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  1. A phenomenology and epistemology of large language models: transparency, trust, and trustworthiness.Richard Heersmink, Barend de Rooij, María Jimena Clavel Vázquez & Matteo Colombo - 2024 - Ethics and Information Technology 26 (3):1-15.
    This paper analyses the phenomenology and epistemology of chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard. The computational architecture underpinning these chatbots are large language models (LLMs), which are generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems trained on a massive dataset of text extracted from the Web. We conceptualise these LLMs as multifunctional computational cognitive artifacts, used for various cognitive tasks such as translating, summarizing, answering questions, information-seeking, and much more. Phenomenologically, LLMs can be experienced as a “quasi-other”; when that happens, users anthropomorphise them. (...)
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  • Nonhuman Moral Agency: A Practice-Focused Exploration of Moral Agency in Nonhuman Animals and Artificial Intelligence.Dorna Behdadi - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Gothenburg
    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 (...)
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  • In search of animal normativity: a framework for studying social norms in non-human animals.Evan Westra, Simon Fitzpatrick, Sarah F. Brosnan, Thibaud Gruber, Catherine Hobaiter, Lydia M. Hopper, Daniel Kelly, Christopher Krupenye, Lydia V. Luncz, Jordan Theriault & Kristin Andrews - 2024 - Biological Reviews 1.
    Social norms – rules governing which behaviours are deemed appropriate or inappropriate within a given community – are typically taken to be uniquely human. Recently, this position has been challenged by a number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethologists, who have suggested that social norms may also be found in certain non-human animal communities. Such claims have elicited considerable scepticism from norm cognition researchers, who doubt that any non-human animals possess the psychological capacities necessary for normative cognition. However, there is (...)
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  • Morgan’s Quaker gun and the species of belief.Devin Sanchez Curry - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):119-144.
    In this article, I explore how researchers’ metaphysical commitments can be conducive—or unconducive—to progress in animal cognition research. The methodological dictum known as Morgan’s Canon exhorts comparative psychologists to countenance the least mentalistic fair interpretation of animal actions. This exhortation has frequently been misread as a blanket condemnation of mentalistic interpretations of animal behaviors that could be interpreted behavioristically. But Morgan meant to demand only that researchers refrain from accepting default interpretations of (apparent) actions until other fair interpretations have been (...)
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  • What is so special about episodic memory: lessons from the system-experience distinction.Shen Pan - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-26.
    Compared to other forms of memory, episodic memory is commonly viewed as special for being distinctively metarepresentational and, relatedly, uniquely human. There is an inherent ambiguity in these conceptions, however, because “episodic memory” has two closely connected yet subtly distinct uses, one designating the recollective experience and the other designating the underlying neurocognitive system. Since experience and system sit at different levels of theorizing, their disentanglement is not only necessary but also fruitful for generating novel theoretical hypotheses. To show this, (...)
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  • Black Boxes or Unflattering Mirrors? Comparative Bias in the Science of Machine Behaviour.Cameron Buckner - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (3):681-712.
    The last 5 years have seen a series of remarkable achievements in deep-neural-network-based artificial intelligence research, and some modellers have argued that their performance compares favourably to human cognition. Critics, however, have argued that processing in deep neural networks is unlike human cognition for four reasons: they are (i) data-hungry, (ii) brittle, and (iii) inscrutable black boxes that merely (iv) reward-hack rather than learn real solutions to problems. This article rebuts these criticisms by exposing comparative bias within them, in the (...)
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  • (1 other version)Animal cognition.Kristin Andrews & Susana Monsó - 2021 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Philosophical attention to animals can be found in a wide range of texts throughout the history of philosophy, including discussions of animal classification in Aristotle and Ibn Bâjja, of animal rationality in Porphyry, Chrysippus, Aquinas and Kant, of mental continuity and the nature of the mental in Dharmakīrti, Telesio, Conway, Descartes, Cavendish, and Voltaire, of animal self-consciousness in Ibn Sina, of understanding what others think and feel in Zhuangzi, of animal emotion in Śāntarakṣita and Bentham, and of human cultural uniqueness (...)
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  • Towards ending the animal cognition war: a three-dimensional model of causal cognition.Tobias Benjamin Starzak & Russell David Gray - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (2):1-24.
    Debates in animal cognition are frequently polarized between the romantic view that some species have human-like causal understanding and the killjoy view that human causal reasoning is unique. These apparently endless debates are often characterized by conceptual confusions and accusations of straw-men positions. What is needed is an account of causal understanding that enables researchers to investigate both similarities and differences in cognitive abilities in an incremental evolutionary framework. Here we outline the ways in which a three-dimensional model of causal (...)
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  • Humans on Top, Humans among the Other Animals: Narratives of Anthropological Difference.Filip Jaroš & Timo Maran - 2019 - Biosemiotics 12 (3):381-403.
    The relationship of humans to other primates – both in terms of abilities and evolution - has been an age-old topic of dispute in science. In this paper the claim is made that the different views of authors are based not so much on differences in empirical evidence, but on the ontological stances of the authors and the underlying ground narratives that they use. For comparing and reconciling the views presented by the representatives of, inter alia, cognitive ethology, comparative psychology, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Entity Realism About Mental Representations.Bence Nanay - 2019 - Erkenntnis 87 (1):75-91.
    The concept of mental representation has long been considered to be central concept of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. But not everyone agrees. Neo-behaviorists aim to explain the mind without positing any representations. My aim here is not to assess the merits and demerits of neo-behaviorism, but to take their challenge seriously and ask the question: What justifies the attribution of representations to an agent? Both representationalists and neo-behaviorists tend to take it for granted that the real question about (...)
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  • Philosophy of mental time — A theme introduction.Lajos Brons & Takashi Iida - 2019 - Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 28:1-8.
    (First paragraphs.) — The notion of “mental time” refers to the experience and awareness of time, including that of past, present, and future, and that of the passing of time. This experience and awareness of time raises a number of puzzling questions. How do we experience time? What exactly do we experience when we experience time? Do we actually experience time? Or do we infer time from something in, or some aspect of our experience? And so forth. These and many (...)
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  • Anti-anthropomorphism and Its Limits.Domenica Bruni, Pietro Perconti & Alessio Plebe - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9:398843.
    There is a diffuse sentiment that to anthropomorphize is a mild vice that people tend to do easily and pleasingly, but that an adult well educated person should avoid. In this paper it will be provided an elucidation of ``anthropomorphism'' in the field of common sense knowledge, the issue of animal rights, and about the use of humans as a model in the scientific explanation. It will be argued for a ``constructive anthropomorphism'', i.e., the idea that anthropomorphism is a natural (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Normative Practices of Other Animals.Sarah Vincent, Rebecca Ring & Kristin Andrews - 2018 - In Aaron Zimmerman, Karen Jones & Mark Timmons (eds.), Routledge Handbook on Moral Epistemology. New York: Routledge. pp. 57-83.
    Traditionally, discussions of moral participation – and in particular moral agency – have focused on fully formed human actors. There has been some interest in the development of morality in humans, as well as interest in cultural differences when it comes to moral practices, commitments, and actions. However, until relatively recently, there has been little focus on the possibility that nonhuman animals have any role to play in morality, save being the objects of moral concern. Moreover, when nonhuman cases are (...)
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  • Anthropomorphism and anthropectomy as friendly competitors.Aliya R. Dewey - 2017 - Philosophical Psychology 30 (7):970-991.
    Principles help comparative psychologists select from among multiple hypotheses that account for the data. Anthropomorphic principles select hypotheses that have the most human–animal similarities while anthropectic principles select hypotheses that have the most human–animal differences. I argue that there is no way for the comparative psychologist on their own to justify their selection of one principle over the other. However, the comparative psychologist can justify their selection of one principle over the other in virtue of being members of comparative psychology (...)
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  • Interpretations without justification: a general argument against Morgan’s Canon.Tobias Starzak - 2017 - Synthese 194 (5).
    In this paper I critically discuss and, in the end, reject Morgan’s Canon, a popular principle in comparative psychology. According to this principle we should always prefer explanations of animal behavior in terms of lower psychological processes over explanations in terms of higher psychological processes, when alternative explanations are possible. The validity of the principle depends on two things, a clear understanding of what it means for psychological processes to be higher or lower relative to each other and a justification (...)
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  • The Semantic Problem(s) with Research on Animal Mind‐Reading.Cameron Buckner - 2014 - Mind and Language 29 (5):566-589.
    Philosophers and cognitive scientists have worried that research on animal mind-reading faces a ‘logical problem’: the difficulty of experimentally determining whether animals represent mental states (e.g. seeing) or merely the observable evidence (e.g. line-of-gaze) for those mental states. The most impressive attempt to confront this problem has been mounted recently by Robert Lurz. However, Lurz' approach faces its own logical problem, revealing this challenge to be a special case of the more general problem of distal content. Moreover, participants in this (...)
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  • Blame as participant anger: Extending moral claimant competence to young children and nonhuman animals.Dorna Behdadi - 2024 - Philosophical Psychology:1-24.
    Following the social conception of moral agency, this paper claims that many beings commonly exempted from moral responsibility, like young children, adults with late-stage dementia, and nonhuman animals, may nevertheless qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices. Blame and other moral responsibility responses are understood according to the communicative emotion account of the reactive attitudes. To blame someone means having an emotion episode that acts as a vehicle for conveying a particular moral content. Therefore, moral agency is argued to be (...)
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  • (1 other version)Animal cognition.Kristin Andrews - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Entry for the Stanford Encylcopedia of Philosophy.
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  • (1 other version)Animal consciousness.Colin Allen & Michael Trestman - 2005 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Evidence in Default: Rejecting Default Models of Animal Minds.Mike Dacey - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (2):291-312.
    Comparative psychology experiments typically test a null statistical hypothesis against an alternative. Coupled with Morgan’s canon, this is often taken to imply that the model positing the simpler psychological capacity should be treated as a ‘default’ that must be ruled out before any other model can be accepted. It has been posited that this practice neglects evidence. I argue that the problem is deeper, including the way it structures the evaluation of evidence that is considered; it frames model choice around (...)
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  • (1 other version)The question of animal technical capacities.Ana Cuevas Badallo - 2019 - Humanities Journal of Valparaiso 14:139-170.
    The ability to use and make technical artifacts has been considered exclusive to human beings. However, recent findings in ethology in light of observations made in nature and in laboratory show the opposite. In the area of philosophy of technology there are few exceptions that take into account the ability of some non-human animals to manufacture and use tools. In this paper I want to show some reasons to reconsider other possibilities. It seems that capacities such as intentionality, culture or (...)
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  • Philosophical Primatology: Reflections on Theses of Anthropological Difference, the Logic of Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial, and the Self-other Category Mistake Within the Scope of Cognitive Primate Research.Hannes Wendler - 2020 - Biological Theory 15 (2):61-82.
    This article investigates the deep-rooted logical structures underlying our thinking about other animals with a particular focus on topics relevant for cognitive primate research. We begin with a philosophical propaedeutic that makes perspicuous how we are to differentiate ontological from epistemological considerations regarding primates, while also accounting for the many perplexities that will undoubtedly be encountered upon applying this difference to concrete phenomena. Following this, we give an account of what is to be understood by the assertion of a thesis (...)
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  • Models, Mechanisms, and Animal Minds.Colin Allen - 2014 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 52 (S1):75-97.
    In this paper, I describe grounds for dissatisfaction with certain aspects of the sciences of animal cognition and argue that a turn toward mathematical modeling of animal cognition is warranted. I consider some objections to this call and argue that the implications of such a turn are not as drastic for ordinary, commonsense understanding of animal minds as they might seem.
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  • Commentary: Interpretations without justification: a general argument against Morgan's Canon.Eduardo Mercado - 2016 - Frontiers in Psychology 7.
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  • A Better Kind of Continuity.Louise Barrett - 2015 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 53 (S1):28-49.
    Discussions of what minds are and what they do is a contentious issue. This is particularly so when considering non‐human animals, for here the questions become: do they have minds at all? And if so, what kinds of minds are they? Alternatives to Cartesian or computational models of mind open up a whole new space of possibility for how we should conceive of animal minds, while also highlighting how Skinner's pragmatist‐inspired radical behaviourism has much more to offer than most researchers (...)
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  • (1 other version)Entity Realism About Mental Representations.Bence Nanay - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (1):75-91.
    The concept of mental representation has long been considered to be central concept of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. But not everyone agrees. Neo-behaviorists aim to explain the mind (or some subset thereof) without positing any representations. My aim here is not to assess the merits and demerits of neo-behaviorism, but to take their challenge seriously and ask the question: What justifies the attribution of representations to an agent? Both representationalists and neo-behaviorists tend to take it for granted that (...)
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  • Decentering Anthropocentrisms: A Functional Approach to Animal Minds.Matthew C. Altman - 2015 - Between the Species 18 (1).
    Anthropocentric biases manifest themselves in two different ways in research on animal cognition. Some researchers claim that only humans have the capacity for reasoning, beliefs, and interests; and others attribute mental concepts to nonhuman animals on the basis of behavioral evidence, and they conceive of animal cognition in more or less human terms. Both approaches overlook the fact that language-use deeply informs mental states, such that comparing human mental states to the mental states of nonlinguistic animals is misguided. In order (...)
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  • A simple explanation of apparent early mindreading: infants’ sensitivity to goals and gaze direction.Marco Fenici - 2015 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (3):497-515.
    According to a widely shared interpretation, research employing spontaneous-response false belief tasks demonstrates that infants as young as 15 months attribute (false) beliefs. In contrast with this conclusion, I advance an alternative reading of the empirical data. I argue that infants constantly form and update their expectations about others’ behaviour and that this ability extends in the course of development to reflect an appreciation of what others can and cannot see. These basic capacities account for infants’ performance in spontaneous-response false (...)
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  • Mating dances and the evolution of language: What’s the next step?Cameron Buckner & Keyao Yang - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (6):1289-1316.
    The Darwinian protolanguage hypothesis is one of the most popular theories of the evolution of human language. According to this hypothesis, language evolved through a three stage process involving general increases in intelligence, the emergence of grammatical structure as a result of sexual selection on protomusical songs, and finally the attachment of meaning to the components of those songs. The strongest evidence for the second stage of this process has been considered to be birdsong, and as a result researchers have (...)
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  • The evolution of episodic-like memory: the importance of biological and ecological constraints.Bas van Woerkum - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (2):1-18.
    A persisting question in the philosophy of animal minds is which nonhuman animals share our capacity for episodic memory. Many authors address this question by primarily defining EM, trying to capture its seemingly unconstrained flexibility and independence from environmental and bodily constraints. EM is therefore often opposed to clearly context-bound capacities like tracking environmental regularities and forming associations. The problem is that conceptualizing EM in humans first, and then reconstructing how humans evolved this capacity, provides little constraints for understanding the (...)
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  • Darwin, Hume, Morgan, and the verae causae of psychology.Hayley Clatterbuck - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 60 (C):1-14.
    Charles Darwin and C. Lloyd Morgan forward two influential principles of cognitive ethological inference that yield conflicting results about the extent of continuity in the cognitive traits of humans and other animals. While these principles have been interpreted as reflecting commitments to different senses of parsimony, in fact, both principles result from the same vera causa inferential strategy, according to which “We ought to admit no more causes of natural things, than such as are both true and sufficient to explain (...)
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  • A critique of the principle of cognitive simplicity in comparative cognition.Irina Meketa - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (5):731-745.
    A widespread assumption in experimental comparative cognition is that, barring compelling evidence to the contrary, the default hypothesis should postulate the simplest cognitive ontology consistent with the animal’s behavior. I call this assumption the principle of cognitive simplicity . In this essay, I show that PoCS is pervasive but unjustified: a blanket preference for the simplest cognitive ontology is not justified by any of the available arguments. Moreover, without a clear sense of how cognitive ontologies are to be carved up (...)
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  • Direct Human-AI Comparison in the Animal-AI Environment.Konstantinos Voudouris, Matthew Crosby, Benjamin Beyret, José Hernández-Orallo, Murray Shanahan, Marta Halina & Lucy G. Cheke - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
    Artificial Intelligence is making rapid and remarkable progress in the development of more sophisticated and powerful systems. However, the acknowledgement of several problems with modern machine learning approaches has prompted a shift in AI benchmarking away from task-oriented testing towards ability-oriented testing, in which AI systems are tested on their capacity to solve certain kinds of novel problems. The Animal-AI Environment is one such benchmark which aims to apply the ability-oriented testing used in comparative psychology to AI systems. Here, we (...)
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  • What makes neurophysiology meaningful? Semantic content ascriptions in insect navigation research.Kelle Dhein - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (5):1-22.
    In the course of investigating the living world, biologists regularly attribute semantic content to the phenomena they study. In this paper, I examine the case of a contemporary research program studying the navigation behaviors of ants and develop an account of the norms governing researchers’ ascriptions of semantic content in their research practices. The account holds that researchers assign semantic content to behaviors that reliably achieve a difficult goal-directed function, and it also suggests a productive role for attributions of semantic (...)
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  • The cognitive map debate in insects: A historical perspective on what is at stake.Kelle Dhein - 2023 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 98 (C):62-79.
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  • On the origins of physical cognition in corvids.Ivo Jacobs - 2017 - Dissertation, Lund University
    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 (...)
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