Human behavior and thought often exhibit a familiar pattern of within group similarity and between group difference. Many of these patterns are attributed to cultural differences. For much of the history of its investigation into behavior and thought, however, cognitive science has been disproportionately focused on uncovering and explaining the more universal features of human minds—or the universal features of minds in general. -/- This entry charts out the ways in which this has changed over recent decades. It sketches the (...) motivation behind the cultural turn in cognitive science, and situates some of its central findings with respect to the questions that animate it and the debates that it has inspired. Woven throughout the entry are examples of how the cognitive science of culture, and especially its elevated concern with different forms of diversity and variation, continues to influence and be influenced by philosophers. -/- One cluster of philosophical work falls within the traditional subject matter of philosophy of science, in this case of the cognitive and social sciences. Philosophers have analyzed and assessed the methods and evidence central to the scientific study of cognition and culture, and have offered conceptual scrutiny, clarification, and synthesis. Research in a second vein sees philosophers themselves contributing more directly to cognitive scientific projects, (co)constructing theories, helping build computational models, even gathering empirical data. A third kind of work is naturalistic philosophy or philosophy of nature, wherein philosophers seek to use results from the cognitive science of culture to inform or transform debates over long-standing philosophical questions, including questions about the nature of philosophy and philosophical methodology itself. (shrink)

The view that folk psychology is primarily mindreading beliefs and desires has come under challenge in recent years. I have argued that we also understand others in terms of individual properties such as personality traits and generalizations from past behavior, and in terms of group properties such as stereotypes and social norms (Andrews 2012). Others have also argued that propositional attitude attribution isn’t necessary for predicting others’ behavior, because this can be done in terms of taking Dennett’s Intentional Stance (Zawidzki (...) 2013), appealing to social structures (Maibom 2007), shared norms (McGeer 2007) or via solution based heuristics for reaching equilibrium between social partners (Morton 2003). But it isn’t only prediction that can be done without thinking about what others think; we can explain and understand people in terms of their personality traits, habitual behaviors, and social practices as well. The decentering of propositional attitude attributions goes hand in hand with a move away from taking folk psychology to be primarily a predictive device. While experiments examining folk psychological abilities in children, infants, and other species still rest on asking subjects to predict behavior, theoretical investigations as to the evolutionary function of folk psychology have stressed the role of explanation (Andrews 2012) and regulative functions (McGeer 2007, Zawidzki 2013, Fenici 2011). In this paper I argue that an explanatory role for folk psychology is also a regulative role, and that language is not required for these regulative functions. I will start by drawing out the relationship between prediction, explanation, and regulation of behavior according to both mindreading approaches to folk psychology and the pluralistic account I defend. I will argue that social cognition does not take the form of causal reasoning so much as it does normative reasoning, and will introduce the folk psychological spiral. Then I will examine the cognitive resources necessary for participating in the folk psychological spiral, and I will argue that these cognitive resources can be had without language. There is preliminary evidence that some other species understand one another through a normative lens that, through looping effects, creates expectations that community members strive to live up to. (shrink)

According to F. Adams [this journal, vol. 68, 2018] cognition cannot be realized in plants or bacteria. In his view, plants and bacteria respond to the here-and-now in a hardwired, inflexible manner, and are therefore incapable of cognitive activity. This article takes issue with the pursuit of plant cognition from the perspective of an empirically informed philosophy of plant neurobiology. As we argue, empirical evidence shows, contra Adams, that plant behavior is in many ways analogous to animal behavior. This renders (...) plants suitable to be described as cognitive agents in a non-metaphorical way. Sections two to four review the arguments offered by Adams in light of scientific evidence on plant adaptive behavior, decision-making, anticipation, as well as learning and memory. Section five introduces the ‘phyto-nervous’ system of plants. To conclude, section six resituates the quest for plant cognition into a broader approach in cognitive science, as represented by enactive and ecological schools of thought. Overall, we aim to motivate the idea that plants may be considered genuine cognitive agents. Our hope is to help propel public awareness and discussion of plant intelligence once appropriately stripped of anthropocentric preconceptions of the sort that Adams' position appears to exemplify. (shrink)

Comparative cognitive science often involves asking questions like ‘Do nonhumans have C?’ where C is a capacity we take humans to have. These questions frequently generate unproductive disagreements, in which one party affirms and the other denies that nonhumans have the relevant capacity on the basis of the same evidence. I argue that these questions can be productively understood as questions about natural kinds: do nonhuman capacities fall into the same natural kinds as our own? Understanding such questions in this (...) way has several advantages: it preserves the intuition that these are substantive empirical questions worth asking; it helps us to understand why they so frequently give rise to disagreements of the kind described; and it provides clues about how to diagnose and resolve them. (shrink)

In virtue of their capacity for political agency, political agents can possess special rights, powers, and responsibilities, such as rights to political participation and freedom of speech. Traditionally, political theorists have assumed that only cognitively unimpaired adult humans are political agents, and thus that only those humans can be the bearers of these rights, powers, and responsibilities. However, recent work in animal rights theory has extended the concept of political agency to nonhuman animals. In this article, I develop an account (...) of political agency that identifies the capacities that one must possess to be a political agent and captures the fact that political action is a distinctive type of action. Crucially, this account makes sense of the standard assumption that only some humans count as political agents, and explains why few nonhuman animals, human infants, and severely cognitively impaired humans are likely to possess the capacity for political agency. I go on to reject the view, recently advanced by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, that nonhuman animals can be ‘nonintentional political agents’. I conclude by suggesting that most nonhuman animals, as well as human infants and humans with severe cognitive impairments, cannot straightforwardly be assigned rights to political participation. (shrink)

In December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a petition for a common law writ of habeas corpus in the New York State Supreme Court on behalf of Tommy, a chimpanzee living alone in a cage in a shed in rural New York (Barlow, 2017). Under animal welfare laws, Tommy’s owners, the Laverys, were doing nothing illegal by keeping him in those conditions. Nonetheless, the NhRP argued that given the cognitive, social, and emotional capacities of chimpanzees, Tommy’s confinement constituted (...) a profound wrong that demanded remedy by the courts. Soon thereafter, the NhRP filed habeas corpus petitions on behalf of Kiko, another chimpanzee housed alone in Niagara Falls, and Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees held in research facilities at Stony Brook University. Thus began the legal struggle to move these chimpanzees from captivity to a sanctuary, an effort that has led the NhRP to argue in multiple courts before multiple judges. The central point of contention has been whether Tommy, Kiko, Hercules, and Leo have legal rights. To date, no judge has been willing to issue a writ of habeas corpus on their behalf. Such a ruling would mean that these chimpanzees have rights that confinement might violate. Instead, the judges have argued that chimpanzees cannot be bearers of legal rights because they are not, and cannot be persons. In this book we argue that chimpanzees are persons because they are autonomous. (shrink)

Are there nonhuman animals who behave morally? In this paper I answer this question in the affirmative by applying the framework of care ethics to the animal morality debate. According to care ethics, empathic care is the wellspring of morality in humans. While there have been several suggestive analyses of nonhuman animals as empathic, much of the literature within the animal morality debate has marginalized analyses from the perspective of care ethics. In this paper I examine care ethics to extract (...) its core commitments to what is required for moral care: emotional motivation that enables the intentional meeting of another’s needs, and forward-looking responsibility in particular relationships. What is not required, I argue, are metarepresentational capacities or the ability to scrutinize one’s reasons for action, and thus being retrospectively accountable. This minimal account of moral care is illustrated by moral practices of parental care seen in many nonhuman animal species. In response to the worry that parental care in nonhuman animals lacks all evaluation and is therefore nonmoral I point to cultural differences in human parenting and to normativity in nonhuman animals. (shrink)

This dissertation may be divided into two parts. The first is about the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission. This model, introduced here, is meant to better explain how humans communicate and understand each other. It has been developed to apply to cases that were left unexplained by the two main models of communication found in contemporary philosophy and linguistics, i.e. the Gricean (pragmatic) model and the code (semantic) model. I discuss cases involving emotional reactions, ways of clothing, speaking, or (...) behaving that are not intended for communication but whose effects on the audience are controllable to some extent. I show why prevailing code and Gricean models cannot explain them and how my Extended Gricean Model does. The second part of the dissertation is about what emotional signs mean, in various senses of the term ‘mean'. I review existing theories of meaning and see how they apply to emotional signs, i.e. signs which give us information about the affective state of the sign producer. (shrink)

Anthropomorphism is the methodology of attributing human-like mental states to animals. Zoomorphism is the converse of this: it is the attribution of animal-like mental states to humans. Zoomorphism proceeds by first understanding what kind of mental states animals have and then attributing these mental states to humans. Zoomorphism has been widely used as scientific methodology especially in cognitive neuroscience. But it has not been taken seriously as a philosophical explanatory paradigm: as a way of explaining the building blocks of the (...) human mind. The philosophical explanatory paradigm of zoomorphism may not explain all aspects of human behavior, but if we accept the zoomorphic way of thinking about the human mind, we should only posit new, different kinds of mental states if the zoomorphic attribution of animal mental states fails to explain our behavior. (shrink)

Reasons-responsive accounts of praiseworthiness say, roughly, that an agent is praiseworthy for an action just in case the reasons that explain why they acted are also the reasons that explain why the action is right. In this paper, we argue that reasons-responsive accounts imply that some actions of non-human animals are praiseworthy. Trying to exclude non-human animals, we argue, risks neglecting cases of inadvertent virtue in human action and undermining the anti-intellectualist commitments that are typically associated with reasons-responsive accounts. Of (...) course, this could be taken as a reason to reject reasons-responsive accounts, rather than as a reason to attribute praiseworthiness to non-human animal action. We respond to two reasons that one might resist the implication that non-human animal action can be praiseworthy. The first appeals to intuition: it’s too counterintuitive to attribute praiseworthiness to non-human animal action. In response, we argue that once the factors that determine an action’s praiseworthiness are disambiguated from the factors that determine whether an agent should be praised, the intuitive objection loses much of its force. The second appeals to empirical evidence: attributing praiseworthiness to non-human animal action involves a problematic kind of anthropomorphizing. First, we point out that this objection is mostly an _a priori_ objection in _a posteriori_ clothes: whether we give anthropomorphic vs. anthropectic explanations is a methodological choice, not an empirical one. Second, we argue that considerations from the literature on rational analysis and radical interpretation actually support anthropomorphic explanations over anthropectic explanations. (shrink)

Since the question “Do chimpanzees have a theory of mind?” was raised in 1978, scientists have attempted to answer it, and philosophers have attempted to clarify what the question means and whether it has been, or could be, answered. Mindreading or theory of mind refers to the ability to attribute mental states to other individuals. Some versions of the question focus on whether chimpanzees engage in belief reasoning or can think about false belief, and chimpanzees have been given nonverbal versions (...) of the false belief moved-object task. Other versions of the question focus on whether chimpanzees understand what others can see, and chimpanzees can pass those tests. From this data, some claim that chimpanzees know something about perceptions, but nothing about belief. Others claim that chimpanzees do not understand belief or perceptions, because the data fails to overcome the “logical problem,” and permits an alternative, non-mentalistic interpretation. I will argue that neither view is warranted. Belief reasoning in chimpanzees has focused on examining false belief in a moved object scenario, but has largely ignored other functions of belief. The first part of the paper is an argument for how to best understand belief reasoning and offers suggestion for future investigation. The second part of the paper addresses and diffuses the “logical problem.” I conclude that chimpanzees may reason about belief, but that there is already compelling evidence that they reason about perceptions. (shrink)

In the United States, the northern spotted owl has declined throughout the Pacific Northwest even though its habitat has been protected under the Endangered Species Act. The main culprit for this decline is the likely human-facilitated invasion of the barred owl. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service conducted an experiment in which they lethally removed the barred owls from selected areas in Washington, Oregon, and California. In those locations, the northern spotted owl populations have stabilized and increased. Some have (...) argued that we should kill the barred owl to protect the northern spotted owl. In this essay, I argue that the competitive displacement of northern spotted owls by the barred owl should not be addressed by killing the later to save the former. The most powerful objection to this conclusion is that we will lose old-growth temperate rainforest without an indicator species like the spotted owl protected under the Endangered Species Act. In response, I argue that we should directly conserve old-growth temperate rainforest independent of the northern spotted owl. In effect, we need legislation and policies that protects endangered ecosystems. (shrink)

Replications are often taken to play both epistemic and demarcating roles in science: they provide evidence about the reliability of fields’ methods and, by extension, about which fields “count” as scientific. I argue that, in a field characterized by a high degree of theoretical openness and uncertainty, like comparative cognition, replications do not sit well in these roles. Like other experiments conducted under conditions of uncertainty, replications are often equivocal and open to interpretation. As a result, they are poorly placed (...) to deliver clear judgments about the reliability of comparative cognition’s methods or its scientific bona fides. I suggest that this should encourage us to take a broader view of both the nature of scientific progress and the role of replication in comparative cognition. (shrink)

Brandom’s inferentialism offers, in many ways, a radically new approach to old issues in semantics and the theory of intentionality. But, in one respect at least, it clings tenaciously to the mainstream philosophical tradition of the middle years of the twentieth century. Against the theory’s natural tendencies, Brandom aligns it with the ’linguistic turn’ that philosophy took in the middle of the last century by insisting, in the face of considerable opposing evidence, that intentionality is the preserve of those who (...) can offer and ask for reasons and thus of language users alone. In this paper, I argue that there is no good reason for giving inferentialism a linguistic twist, and that, in doing so, Brandom is forced to make claims which are implausible in themselves and lead him, in the attempt to mitigate them, to a number of doubtful expedients. (shrink)

Kant: Philosophy of Mind Immanuel Kant was one of the most important philosophers of the Enlightenment Period in Western European history. This encyclopedia article focuses on Kant’s views in the philosophy of mind, which undergird much of his epistemology and metaphysics. In particular, it focuses on metaphysical and epistemological doctrines forming the … Continue reading Kant: Philosophy of Mind →.

What is involved in making an inference? This chapter argues against what Paul Boghossian calls the Taking Condition: "Inferring necessarily involves the thinker taking his premises to support his conclusion and drawing his conclusion because of that fact" (2014: 5). I won’t argue that the Taking Condition is incoherent: that nothing can coherently play the role that takings are supposed to play in inference. Instead, I’ll argue that it cannot plausibly explain all the inferential knowledge that we ordinarily take ourselves (...) to have. Moreover, I’ll argue that we don’t need it to understand the nature of inference. (shrink)

Mental fictionalism is not the benign view that we may better understand the mind if we think of mental states as something like useful fictions, but the more radical view that mental states just are useful fictions. This paper argues that, if one were to treat mental states as a kind of fiction, the genre of fiction best suited to this purpose would be fantasy make-believe, in which magic is a central feature. After defending a promising fictionalist account of mental (...) discourse as a kind of prop-oriented make believe against recent criticism, the paper ultimately concludes that mental fictionalism faces further, potentially insurmountable, challenges. Most significantly, there is a problematic disanalogy between folk psychology and fiction: our mental state attributions aim to track truth, and this crucial aspect of our mental discourse cannot be captured if we interpret it as a kind of fictional discourse. For this and other reasons, the cost of adopting mental fictionalism likely outweighs its benefits. Whether or not these problems can be resolved, there is still much to be gained from taking mental fictionalism seriously: in doing so we may illuminate several important features of our own folk psychology that often go unnoticed. (shrink)

One way to defend humane animal agriculture is to insist that the deaths of animals aren’t bad for them. Christopher Belshaw has argued for this position in the most detail, maintaining that death is only bad when it frustrates categorical desires, which he thinks animals lack. We are prepared to grant his account of the badness of death, but we are skeptical of the claim that animals don’t have categorical desires. We contend that Belshaw’s argument against the badness of animal (...) death relies on overly simplistic thought experiments and isn’t sufficiently careful in how it attributes mental states to animals. We present some cases of animal behavior from recent work on animal cognition that are most plausibly understood as spurred by categorical desires and we show how an independently plausible account of mental content—Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics—supports our attribution of categorical desires in those cases. We end by arguing that even if you’re wary of our reliance on teleosemantics, you should still accept it due to considerations about moral risk. (shrink)

Peña-Guzmán (2017) argues that empirical evidence and evolutionary theory compel us to treat the phenomenon of suicide as continuous in the animal kingdom. He defends a “continuist” account in which suicide is a multiply-realizable phenomenon characterized by self-injurious and self-annihilative behaviors. This view is problematic for several reasons. First, it appears to mischaracterize the Darwinian view that mind is continuous in nature. Second, by focusing only on surface-level features of behavior, it groups causally and etiologically disparate phenomena under a single (...) conceptual umbrella, thereby reducing the account’s explanatory power. Third, it obscures existing analyses of suicide in biomedical ethics and animal welfare literatures. A more promising naturalistic approach might seek a theoretical understanding of the social/ecological circumstances that drive humans and perhaps other animals to self-destruction. (shrink)

The evolutionary origin of consciousness has been a growing area of study in recent years. Nevertheless, there is intense debate on whether the existence of phenomenal consciousness without the cerebral cortex is possible. The corticocentrists have an empirical advantage because we are quasi-confident that we humans are conscious and have the well-developed cortex as the site of our consciousness. However, their prejudice can be an anthropic bias similar to the anthropocentric prejudice in pre-Darwinian natural history. In this paper, I propose (...) three basic principles to provide a conceptual basis for evolutionary studies of consciousness: the non-solipsistic principle, the evolution principle, and the anthropic principle. These principles collectively help us to avoid solipsism, anthropocentrism, and anthropomorphism to some degree, although we cannot be completely free from them. Also, the landscape metaphor associated with the anthropic principle provides an image of how different forms of consciousness can be acquired. (shrink)

El trabajo pone en relación la propuesta filosófica de John McDowell con los estudios recientes sobre cognición animal. La primera sección reconstruye la noción liberalizada de naturaleza desarrollada por este autor en Mente y mundo a partir del umbral representado por las ciencias naturales modernas, y explica luego el lugar que ocupan en ella los animales no humanos. La segunda sección examina dos problemas que posee esta propuesta: su inestabilidad interna y la dificultad para ubicar en ella a los animales (...) no humanos tal como los estudia la etología cognitiva. La tercera sección sostiene que estos problemas no resultan acuciantes si se piensa que la naturaleza liberalizada de McDowell es reencantada desde la etología. The paper discusses the philosophy of John McDowell in relation to the recent research in animal cognition. Firstly, it introduces the liberal or relaxed naturalism put forward by this author in Mind and World, taking into account the threshold of the modern natural sciences and the way McDowell places “mere animals” in nature. Secondly, it features two problems of this proposal: its unstable character and the fact that non-human animals do not have a proper place in it -at least from the viewpoint of cognitive ethology. Thirdly, it argues that these problems do not arise if one considers that nature is re-enchanted by the recent ethology itself. (shrink)

I argue that the standard paradigm for understanding cognition—namely, that thoughts are representational, internal, and propositional—does not account for a large number of genuinely cognitive processes. Instead, if we adopt a more radical approach, one that treats cognition as a cooperative, dynamic, and interactive process, accounting for shared meaning making and embodied thought becomes much more plausible. To support this thesis, rather than turn to the debate as it has been ongoing among philosophers of mind pertaining solely to human thought, (...) I examine our interactions with other animals, and thus, I take a more biological approach to how thought evolves and emerges. Chiefly, I look at the ways in which human-canine interaction ought to count as producing genuinely cognitive phenomena that cannot be properly explicated under a standard model of cognition, and that these sorts of interactive and dynamic pairings between us and our dogs can serve as models for human minds, which I argue are much more shared and cooperative than competing accounts of cognition would have us believe. (shrink)

The relation between conceptual analysis and empirical observations when ascribing or denying concepts and beliefs to non-human animals is not straightforward. In order to reflect on this relation, I focus on two theoretical proposals and one empirical case, the three of which are permanently discussed and considered in the literature on animal cognition. First, I review briefly Davidson’s arguments for denying thought to non-linguistic animals. Second, I review Allen’s criteria for ascribing concepts to creatures capable of correcting their discriminatory powers (...) by taking into account their previous errors. Allen affirms that this is an empirical proposal which offers good reasons, but not necessary or sufficient conditions, for concept attribution. Against Allen, I argue that his important proposal is not an empirical, but a conceptual one. Third, I resort to vervet monkeys to show that Allen’s criteria, and not Davidson’s, are very relevant for ascribing first-order and denying second-order beliefs to this species and thus make sense of the idea of animal cognition. (shrink)

Can nonhuman animals and artificial intelligence (AI) entities be attributed moral agency? The general assumption in the philosophical literature is that moral agency applies exclusively to humans since they alone possess free will or capacities required for deliberate reflection. Consequently, only humans have been taken to be eligible for ascriptions of moral responsibility in terms of, for instance, blame or praise, moral criticism, or attributions of vice and virtue. Animals and machines may cause harm, but they cannot be appropriately ascribed (...) moral responsibility for their behavior. This thesis challenges the conventional paradigm by proposing an alternative approach where moral agency is conceived as the competence to participate in moral responsibility practices. By shifting focus from intra-individual to contextual and socially situated features, this practice-focused approach appears to make the attribution of moral agency to nonhuman animals and AI entities more plausible than commonly assumed. Moreover, considering the current and potential future prevalence of nonhuman animals and AI entities in everyday settings and social contexts, a potential extension of moral agency to such entities could very well transform our social, moral, and legal practices. Hence, this thesis proposes that the attribution or withholding of moral agency to different entities should be carefully evaluated, considering the potential normative implications. (shrink)

Physical cognition involves a host of cognitive abilities that enable understanding and manipulation of the physical world. Corvids, the bird family that includes crows, ravens and jays, are renowned for their cognitive abilities, but still little is known about their folk physics. This thesis explores the origins of physical cognition in corvids by investigating its mechanisms, development,fitness value and phylogeny in a wide context that includes theoretical and empirical studies.String pulling is a valuable paradigm for addressing these questions. Many animals (...) can pull a string with food attached to its end, but uncovering the cognitive abilities involved in this behaviour requires further testing. Paper I reviews the string-pulling paradigm, which is one of the oldest tests of animal cognition.It is a highly suitable test for species comparisons, socio-ecological correlations, and phylogenetic questions. Paper II tests several corvids, apes and peafowl on a string-pulling task where the first pulls do not result in the food moving closer. Despite the absence of such visual feedback, most subjects pulled strings in completely, although corvids appeared to choose randomly.Tool use is the archetypical example of physical cognition. Many corvids are remarkably adept at using tools in experimental settings. Paper III reviews animal tool use in general. It is now clear that customary tool-using species do not necessarily outperform their non-tool-using relatives on tests of physical cognition. For corvids that frequently use tools in the wild, such as New Caledonian crows and‘Alalā, tool use appears to have a significant fitness value and may have resulted in morphological adaptations. Paper IV describes a novel tool-use mode in New Caledonian crows. They inserted sticks into objects and then moved away,thereby transporting both. One crow could not grasp the target object, which suggests that such insert-and-transport tool use facilitates control over unwieldy objects. Paper V briefly argues that some corvids have shown the ability to make novel causal interventions, although this question should be addressed in a clearer theoretical framework that makes testable predictions.Sensorimotor cognition is a set of fundamental cognitive abilities that enables the integration of sensory and motor information into practical behaviour. It underlies much of corvid physical cognition. Paper VI investigates the development of sensorimotor cognition in ravens. Their skills developed rapidly and exceeded those of some mammals. They reached the same final sensorimotor stage as great apes, albeit at a markedly accelerated rate. The propensity of corvids to cache objects was investigated in Paper VII. Ravens, which often cache food,frequently cached objects, but surprisingly at similar rates as non-food-caching jackdaws. New Caledonian crows mostly cached objects that resembled functional tools.Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits to animals. Fear of mistakenly anthropomorphising animals has resulted in biased principles and an uneven burden of proof, which may hinder scientific progress more than it is supposed to offer protection against making mistakes. Cognitive zoology should not be misguided by overcompensating for such potential pitfalls. (shrink)