow on
out-of-reach objects to bring them closer, a bear who pawed the water
to draw in a floating object, a monkey who kept a stone hidden in his
bedding that he used to crack nuts, and female birds who are attracted
to male songs and bright colors. Darwin takes these cases to suggest
animal emotion, memory, imagination, reason, property, and aesthetic
sensibility.



The theory of evolution by natural selection suggests that there will
be differences as well as similarities across species. Just as
Darwin's finches have different beak shapes depending on the
food available on their island, psychological difference should be
expected given different environmental pressures. Thus, a Darwinian
approach to animal cognition will emphasize differences as well as
similarities. Problems arise when the focus is only on questions about
similarities without also attending to questions about differences,
and vice versa, as we will see in
 section 2.



While Darwin may be seen as the progenitor of modern animal cognition
research, many other scientists have played a role, leading to the
vibrant interdisciplinary research we see today. Learning theorists
who look carefully at the mechanisms that lead to acquiring new
knowledge arose from the behaviorist methods of John Watson and B.F.
Skinner. Field researchers owe much to the classical ethologists
Nikolaas Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz, and Karl von Frisch. Considerations
of animal culture found their own progenitor in the work of ecologist
and anthropologist Kinji Imanishi, who saw social transmission in
animals as the same process that supports human cultural learning. The
idea of creating puzzles for animals to solve can be traced back to
psychologist Edward Thorndike's puzzle boxes for cats. The
rejuvenation of interest in animal consciousness finds an early
defense in psychologist Margaret Floy Washburn, whose textbook *The
Animal Mind: A Text-book of Comparative Psychology* (1908) was
widely used in psychology for the first third of the twentieth
century. The interface between psychology, anthropology, and biology
is where most of the research in animal cognition can be found
today.



Comparative cognition is the scientific study of animal cognitive
capacities that recognizes humans as animals and acknowledges that all
animals are evolved biological organisms. It also recognizes that
there are species-specific capacities as well as individual
differences, and that these capacities are a part of the natural world
that can be studied using familiar scientific methods. Animal
cognition focuses on capacities and psychological states that are
causally effective in behavior, and thus the study of animal cognition
can be understood broadly to include all topics that philosophers
cover under the notion of mind.



For some, the current philosophical interest in comparative cognition
was inspired by series of books written by zoologist Donald Griffin
arguing for animal thinking and animal consciousness (Griffin 1976
[1981], 1985, 1992 [2001]), topics that were not at the time taken up
by scientists. Collaborations between scientists and philosophers
provided a rich environment for initial work on these issues. Notably,
in philosopher Colin Allen and biologist Marc Bekoff's book
*Species of Mind: The Philosophy and Biology of Cognitive
Ethology* (1997), the interdisciplinary team introduced many
issues arising in the science of animal minds to the broader
philosophical community.



Philosophers of animal minds are sometimes interested in epistemic
virtues related to how the claims of the science are generated and
justified, and whether the concepts being used in scientific studies
are reasonable. Philosophers of animal minds are also sometimes
interested in how the findings of scientific studies can serve as
premises in philosophical arguments. In the remainder of this entry we
will explore both of these aspects.


## 2. Philosophical Assumptions in the Study of Animal Cognition



One of the ways in which philosophy connects to the study of animal
cognition has to do with the fact that, as with any science, there are
numerous philosophical assumptions embedded in the practice of
comparative cognition research. Scientists, like all humans, make
choices about how to use terms, they are swayed to formulate questions
and seek data given the values they have, they have assumptions about
the topics under study, as well as views about what makes for a
scientifically respectable interpretation of data and the virtues of a
good scientific explanation. Scientists have the goal of seeking
objectivity, but seeking objectivity can itself introduce new biases,
as we know from work in the philosophy of science on objectivity and
feminist philosophy of science. This is as true in animal cognition
research as in any other science (Andrews 2020c).



Philosophical assumptions in animal cognition research are present,
most obviously, in how the capacities under study are defined. For
instance, when scientists embark on an experimental project to
determine whether a certain species has capacities such as altruism,
cooperation, or empathy, they assume a certain definition of these
terms. These definitions are often operational, meaning that they
focus on the behavioral or physiological reactions that one would have
to see in an animal to confirm that they possess this capacity. But
even operational definitions come with philosophical baggage. For
instance, some scientists consider that finding emotional contagion in
an animal is enough to claim that that species is capable of empathy.
This presupposes that a particular philosophical account of empathy is
true, and not others. Some phenomenological accounts of empathy, for
instance, do not require emotional state-matching (Zahavi &
Overgaard 2012), and so, under these accounts, finding emotional
contagion in an animal would not suffice to claim that they are
capable of empathy.



Simply stating how one uses a particular term might seem to be good
science, for this is thought to offer clarity regarding what exactly
is being studied. Terms are often defined without any argumentation,
or simply by reproducing the definition given by another scientist or
one that is generally accepted in a certain scientific tradition.
However, different definitions come with different assumptions and
implications. They can establish which animals we study in search for
a certain capacity, the methods we use to study it, and what counts as
evidence for that capacity. Moreover, determining that an animal has
this or that capacity can have profound ethical implications, so how
we choose to use our terms is far from normatively neutral.



This discussion of how terms are used in science is a starting point
for understanding the theory-ladenness and value-ladenness of science.
Considerations from the philosophy of science can help to bring to
light how the choices scientists make impact the research. We will
next consider how value-ladenness, theory-ladenness, concerns about
objectivity, and appeals to the virtue of simplicity impact
comparative cognition research.


### 2.1 Theory-ladenness



Observations and definitions of terms can be theory-laden, in that
they depend on a set of theoretical assumptions for their
interpretation. Theory plays a role in background assumptions in
animal cognition about the continuity or discontinuity of the mental
across species, or regarding the relationship between certain
behaviors and certain capacities, or how best to get good results from
research subjects.



For example, Darwin's perception of psychological continuity
between species is an example of a theory-laden commitment that shapes
how the data is perceived. Among today's scientists, there is a
diversity of views about continuity and discontinuity. Some scientists
may be described as "romantic" because they take animals
and humans to share many psychological properties the way Darwin
described it. Other scientists may be described as
"killjoy" because they deny many human capacities to
animals. This terminology, first used by Daniel Dennett (1983), and
criticized by Sara Shettleworth (2010b), highlights an example of a
theory-laden approach to science. Attempts to avoid working from one
of these two perspectives are attempts to find objectivity, which as
we will see admits of its own challenges.



Animal cognition research can also be theory-laden within particular
research paradigms. We can look at two current examples. The
decades-long use of the false belief task as a measure for theory of
mind in children and animals can be traced back to three commentaries
on a scientific study of theory of mind (Premack & Woodruff 1978)
by philosophers Dennett (1978), Jonathan Bennett (1978), and Gilbert
Harman (1978), who first suggested this methodology. The suggestion
reflected current philosophical theorizing associated with
functionalism in the philosophy of mind, and a theory of action
according to which behaviors are caused by propositional
attitudes--beliefs and desires.



Another example is seen in research on social learning and imitation
in nonhuman great apes that is grounded in the theory that the
significant difference between humans and other animals rests on the
cumulative nature of human culture (e.g., Dennett 2017; Henrich 2016;
Heyes 2018; Sterelny 2012; Tomasello 2016). According to this theory,
humans learn cultural behavior by a process of high-fidelity imitation
in which even causally irrelevant aspects of the behavior are
copied--overimitation--and subsequent generations innovate
improvements that lead to an ever-growing technological society.
Overimitation is understood here to be a capacity towards which humans
are strongly drawn and that is thought to be driven by social factors,
such as a desire to "fit in". Great apes have been tested
for overimitation several times and scientists have failed to find
robust evidence that they overimitate (though, complicating this
story, there is evidence that chimpanzees sometimes overimitate those
with whom they have a long-term relationship (Myowa-Yamakoshi &
Matsuzawa 2000) and that domestic dogs sometimes overimitate their
human companion (Huber et al. 2018; Huber et al. 2020)). In contrast,
young children will readily overimitate the actions of selective
experimenters (Clay & Tennie 2018). Scientists have described this
pattern of results as a "failure" on behalf of the apes
and a "success" on behalf of the children, and are taken
to bolster the claim that apes lack cumulative culture given theories
of cultural learning.


### 2.2 Value-ladenness



Philosophers of science have highlighted that scientific studies are
also value-laden, insofar as scientists' values shape how they
do their science and the data that it ultimately delivers. This is
also evident in the study of animal cognition. Values shape the choice
of capacities to study. For example, during the twentieth century, a
great deal of effort went into attempting to teach various forms of
linguistic communication to great apes, an endeavor that stems from
the value that humans place on language. Values also shape the methods
that scientists use. Experimental evidence coming from labs is often
considered more valuable than observational evidence coming from field
studies, because the increase in ability to control the different
variables that can affect an animal's performance is thought to
compensate for the loss of ecological validity that comes with the
highly artificial experimental settings. Values also shape how
scientists interpret the results of their studies. The data that an
empirical study delivers is useless without an interpretation, and
this interpretation cannot be fully disentangled from the values
upheld by scientists. This is because scientists have to choose which
statistical methods to apply, which theories to accept, and what
narrative they follow when writing up the results in a scientific
paper.



The research on animal culture is another example of value-ladenness,
given that the driving force behind it is a fascination with human
culture, and an attempt to map out the cognitive differences between
our own and the other ape species that can explain the origins of our
uniqueness. This is why the negative results in experiments that have
tested for great ape overimitation are described as a
"failure" on their behalf. However, by its very definition
overimitation is the imitation of actions that are irrelevant to
producing the desired goal, so one could easily turn these results on
their head and describe this as evidence that apes will go for the
more efficient solution to the problem, which children fail to do. The
fact that these results are not described this way evidences a
value-laden perspective, from which overimitation is seen as a
"desirable" capacity, insofar as it is linked to other
characteristically human traits, such as rituals, normativity, and
cumulative technologies.



Another good example of how the design of studies in comparative
cognition is value-laden is the mirror self-recognition (MSR) test,
which was originally envisioned by Gordon Gallup (1970) to probe
animals' self-awareness. In this test, an animal is first
allowed to become familiarized with a mirror. In a second step, the
animal is anesthetized and an odorless mark is painted on their
forehead. The behavior of the animal in front of the mirror is then
observed, to see whether they interact with the mark, which would be a
sign that they understand that the individual in the mirror is
themself. Passing the MSR test is viewed as a sign of self-awareness,
though whether it shows awareness of one's own mind or just
one's body is disputed (Heyes 1994, 2008; Povinelli 1998).
Leaving aside whether the MSR test actually addresses this capacity,
which is an issue of theory-ladenness, we would like to draw attention
to the methodology itself. As has long been argued, animals can fail
this test for reasons that have nothing to do with their lack of
self-awareness. For instance, gorillas' failure to pass the test
has been linked to the fact that this species tends to avoid eye
contact with conspecifics, because it is considered a threat
(Shillito, Gallup, & Beck 1999). Other species might fail the test
because vision is not their primary sensory modality. Dogs, for
instance, fail the MSR test but pass an analogous olfactory test
(Horowitz 2017). In this alternative, dogs are presented with urine
samples from themselves and other dogs. Results show that they spend
less time sniffing their own urine marks, which evidences some form of
olfactory self-recognition. For humans, however, vision is the primary
and most cherished sensory modality and this often leads to study
designs that, like the MSR test, are vision-centered. Joint attention,
for instance, is measured by means of gaze-following (Carpenter &
Call 2013), which Maria Botero (2016) has criticized, arguing that for
nonhuman primates touch might also be a medium for joint attention to
emerge.



Despite these problems, the MSR test is still treated as the gold
standard in the study of self-awareness, which illustrates the value
that humans place on visual self-recognition, and our failure to
appreciate that other animals may recognize themselves through other
sensory modalities. Additionally, the MSR test presupposes that the
animals tested *care* in some sense about their appearance.
This is a necessary requirement for them to be motivated to interact
with the mark. The fact that this is taken for granted in discussions
on the MSR test illustrates the importance that *we* grant to
mirrors delivering our expected self-reflection. However, it is not
immediately obvious that all animals should care about this. Instead,
whether or not they do will likely be shaped by their particular
ecology and evolutionary history. For example, a tiny fish, the
cleaner wrasse, has been recently shown to pass the MSR test,
attempting to scrape off the mark in the presence of a mirror and
ignoring it if it was colorless or there was no mirror available
(Kohda et al. 2019). This initially surprising result becomes less so
when one considers that this species of fish feeds off the parasites
that they visually detect on the skin of other fish, and the mark that
was planted on their head was intentionally made to mimic the color,
size, and shape of one of these parasites. In the cleaner
wrasse's *Umwelt*, this mark is clearly something worth
attending to, but it might not be the case for all species. Other
animals, for instance, might care much more if their coat smells in an
unexpected way than if there is some debris on their head.



Further exemplifying value-ladenness, it is not uncommon for
experimental results in comparative psychology to be communicated in a
way that depicts the human species as "superior," which
can be illustrated by some experiments that have compared chimpanzee
performance to our own. Daniel Povinelli and colleagues (1999), for
example, found that chimpanzees outperform children in a
gaze-following task, but interpreted the children's poorer
performance as evidence of their possession of superior cognitive
capacities (see also Leavens, Bard, & Hopkins 2017). In this
experiment, the subjects had to follow the experimenter's gaze
to find a reward, which both children and chimpanzees could do. In one
condition, however, the experimenter was oriented towards the reward
but gazing above it. While the chimpanzees could still use this gaze
to find the reward, the children chose randomly in these trials.
Povinelli et al. interpreted this as evidence that children, but not
chimpanzees, have a theory of mind, which allowed the children to
interpret the above-target gaze as a distracted one that was not worth
following. From the chimpanzees' perspective, however, one could
also argue for their superiority in this task, since they were much
more successful than the children in actually finding the reward. In
another experiment (Jensen, Call, & Tomasello 2007), chimpanzees
were tested in an ultimatum game, where one chimpanzee (the proposer)
could choose how a reward was distributed among themself and another
chimpanzee (the responder). The responder could either choose to
accept the offer (in which case, they both kept it) or reject it
(which would have meant they both lost it). The experimenters found
that the responder would always accept the offer, regardless of how
unfair the distribution was, so long as their part was higher than
zero. Chimpanzees behaved in the way that economic theory predicts of
the fully rational agent, in contrast to humans, who would typically
rather be left with zero than accept an unfair distribution. Although
the researchers acknowledge this, they also make a point of
highlighting how these results illustrate that chimpanzees lack the
sensitivity to fairness that characterizes (superior) human societies,
though they fail to consider that chimpanzees may have fairness norms
in domains outside of food sharing. A further example of results being
interpreted to fit the narrative of human superiority comes from a
study by Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa (2007), where a chimpanzee
named Ayumu was found to strongly outperform humans in terms of speed
and accuracy in a working memory task. Although in this paper the
superiority of the chimp was acknowledged without caveats, one of the
authors (Matsuzawa 2010) later used these results to highlight the
superior cognitive capacities of humans, arguing for the existence of
a trade-off between memory and abstraction in the phylogeny and
ontogeny of our species, such that by letting go of the photographic
memory that our ancestors likely shared with chimpanzees, we could
develop our characteristic skills for complex representation and
language.


### 2.3 Objectivity



While one might hope that an appeal to objectivity would help to
offset the theory-ladenness and value-ladenness of science,
philosophers of science tend to describe objectivity as an ideal,
rather than an achievable result, of good science. Given that
objectivity can be understood as a commitment to value- and
theory-free faithfulness to facts that avoid any personal bias or
perspective--a view from nowhere--it is at best a guide to
balancing biases rather than avoiding them.



Animal cognition research has a particular interest in being
objective, for some of the reasons reviewed in the previous two
sections. Furthermore, as we saw in
 section 1,
 Darwin may have emphasized similarities over differences between
species, suggesting a bias toward seeing other animals as like us. If
humans are biased towards seeing animals as too much like humans, then
some principles to protect against that bias may be needed. We see
this in two classic principles used in comparative psychology:
Morgan's Canon and a prohibition against anthropomorphism.



The British biologist and psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan was worried
that the methods of Darwin emphasized our tendencies to see others as
like us, and he felt the need to offer a corrective to our egocentric
biases in the form of what is now called Morgan's Canon:



> 
> 
> In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise
> of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome
> of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.
> (Morgan 1894: 53)
> 
> 
> 



Morgan describes his Canon by telling us the story of Tony, a
fox-terrier pup who was able to open the gate from his garden and
escape into the road by putting his head under the latch of the gate,
lifting the latch and waiting for the gate to swing open. While it
might look like Tony was smart--that he had a goal and knew how
to achieve it by lifting the latch, Morgan invites us to consider
other explanations. Perhaps Tony saw that the latch was liftable, and
lifted it, without knowing the gate would open or wanting to get out.
Perhaps Tony had associated the latch with getting out to the street,
and wanted to get to the street, so he pushed against the latch
without knowing how it worked. The worry is that, by thinking that
Tony was a clever little dog, an observer is being
anthropomorphic.



Though in its strictly literal sense, "anthropomorphism"
simply makes reference to the attribution of human-like
characteristics to animals, in its common usage in comparative
cognition it has a very negative connotation, such that it is used to
make reference to the *mistaken* attribution of human-like
characteristics to animals. Thus understood, anthropomorphism is
connected to humans' well-documented tendency to over-attribute
mental states. This was already demonstrated in the 1940s, in a famous
study by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel (1944). In this study, human
participants were shown a video that depicted animated geometric
shapes moving around the screen (see Heider and Simmel (1944)
animation in
 Other Internet Resources
 for the video). Although the shapes make no sounds and have no facial
expressions, the participants couldn't help but interpret their
movement in intentional terms and construct a narrative regarding
their "interactions". This is a particularly egregious
example of our anthropomorphic biases, which lead us to be inclined to
interpret the behavior of entities (human, non-human, and beyond) in
human-like terms. Scientists studying animal cognition are well aware
of this problematic tendency, and they attempt to counter it by
stressing the importance of avoiding anthropomorphism.



However, the dictum regarding the need to avoid anthropomorphism is
also a philosophical assumption embedded in comparative cognition and,
as such, it can be questioned. It has been argued, for instance, that
a blanket ban against the attribution of human-like qualities to
animals would beg the question by assuming that said qualities are
indeed uniquely human (Fitzpatrick 2017a). Frans de Waal (1999) uses
the term "anthropodenial" to refer to the a priori
rejection of the possibility that humans and animals may share
characteristics, and argues that it is just as worrisome as
anthropomorphism. He points out that there is an imbalance in
comparative cognition, such that the over-attribution of mental
capacities to animals is seen as much more problematic than the
under-attribution. The reason behind this is that comparative
psychologists are wary of violating Morgan's Canon. However, by
looking to preserve *cognitive* parsimony at all costs, de Waal
argues, comparative psychologists may be disregarding
*evolutionary* parsimony, which dictates that we should offer
explanations that posit the fewest possible changes in the
phylogenetic tree. We should thus steer clear of both anthropodenial
and anthropomorphism. A similar point was made by Kristin Andrews and
Brian Huss (2014), who coined the term "anthropectomy" to
refer to the mistake of denying that an animal has a certain
characteristically human capacity when in fact they do have that
capacity. They argue that anthropomorphism and anthropectomy are both
errors, they both amount to a false depiction of how the world
actually is, and so there is no reason to fear one over the other.



While anti-anthropomorphism attempts to avoid the bias of seeing mind
when it isn't there, it risks placing emphasis on another bias
that humans are subject to, namely the bias of human exceptionalism.
Anthropectomy arises in cases in which humans see their own cognitive
capacities as sophisticated, and other species as only having diluted
versions of them. For example, it is anthropectic to observe human
cultural practices and infer that because other species don't
have opera houses they don't have culture. When we make
self-serving bias errors and assume too quickly that we are better
than other people, we get ourselves and other people wrong.
Anthropectic thinking extends this bias toward other animals.



Morgan also warned scientists against anthropectomy. In what we can
call Morgan's Challenge, he warned us not to too quickly ascribe
sophisticated capacities as explanations of human behavior:



> 
> 
> To interpret animal behavior one must learn also to see one's
> own mentality at levels of development much lower than one's
> top-level of reflective self-consciousness. It is not easy, and savors
> somewhat of paradox. (Morgan 1932: 250)
> 
> 
> 



Morgan's idea that we have to avoid exaggerating human
capacities and wrongly denying that we share capacities with other
animals has been taken up in current discussions of philosophers and
psychologists. For example, as Shettleworth (2010b) points out, much
human behavior is controlled by simple and often unconscious cognitive
mechanisms of the sort we usually only associate with animals. We tend
to disregard this and, as a result, we sometimes engage in
anthropomorphism towards humans! Not only is there a tendency to
forget that human behavior is often caused by simple mechanisms, one
can also see a propensity to exaggerate the prowess of humans at
various tasks. If we are wrong about human capacities, and then deny a
continuity claim because we fail to find those confabulated capacities
in other animals, we commit a double error--confabulating human
cognitive mechanisms plus anthropocentrism, an error Cameron Buckner
calls "anthropofabulation" (Buckner 2013). For example,
despite the fact that we know that human memory is constructive and
confabulatory to a large degree, many comparative psychologists engage
in anthropofabulation by expecting animals to be capable of mentally
replaying past events in order to be credited with episodic memory
(Suddendorf & Corballis 2007; Tulving 1985; cited in Buckner 2013:
830).



One way to think of Morgan's general idea is that to explain
animal behavior we need to have a variety of competing hypotheses, and
from that set we can then pick the one that fits best. Morgan's
Canon suggests that psychologically lower explanations are best,
appealing to a kind of simplicity principle associated with
Ockham's Razor. But what counts as best is a classic problem in
the philosophy of science. We turn to this issue next.


### 2.4 Simplicity



Another aspect of the science of animal cognition where philosophical
assumptions become evident is in the preference given to simpler
explanations of animal behavior. Simplicity has long been seen as a
virtue of scientific explanations, but it is notoriously difficult to
decide what makes one explanation simpler than another.



In comparative psychology, and especially when following
Morgan's Canon, simpler explanations are taken by default as the
null hypothesis. This means that they are assumed to be true unless
proven otherwise, and that the burden of proof falls on the side of
more complex explanations. For example, research into causal reasoning
in animals takes as its null hypothesis animals' ability to
learn associations between different events. The experiments then
probe into whether animals are not just capable of this simple form of
learning, but whether they have the more complex capacity to
comprehend that some events *cause* others. When the
experimental data support both a simple hypothesis and a more complex
one, it is standard among scientists to prefer the simpler
explanation. For instance, some have argued that the experiments done
to test whether animals are capable of metacognition (or thinking
about their thoughts) can in fact be passed by reasoning solely in
first-order terms (or thinking about the world). Since first-order
thinking is assumed to be a simpler explanation of the data, it has
been argued that this explanation ought to be favored (e.g.,
Carruthers 2003; Hampton 2009).



The idea that simpler explanations ought to be preferred is viewed by
many as self-evident, a result of applying Ockham's Razor to the
study of animal cognition, and the claim that an explanation is
"simpler" or "more parsimonious" is often
offered as the equivalent to "End of discussion!" However,
in the past couple of decades philosophers have argued that this
preference for simplicity in comparative cognition is much more
problematic than it may initially seem. For one, many have argued that
there is no reason why a simpler explanation will be more likely to be
true in this context. Simpler explanations may have other virtues,
such as being easier to understand or to describe, but since animal
behavior is the result of natural selection, and not the outcome of a
process of intelligent design that infallibly delivers optimal
solutions, there is no reason to think that it is more likely to be
caused by simpler processes (Mikhalevich, Powell, & Logan 2017).
In fact, some have argued that when scientists claim a preference for
simpler explanations, it is actually some other consideration that is
doing the epistemic work, like the idea that we should avoid
anthropomorphic descriptions of animal behavior (Fitzpatrick 2017a;
Sober 1998). We see this, for instance, in Shettleworth's
(2010a) equation of simpler explanations with associative ones. She
argues that associative explanations are to be preferred, but this is
not a result of a preference for simplicity per se, but stems from the
idea that association is phylogenetically widespread in the animal
kingdom, and so associative explanations are, in her view, more likely
to be true.



In fact, there is no such thing as simplicity per se. Instead, what we
have are different types of simplicity depending on how and what we
focus on "simplifying". Irina Mikhalevich (2017) has
argued that simplification can be done through homogenization, by
aiming at fewer entity types; through reduction, by decreasing the
number of entities; or through idealization, by removing entities that
are not seen as crucial. Simon Fitzpatrick (2009) distinguishes five
different notions of the ideal of simplicity that are used in the
literature on comparative cognition:


1. simplicity as psychological unity (preferring explanations that
unify different behaviors by positing a single cognitive
mechanism);
2. simplicity as parsimony of mental representations (preferring
*X* over *Y* as an explanation whenever *Y* entails
*X* but not vice versa);
3. simplicity as less cognitive sophistication (preferring
explanations that attribute the least cognitively sophisticated
mechanisms);
4. simplicity as analogy (preferring explanations that posit similar
cognitive mechanisms to explain similar behavior in different
species);
5. simplicity as evolutionary parsimony (preferring explanations that
posit mechanisms inherited from a common ancestor to explain similar
behavior in different species).



Mike Dacey (2016) distinguishes further notions of simplicity, such as
a preference for those mechanisms that demand less computational
memory, time, or energy, those that require less input data, or those
that posit fewer changes in the phylogenetic tree. We previewed an
argument along these lines in our discussion of anthropomorphism and
anthropodenial--which is simpler, positing a simpler cognitive
capacity and more changes over evolutionary time, or positing a more
sophisticated cognitive capacity and fewer changes over evolutionary
time?



These different notions of simplicity are not only conceptually
distinct, they are often mutually incompatible or conflicting. Nowhere
has this become more evident than in the chimpanzee theory of mind
debate. The last few years have witnessed a huge controversy over the
experimental results in this research area. A number of studies have
shown that chimpanzees can use information regarding what a competitor
has visual access to in order to decide whether or not to go for a
reward (Hare et al. 2000; Hare, Call, & Tomasello 2001; Karg et
al. 2015; Melis, Call, & Tomasello 2006). The controversy arose
because these experimental results can in principle be explained by
positing that chimpanzees were reasoning about the mental states of
others (in this case, about what they could or could not see), or that
they were solely reasoning about their behavior (e.g., about their
bodily orientation or the existence of an uninterrupted line of gaze
between their eyes and the reward). What is interesting about this
controversy is that the defenders of each of these options were both
claiming to be offering the simplest explanation of the data. For
Michael Tomasello and Josep Call (2006), it's more parsimonious
to assume that chimpanzees can understand what others can and cannot
see rather than posit that they have learned a different behavioral
rule for every relevant situation that involves a competitor's
line of gaze. For Povinelli and Jennifer Vonk (2004), mental state
attributions can only be inferred from another's behavior, which
means that every mindreader must also be a behavior reader. Since the
opposite is not the case, it's more parsimonious to assume that
chimpanzees are behavior readers rather than mindreaders. The
chimpanzee theory of mind controversy perfectly illustrates that the
issue of simplicity is a philosophical one, meaning that the question
of whether, to what extent, and in what sense simpler explanations
ought to be preferred is one that cannot be settled solely through
empirical measurements or mathematical calculations, but requires
philosophical analysis and argumentation (for discussions, see
Clatterbuck 2017, 2018; Sober 2015).


### 2.5 Summary



Objectivity and simplicity are taken as goals of science, which is
understood to aim at tracking the facts of the world. The
value-ladenness and theory-ladenness of science, however, shows how
difficult it is to achieve those goals. While this is true of science
in general, with animal cognition the stakes are different. Human use
of animals in food, in medicine, in work, as entertainment, and as
companions raises a host of sometimes conflicting goals that scaffold
motivated reasoning and risk implicit bias. The quest for truth about
animal capacities relates to an over-arching philosophical theme in
comparative cognition: the human-animal divide and the question of the
extent and areas of continuity between the minds of humans and other
animals. This is not a normatively-neutral issue, but rather, the
picture that science delivers of the human-animal divide can serve to
justify or undermine the practices that constitute the human-animal
relationship. As we will see in
 section 3,
 addressing the biases and philosophical assumptions that shape the
science of animal cognition is of great importance for getting things
right philosophically as well as ethically.


## 3. Animal Cognition Applied to Philosophy



The science of animal behavior and cognition is increasingly being
used to provide premises in philosophical arguments. What follows is
an extremely brief gesture toward several areas of philosophy that
have benefited from recent attention to the sciences of animal mind
and behavior.



Before we begin, we should point out two potential obstacles with this
project. It's important to note that the use of animal cognition
research in philosophy must be handled carefully, given the
methodological considerations discussed in
 section 2.
 Sometimes philosophers seek to show that animals have a property
because they have a capacity, but the way the capacity was
operationalized in the study is different from how the philosopher
understands it. While many of the terms used in comparative cognition
are familiar, they may be defined differently, which can lead to
confusion and misunderstanding.



It's also important to note that the relationship between a
theory and a claim about an animal having or lacking a psychological
property is a tight one. Sometimes philosophers are both arguing for a
theory and for a claim that an animal has a particular property; such
projects might be defended as cohesive, or they might be critiqued as
question-begging.



Keeping these obstacles in mind, in this section, we will have a look
at how the evidence coming from the science has influenced and shaped
different philosophical debates.


### 3.1 The problem of other minds



The traditional philosophical problem of other minds, which challenges
us to consider the evidential basis for our commitment that other
humans are minded beings like ourselves, exists in an extreme form
when applied to other animals (see Andrews 2020b: Chapter 1).



The traditional argument from analogy for other minds rests on
similarities between oneself and other humans. While the traditional
argument is weak enough, when the analogy goes from humans to members
of another species, it becomes significantly weaker.



The *argument from analogy* for animal minds can be formulated
as:


1. Humans who have minds have some property *M*.
2. Individuals of species *A* have property *M*.
3. Therefore, individuals of species *A* probably have
minds.



But what is *M*? Commonly used properties in such arguments
include observable behaviors (such as emotional or communicative
behavior), passing certain experimental tests (such as success on a
memory task or a reasoning task), or physical structures (such as the
existence of a neocortex).



The *inference to the best explanation argument* for animal
minds rests on the claim that the existence of animal minds is a
better explanation of animal behavior and physiology than those
offered by other hypotheses. This argument can be formulated as:


1. Individuals of species *x* engage in behaviors *y*.
2. The best scientific explanation for an individual engaging in
behaviors *y* is that they have a mind.
3. Therefore, it is likely that individuals of species *x* have
minds.



When we look for the best explanation for a phenomenon, we first have
to generate a number of hypotheses, and then decide between them. The
best explanation will be the one that can be used to generate accurate
predictions and that coheres with our other scientific
commitments.



The *argument from evolutionary parsimony* is based on the idea
that closely related species share some physical traits, and this
relationship can offer evidence in favor of a mentalistic causal
explanation in certain cases. For example, we can consider this
argument that chimpanzees have minds:


1. The more parsimonious explanation requires the fewest changes
between species with recent common ancestors.
2. Humans and chimpanzees have a recent common ancestor.
3. Humans achieve behavior *B* by psychological capacity
*P*.
4. Therefore, it is most parsimonious to infer that chimpanzees
achieve behavior *B* by psychological capacity *P*.



In his discussion of this style of argument, Elliott Sober (2015)
points out that phylogenetic parsimony only offers some evidence of
the trait in other animals; while the probability of chimpanzees
having *P* is raised by the presence of *P* in humans, given
other considerations we might still conclude that the probability of
chimpanzees having *P* is low.



These arguments all have their weakness when it comes to their ability
to justify belief in other animal minds, just as the humancentric
versions do when it comes to other human minds. Even when used in
conjunction with one another, there is room for doubt when it comes to
other minds. However, in the case of humans, it is deemed a mental
illness to worry that the others around you are actually minded. The
weakness of these arguments suggests that when we are doing science
and trying to determine the causes of behavior, we are engaged in one
project, but when we are considering the traditional problem of other
minds when it comes to other animals, we are engaged in a different
kind of project, one of relating to others.



Dale Jamieson (1998) argues that the problem of other minds is solved
not inferentially, but via engagement with other beings. The
inferential solution to the problem suggests that when we see other
beings we see behaving bodies rather than agents or
people--individuals we can have relationships with. Jamieson
suggests that this idea of a behaving body is a "philosophical
monster"--a boogie man created by philosophers that creates
a problem rather than solving one.



When philosophers presume humans have minds, rather than feel that
they have to prove their existence, they can move forward to ask
questions about those minds. The same goes for other species.
Skepticism about the existence of other minds remains a possibility in
the human as well as the nonhuman case.


### 3.2 The mind-body problem



The traditional mind-body problem asks what are the relationships that
exist between mental properties and physical properties, or between
the mental and the physical. Appealing to nonhuman animals offers
additional evidence in support of theories regarding the relationship
between the mind and the body.



For example, Hilary Putnam (1967) famously used the example of octopus
pain to challenge identity theory and introduce the notion of multiple
realizability into the philosophy of mind. While Putnam presumed the
existence of pain in the octopus, contemporary philosophers use the
science of octopus behavior and physiology to argue for embodied
cognition (Carls-Diamante forthcoming) or to suggest the existence of
multiple cognitive systems working together in a single organism
(Godfrey-Smith 2016).



Research on animals without neurons, such as sponges, or on other
organisms, such as slime molds, which show habituation learning
(Boisseau, Vogel, & Dussutour 2016), or pea plants, which show
associative learning (Gagliano et al. 2016; though for a dissenting
view see Markel 2020), also offers opportunities for supporting the
multiple realizability of the material and organization that supports
cognition and mentality.


### 3.3 Consciousness



Philosophers are developing theories of consciousness that are
sensitive to studies of neurobiological and psychological properties
of animals, including pain, emotions, decision-making, learning,
memory, and future planning. Philosophers are also using theories of
consciousness to argue for or against animal consciousness. For
example, in his book *Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness
Questions Laid to Rest* (2019), Peter Carruthers argues that since
consciousness is neural processing in a human global workspace, and
nonhuman animals lack the equivalent to a human global workspace, it
doesn't make sense to continue asking whether animals are
conscious. In contrast, Michael Tye (1997) argues that on his PANIC
theory of consciousness most vertebrates and invertebrates will be
conscious, because they have to evaluate their sense data in order to
act. Such theory-first approaches often end in a standoff between
theories.



Some philosophers and scientists also argue from a more
pre-theoretical position that many species are conscious. In their
plea for a new science of consciousness, Francis Crick and Christof
Koch (1990) decided to assume that some mammals are conscious in order
to study consciousness in animals, which might explain the widespread
use of macaque monkeys as research subjects in consciousness studies.
Andrews (2020c) argues that presuming animal consciousness in this way
has a precedent in human sciences; while we can't *prove*
that humans are conscious, we are justified in *presuming*
humans are conscious, just as we are justified in presuming that there
is an external world, and that we're not merely brains in vats.
The premise that humans are conscious allows us to do good science,
and generates findings that are robustly predictive and support other
facts that we believe are true. If the premise that animals are
conscious also supports the fecundity of science, it should be taken
as starting point.



A common theory-light approach deals with markers for consciousness. A
marker is an indicator of something we cannot directly perceive, and
in the case of consciousness we find markers by relying on our own
phenomenological experience. For example, in his book *Personhood,
Ethics, and Animal Cognition* (2012), Gary Varner relies on
behavior and physiology of pain in order to argue that nociceptors
connected to the brain, endogenous opioids, responsiveness to
analgesics, and appropriate pain behavior are sufficient indicators of
consciousness. Scientific data current at the time suggested to Varner
that all vertebrates experience pain, but among the invertebrates, the
current science only suggested pain in cephalopods (such as octopus,
squid, and cuttlefish). More recently, Tye's *Tense Bees and
Shell-Shocked Crabs: Are Animals Conscious?* (2017) suggests we
use Newton's Principle ("from similar effects we can infer
similar causes") and the premise that certain human behaviors
are caused by consciousness to infer that certain animal behaviors are
caused by conscious experience; this approach finds consciousness in
crabs, bees, and fish, as well as mammals, birds, and reptiles.



Yet another way of finding markers of consciousness is to ask what
consciousness is for--the function of consciousness. In their
book *The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul*, Simona Ginsburg and
Eva Jablonka (2019) propose that consciousness evolved with the
development of a capacity for an open-ended kind of learning they call
Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL), originating in the Cambrian era.
UAL permits organisms to assign value to new and complex stimuli, to
remember the associations with these stimuli, and to use those
memories to make decisions in the future.



This tension between these different approaches has led philosophers
to engage in meta-theoretical analysis of how best to answer the
question. Jonathan Birch argues that the debate about invertebrate
consciousness can move forward if we adopt a theory-light approach
over theory-heavy and theory-neutral approaches (Birch forthcoming).
Eric Schwitzgebel (2019) argues that when we rely on a theory of
consciousness in order to answer questions about consciousness in
animals who are very different from us, such as garden snails, we
inevitably beg the question, suggesting that any theory-first approach
to such questions is not going to be helpful. To move forward on
questions of consciousness in beings who are very different from the
mammals, birds, and reptiles many naturally take to be conscious,
Andrews (2020b) sketches a method she calls the Dynamic Marker
Approach, which starts by identifying the properties that trigger
human commitments to consciousness in familiar animals, and then
derives further markers that can be used to identify consciousness in
unfamiliar ones.


### 3.4 Thought



Philosophical engagement on the nature of belief, concepts,
perception, mental representation, non-conceptual content,
rationality, and reasoning deals both with the question of whether
animals have capacities related to thought, and with questions about
the nature of these capacities. Though there are a lot of contemporary
discussions on these topics, this corresponds to a rather recent turn
of events, since philosophy of mind has, for the most part,
historically dealt only with human forms of thought. This was not out
of lack of interest, but the result of the conviction that only humans
were capable of thinking. Descartes, for instance, famously argued
that animals' lack of language gives us a good reason to think
that they do not have any form of thought or rationality.



Descartes' view was echoed in the twentieth century by
philosopher Donald Davidson. In a well-known article (Davidson 1982),
he argued that animals are incapable of thinking due to their lack of
language. He departs from an example by Norman Malcolm (1972/73): a
dog is chasing the neighbor's cat through the backyard. The cat
runs directly towards an oak tree but at the last minute they swerve
and go up a maple. The dog misses this last maneuver and runs towards
the oak tree, rests their paws on it, and begins to bark at its
branches. Though we would be inclined to describe this behavior by
saying that the dog *believes* that the cat is in the oak tree,
Davidson thinks that we would be wrong.



Davidson first identifies an epistemological problem with attributing
such a belief to the dog; a problem that was already described by
Stephen Stich (1979). The problem boils down to the fact that we lack
a way of determining which description would accurately capture the
dog's belief: do they believe the cat went up the oldest tree in
the backyard? Or the tree that smells the best? Or the tree that the
cat went up the last time? This epistemological hurdle is
insurmountable, in Davidson's view. Moreover, for him, beliefs
are never had in isolation, but rather every belief is embedded in a
network of associated beliefs without which that initial belief would
lack all sense. In order to believe of an object that it is a tree,
the dog needs all sorts of general beliefs about trees: that they
grow; that they have leaves, branches, and roots; that they need water
and sunlight, etc. And the same goes for the cat: believing that this
is a cat implies believing that they are a mammal, that they have four
legs, that they meow, etc. Even though there is no fixed set of
beliefs that one needs in order to be able to believe of this object
that it is a tree or a cat, without the attribution of at least some
of these beliefs, the attribution to the dog of the belief that the
cat is in the tree becomes senseless.



Though it has been widely discussed, few philosophers have been
convinced by this argument. For one, similar problems also arise when
attributing beliefs to other humans. Furthermore, such arguments are
excessively pessimistic with regards to the limits of what we can know
about animals' beliefs. By studying animal behavior in
controlled situations, we can come to know quite a lot about how they
understand the world, which would allow us to delineate their beliefs
to a much higher degree than Davidson and Stich acknowledge. Moreover,
perhaps animals' beliefs don't take the form of
propositional attitudes made up of concepts, like Davidson assumes. It
could be the case, for instance, that the dog thinks of the cat, not
as a four-legged meowing mammal, but in terms of the actions they
allow: as, for instance, a chase-able or eat-able thing. And lastly,
while Davidson's argument may allow us to conclude that we
don't know the exact form that animals' beliefs take, a
number of philosophers have argued that we can still ascribe content
to animal beliefs using a variety of different methods (e.g., Allen
2013; Bermudez 2003; Rowlands 2012).



However, for Davidson, attributing thought to animals is not merely an
epistemological problem. It isn't just that we don't have
a way of knowing *what* animals believe; for him, the very idea
that animals can think is problematic. Davidson ties the ability to
think to the possession of language. He considers that an individual
who has beliefs has to be capable of being surprised, for surprise
consists precisely of registering that reality isn't how we
*believed* it was. Surprise shows that one can discriminate
between the purely subjective and the objective. In order to have the
capacity to be surprised, and therefore to have beliefs, one needs the
*concept* of belief, to be able to understand that there is an
objective reality that is independent from our beliefs. At the same
time, language is necessary to have the concept of belief, for it
allows us to contrast what we believe with what others believe, and
thus generate the notion of truth and an objective reality. Given that
only humans have language, only humans can have the concept of belief,
and therefore beliefs. And as, for Davidson, beliefs are the basic
foundation for all kinds of thought, only humans can think.



More recent philosophical engagement on these topics tends to take a
more varied and often nuanced view about the relationship between
language and thought that distinguishes between different kinds of
thinking. Elisabeth Camp finds evidence that while some animals think
in compositional representational systems, such systems lack other
properties of language and are not propositional in structure (Camp
2009a). This is in contrast to Jerry Fodor's Language of Thought
(LoT) hypothesis, according to which all thought has a language-like
structure and can be had by animals who do not use language (Fodor
1975). On Camp's view, animals lack propositional thought, but
some animals still have conceptual thought because they have
systematically recombinable stimulus-independent representational
capacities--a flexible capacity to represent different aspects of
the world, including abstractions (Camp 2009b). Other philosophers
argue that the evidence suggests both that animals lack concepts and
that they think, providing evidence for nonconceptual mental content
(e.g., Beck 2012; Peacocke 2001; Schellenberg 2013, 2018).
Contemporary philosophers are also interested in investigating the
kinds of rational thought processes that animals might engage in,
including logical reasoning (Burge 2010), causal reasoning
(Bermudez 2006), or statistical reasoning (Rescorla, 2009,
2017).


### 3.5 Communication



Communication is another area in which data from animal studies is
used to help shape philosophical theories. Many take their starting
position from H.P. Grice, who proposed that a speaker means something
by an utterance *x* if and only if the speaker utters *x*
with the intention that:


1. it produces a response in the intended audience,
2. the audience recognizes the speaker's first intention,
and
3. the audience's recognition of the speaker's first
intention serves as a reason for the audience responding as it does
(Grice 1957).



Dennett interprets Grice as concluding that only those being who can
entertain a third-order belief (e.g., "I think that she thinks
that I think") can be communicators (Dennett 1987). That would
entail that only creatures who have a theory of mind, and can think
about others' mental states, are able to communicate. More
recently, philosophers have objected to the high cognitive
requirements for communication, in part by noting that children and
animals often appear to be communicating, expressing their thoughts
and feelings, or exchanging information in a purposeful way. Current
research also takes seriously that communication need not be limited
to the verbal domain; communication can occur through gestures and
other bodily movements, touches, and at least in some species, through
the flexible release of chemicals.



For example, Moore (2016b) suggests that intentional communication
need only require a message and an "act of address" that
signifies that the message is intended for the receiver. This
pragmatic ostensive communicative account of intentional communication
requires that communicative partners be able to understand that others
have goals, but doesn't require understanding others'
beliefs. Moore thinks we may find evidence of intentional
communication of this sort in animals from fish to apes.



For there to be communication, there must be thought, and as we saw in
the previous section, some philosophers deny that thought is possible
without language. Dorit Bar-On defends a theory of intentional
communication she calls expressive communication, according to which
avowals are self-reports or expressions of one's current mental
states that have both an action component and a semantic component
(Bar-On 2004). She argues that an appreciation of expressive
communication can help us see how children and animals who lack
language may yet still have thoughts (Bar-On 2019).



While philosophers are finding value in animal behavior to develop
theories of communication, there is less impact on theories of
language. This is perhaps due to the fact that linguists tend to agree
with Noam Chomsky that it is "obviously true" that animals
can have systems of communication, but lack anything that can be
called a language (Chomsky 1980: 430). However, continued research
into animal communication challenges the idea that human language is
discontinuous from animal communication systems, with evidence of
capacities supporting recursion in birdsongs (Gentner et al. 2006) and
syntax in bonobos (Clay & Zuberbuhler 2011). Appeal to such
findings permits better theories regarding the evolution of language
(Zuberbuhler 2020).



On the basis of empirical research into the multimodal communication
of animals, Eva Meijer (2019) has recently argued that, far from being
obviously true, it is anthropocentric to restrict the term
"language" to human forms of communication. Instead, she
suggests using the Wittgensteinian notion of language games to
articulate a notion of language that is not fixed and universal, but
instead incorporates many different forms of communication that bear a
family resemblance without having any one common characteristic. This
notion of language games can include much more than just verbal
communication, seeing language instead as something that is embodied,
open-ended, ever-changing and embedded in practices of co-creating
meaning, something that need not exclude animals.


### 3.6 Social understanding



Philosophical discussions on the nature of social understanding,
including empathy, theory of mind, norms, and culture, have been
influenced in the past couple of decades by the accumulating evidence
on the socio-cognitive capacities of animals. The chimpanzee theory of
mind controversy, which we outlined in
 section 2,
 is a perfect illustration of this, since it gave rise to numerous
articles and books that dealt with this topic from a philosophical
perspective. Many of the early papers focused on what has been termed
the "logical problem," which is the problem that the
experimental results can be interpreted by postulating that
chimpanzees are mindreaders or that they are mere behavior-readers.
Philosophers have offered various solutions to this problem, ranging
from experimental proposals that are meant to disentangle these two
explanations of the data (Lurz 2011) to attempts to dissolve it by
arguing that it is just a skeptical problem that will not help us
advance in our study of animal cognition (Halina 2015).



Other philosophers have been inspired by the chimpanzee theory of mind
controversy to rethink social cognition. Andrews (2012), for instance,
argued that the chimpanzee theory of mind debate presupposes a view of
social understanding according to which predicting and explaining
behavior are two symmetrical activities that depend on the attribution
of propositional attitudes (beliefs and desires) to others. Instead,
she argues that in many cases humans and nonhumans alike can predict
behavior without appealing to someone's beliefs and desires,
predicting instead from the situation in which the other is in, from
what they themselves would do, based on stereotypes or personality
traits, from what that individual did in the past, from social norms,
by perceiving the individual's emotional state, and so on. In
contrast, the attribution of mental states is more commonly found in
the practice of explaining the behavior of others, especially in the
case of anomalous behavior. Though chimpanzees and other apes have
been found to pass a false belief task (Buttelmann et al. 2017;
Krupenye et al. 2016), the chimpanzee theory of mind experiments have
been designed to test for their capacity to predict behavior, not to
explain it, so they may not actually be probing into
chimpanzees' theory of mind (Andrews 2018). Stephen Butterfill
and Ian Apperly (2013) also argued that theory of mind tests that have
been performed on children, apes, and other animals can be passed
without attributing full-blown propositional attitudes to others. The
individuals can rely instead on what they call a "minimal theory
of mind," an ability to register objects and their relations to
agents that allows one to track propositional attitudes without
representing them as such. While much of the current discussion of ape
theory of mind is methodological, raising worries about the nonverbal
implicit methods used in these tests (Horschler, MacLean, & Santos
2020), there are also philosophical questions to be asked about a
construct that has arisen from the nonverbal tests, namely,
*implicit belief representation*. Implicit knowledge is often
taken to be nonrepresentational, as seen in the philosophical
literature on knowledge how. To address the questions of what it means
to say a nonverbal infant or nonhuman animal has a theory of mind
requires some conceptual clarifications (Rakoczy 2012).



Philosophers have more recently been interested in a wider array of
social capacities. Philosophical accounts of social learning (Moore
2013), culture (Goodrich 2017; Ramsey 2013), innovation (Ramsey,
Bastian, & van Schaik 2007), social norms (Andrews 2020a), and
animal morality (Fitzpatrick 2017b; Korsgaard 2006; Monso 2015;
Rowlands 2012) are also topics that are informed by current research
in animal cognition.


### 3.7 The influence of animal cognition on value theory



The evidence coming from comparative cognition also has important
implications for our obligations towards animals. In this section, we
will give an overview of some of the ways in which comparative
cognition has influenced ethics and political theory.


#### 3.7.1 Ethics



Ethical theorizing regarding animals focuses on two main issues: the
question of moral status and the question of moral treatment. The
discussion on moral status attempts to establish which animals are
owed moral consideration and on what grounds. The discussion on moral
treatment starts from the assumption that some animals have moral
status and aims to elucidate what the interests of these animals are
and how to manage situations in which they conflict with our own.
Discussions in both of these debates are often informed by comparative
cognition research.



The most common capacity that has been used to ground animals'
moral status is sentience, roughly defined as the capacity to feel
pleasure and pain. Sentience is widely regarded as sufficient for
animals to be owed moral consideration, since only sentient animals
*care* about what happens to them. Early animal ethics focused
on animals most directly and gravely affected by human practices,
namely, the mammals and birds used in food production and biomedical
research, and built a case in their defense based on evidence of their
sentience. In recent years, evidence of sentience in other taxa is
being used to argue that the circle of moral consideration should be
widened to include fish (Balcombe 2016; Sneddon 2006), cephalopods
(King & Marino 2019; Mather & Anderson 2007), and arthropods
(Mikhalevich & Powell 2020). Evidence from comparative psychology
that points to some animals being capable of sophisticated forms of
agency has also been used in attempts to ground moral status on this
capacity (Sebo 2017; Wilcox 2020). Other philosophers object to using
individualistic cognitive capacities to ground moral standing, and
instead rely on our perception of animals and pre-existing
relationships as the relevant properties (Crary 2010; Diamond 1978;
Gruen 2015). However, it has been argued that even these approaches
cannot ignore the cognitive capacities of individuals (Monso
& Grimm 2019).



If animals have moral status, the question emerges: what sort of
treatment are they owed? Moral treatment is usually considered to be a
function of the *interests* that a being has, and these are
closely linked to their psychological capacities. Inspired by findings
in comparative cognition, scholars have argued that some animals not
only have an interest in experiencing pleasure and avoiding pain, but
that they can also enjoy other goods, such as freedom (Gruen 2018;
Schmidt 2015), friendship (Frooding & Peterson 2011),
relationships of care (Monso, Benz-Schwarzburg, & Bremhorst
2018), and meaning (Purves & Delon 2018). This has potential
implications for the moral treatment that animals are owed, because it
could mean that animals are not just wronged when they are made to
feel pain, but also when they are deprived of opportunities to enjoy
these other goods.


#### 3.7.2 Political theory



Recent years have witnessed a political turn in animal ethics, with
the appearance of several theories that discuss how political
institutions and processes can be transformed to guarantee justice for
animals (Cochrane, Garner, & O'Sullivan 2018). This work is
somewhat less capacity-oriented than traditional animal ethics, since
it does not focus on the moral obligations of individual humans
towards animals, and tends to highlight instead the sorts of
obligations that are generated at the state level by the relationships
that humans have historically held with animals (Donaldson &
Kymlicka 2011).



Still, some of the work in political theory has been influenced by
findings in comparative cognition. An example of this is the debate
surrounding the notion of personhood, a term that marks those beings
who are entitled to legal protection, and which is often linked to
certain cognitive capacities, such as rationality, self-awareness, or
sociality. Drawing on the accumulating psychological evidence,
scholars have defended that personhood should be granted to great apes
(Andrews et al. 2018; Cavalieri & Singer 1993), cetaceans
(Cavalieri 2011; White 2007), and elephants (Poole 1998). The
capacities of animals documented by comparative cognition have also
been used to defend different ways in which animals can be seen as
having a political agency of their own, and thus as capable of
engaging in political participation. Meijer (2019), for instance, has
argued that animals can communicate in complex and nuanced ways using
multimodal signals, and that by means of these they can express their
needs and negotiate their relationships with us. Rather than seeing
them merely as voiceless victims, she encourages us to take their
voices into account when shaping an interspecies democracy.


### 3.8 Summary



The philosophy of animal minds is a rich and growing area of
philosophy. Philosophers engage with the science of animal cognition
to analyze the methods, assumptions, and values in the science itself.
Philosophers also use the research findings to support theories in
traditional topics in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind,
language and action, and value theory. Finally, attention to animal
cognition can also highlight previously overlooked philosophical
issues related to the nature of culture, learning, and teaching, and
it provides a new lens to consider classic questions about human
nature and our place among all the other animals.