Social animals need to share space and resources, whether sexual partners, parents, or food. Sharing is indeed at the core of social life. Humans, however, of all social animals, have distinct ways of sharing. They evolved to become Homo Negotiatus; a species that is prone to bargain and to dispute the value of things until some agreement is reached.

In this essay I argue that many nonhuman animal beings are conscious and have some sense of self. Rather than ask whether they are conscious, I adopt an evolutionary perspective and ask why consciousness and a sense of self evolved—what are they good for? Comparative studies of animal cognition, ethological investigations that explore what it is like to be a certain animal, are useful for answering this question. Charles Darwin argued that the differences in cognitive abilities and emotions among animals (...) are differences in degree rather than differences in kind, and his view cautions against the unyielding claim that humans, and perhaps other great apes and cetaceans, are the only species in which a sense of self-awareness has evolved. I conclude that there are degrees of consciousness and self among animals and that it is likely that no animal has the same highly developed sense of self as that displayed by most humans. Many animals have a sense of “body-ness” or “mine-ness” but not a sense of “I-ness.” Darwin's ideas about evolutionary continuity, together with empirical data (“science sense”) and common sense, will help us learn more about consciousness and self in animals. Answers to challenging questions about animal self-awareness have wide-ranging significance, because they are often used as the litmus test for determining and defending the sorts of treatments to which animals can be morally subjected. (shrink)

The zone of latent solutions hypothesis provides an alternative approach to explaining cultural patterns in primates and many other animals. According to the ZLS hypothesis, non-human great ape cultures consist largely or solely of latent solutions. The current competing hypothesis for ape culture argues instead that at least some of their behavioural or artefact forms are copied through specific social learning mechanisms and that their forms may depend on copying. In contrast, the ape ZLS hypothesis does not require these forms (...) to be copied. Instead, it suggests that several social learning mechanisms help determine the frequency of these behaviours and artefacts within connected individuals. The ZLS hypothesis thus suggests that increases and stabilisations of a particular behaviour’s or artefact’s frequency can derive from socially-mediated form reinnovations. Therefore, and while genes and ecology play important roles as well, according to the ape ZLS hypothesis, apes typically acquire the forms of their behaviours and artefacts individually, but are usually socially induced to do so. The ZLS approach is often criticized—perhaps also because it challenges the current null hypothesis, which instead assumes a requirement of form-copying social learning mechanisms to explain many ape behavioural forms. However, as the ZLS hypothesis is a new approach, with less accumulated literature compared to the current null hypothesis, some confusion is to be expected. Here, we clarify the ZLS approach—also in relation to other competing hypotheses—and address misconceptions and objections. We believe that these clarifications will provide researchers with a coherent theoretical approach and an experimental methodology to examine the necessity of form-copying variants of social learning in apes, humans and other species. (shrink)

The creation of chimeras by introducing human stem cells into nonhu- man animals has provoked intense concerns. Addressing objections that appeal to human dignity, I focus in this essay on stem cell research intended to generate human neurons in Great Apes and rodents. After considering samples of dignity- based objections from the literature, I examine the underlying assumption that nonhuman animals have lower moral status than personsFwith particular attention to what it means to speak of higher and lower moral statusFbefore (...) evaluating the chimera research in question. I argue that (1) such experiments involving Great Apes should be prohibited out of respect for the research subjects and (2) such experiments involving rodents may or may not be permissible, depending on how we answer unresolved questions regarding rodents’ moral status. In the end, concerns about human dignity prove insignificant. (shrink)

Recent advances in evolutionary biology and ethology suggest that humans are not the only species capable of empathy and possibly morality. These findings are of no little consequence for theology, given that a nonhuman animal as a free moral agent would beg the question if human beings are indeed uniquely created in God's image. I argue that apes and some other mammals have moral agency and that a traditional interpretation of the imago Dei is incorrectly equating specialness with exclusivity. By (...) framing the problem in terms of metaphor, following the work of Paul Ricoeur and Sallie McFague, I propose that the concept of the imago Dei could be extended to accommodate moral species other than our own. (shrink)

In this paper I evaluate embodied social cognition, embodied cognition’s account of how we understand others. I identify and evaluate three claims that motivate embodied social cognition. These claims are not specific to social cognition; they are general hypotheses about cognition. As such, they may be used in more general arguments for embodied cognition. I argue that we have good reasons to reject these claims. Thus, the case for embodied social cognition fails. Moreover, to the extent that general arguments for (...) embodied cognition rest on these premises, they are correspondingly uncompelling. (shrink)

Descartes boldly claimed: "I think, therefore I am." But one might well ask: Why do we think? How? When and why did our human ancestors develop language and culture? In other words, what makes the human mind human? _Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture_ offers a comprehensive and scientific investigation of these perennial questions. Fourteen essays bring together the work of archaeologists, cultural and physical anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, geneticists, a neuroscientist, and an environmental scientist to explore the evolution of the (...) human mind, the brain, and the human capacity for culture. The volume represents and critically engages major theoretical approaches, including Donald's stage theory, Mithen's cathedral model, Tomasello's joint intentionality, and Boyd and Richerson's modeling of the evolution of culture in relation to climate change. The volume contains chapters by: Peter Carruthers; Thierry Chaminade; Philip Chase; Merlin Donald; Peter Gardenfors; Gary Hatfield; Jody Hey; Steven Mithen; April Nowell; Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd; Theodore Schurr; Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney; Kim Sterelny; and Felix Warneken. ISBN 978-1-934536-49-0. (shrink)

Both biosemiotics and evolutionary epistemology are concerned with how knowledge evolves. (Applied) Evolutionary Epistemology thereby focuses on identifying the units, levels, and mechanisms or processes that underlie the evolutionary development of knowing and knowledge, while biosemiotics places emphasis on the study of how signs underlie the development of meaning. We compare the two schools of thought and analyze how in delineating their research program, biosemiotics runs into several problems that are overcome by evolutionary epistemologists. For one, by emphasizing signs, biosemiotics (...) needs to delineate a semiotic threshold, which is a problem not encountered by evolutionary epistemologists. Instead, the latter recognizes that all organisms are knowers that evolve knowledge, which they recognize to extend toward phenomena produced by organisms such as behavior, cognition, language, culture, science, and technology. Secondly, biosemiotics attempts at continuing adaptationist notions on how organisms relate to their environment, while especially Applied Evolutionary Epistemology comes to redefine the nature of the organism–environment relationship in such a way that it recognizes the spatiotemporal boundedness of existence, which in turn makes adaptationist accounts obsolete. (shrink)

A systematic theory of naturalism, bridging metaphysics and the science of complexity and emergence.

The aim of this paper is to give an account of what it is to internalize a rule. I claim that internalization is the process of redistributing the burden of instruction from the teacher to the student. The process is complete when instruction is no longer needed, and the rule has reshaped perceptual classification of the circumstances in which it applies. Teaching a rule is the initiation of this process. We internalize rules by simulating instruction coming from someone else. Running (...) these simulations enables us to toggle between the perspective of the instructor and our own perspective. By doing this we coordinate our perspectives with that of the teacher. The account given here provides a deeper explanation of why internalizing a rule involves the dispositions and reactive attitudes proponents of Rule Consequentialism often say it does, why moral reflection is variably demanding, how intergenerational moral progress is made possible by our cognitive architectures, and why the adoption of a rule should be understood in terms of teaching that rule. (shrink)

This paper considers the past and future of Psychology within Cognitive Science. In the history section, I focus on three questions: (a) how has the position of Psychology evolved within Cognitive Science, relative to the other disciplines that make up Cognitive Science; (b) how have particular Cognitive Science areas within Psychology waxed or waned; and (c) what have we gained and lost. After discussing what’s happened since the late 1970s, when the Society and the journal began, I speculate about where (...) the field is going. (shrink)

The problem of cooperation for rational actors comprises two sub problems: the problem of the intentional object (under what description does each actor perceive the situation?) and the problem of common knowledge for finite minds (how much belief iteration is required?). I will argue that subdoxastic signalling can solve the problem of the intentional object as long as this is confined to a simple coordination problem. In a more complex environment like an assurance game signals may become unreliable. Mutual beliefs (...) can then bolster the earlier attained equilibrium. I will first address these two problems by means of an example, in order to draw some more general lessons about combining evolutionary theory and rationality later on. (shrink)

The strong predominance of right-handedness appears to be a uniquely human characteristic, whereas the left-cerebral dominance for vocalization occurs in many species, including frogs, birds, and mammals. Right-handedness may have arisen because of an association between manual gestures and vocalization in the evolution of language. I argue that language evolved from manual gestures, gradually incorporating vocal elements. The transition may be traced through changes in the function of Broca's area. Its homologue in monkeys has nothing to do with vocal control, (...) but contains the so-called “mirror neurons,” the code for both the production of manual reaching movements and the perception of the same movements performed by others. This system is bilateral in monkeys, but predominantly left-hemispheric in humans, and in humans is involved with vocalization as well as manual actions. There is evidence that Broca's area is enlarged on the left side in Homo habilis, suggesting that a link between gesture and vocalization may go back at least two million years, although other evidence suggests that speech may not have become fully autonomous until Homo sapiens appeared some 170,000 years ago, or perhaps even later. The removal of manual gesture as a necessary component of language may explain the rapid advance of technology, allowing late migrations of Homo sapiens from Africa to replace all other hominids in other parts of the world, including the Neanderthals in Europe and Homo erectus in Asia. Nevertheless, the long association of vocalization with manual gesture left us a legacy of right-handedness. Key Words: cerebral dominance; gestures; handedness; hominids; language evolution; primates; speech; vocalization. (shrink)

Does language make moral cognition possible? Some authors like Andy Clark have argued for a positive answer whereby language and the ways people use it mark a fundamental divide between humans and all other animals with respect to moral thinking (Clark, Mind and morals: essays on cognitive science and ethics. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996; Moral Epistemol Nat Can J Philos Suppl XXVI, 2000a; Moral Epistemol Nat Can J Philos Suppl XXVI, 2000b; Philosophy of mental representation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, (...) pp 37–43 and discussion, 44–61, 2002). I take issue with Clark’s view and argue that language is probably unnecessary for the emergence of moral cognition. I acknowledge, however, that humans unlike other animals seem to posses what Haugeland in Philosophy of mental representation. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2002) terms ‘norm-hungriness’: an idiosyncratic need or desire to create and abide by a multitude of norms. Our peculiar norm-hungriness, I suggest, depends on what can be called florid control rather than on language. (shrink)

The theory-theory of human uniqueness posits that the capacity to theorize, in a way strongly analogous to theorizing in scientific practice, was a key innovation in the hominid lineage and was responsible for many of our unique cognitive traits. One of the central arguments that its proponents have used to support the claim that animals are not theorists, the logical problem, bears strong similarities to Hempel's theoretician's dilemma, which purports to show that theories are unnecessary. This similarity threatens to undermine (...) both the claim that theorizing serves a unique, adaptive role in human cognition and our ability to test for the presence of theories. I examine two historical responses to the theoretician's dilemma and argue that they open up strategies for experimentally testing for theoretical ability in other animals. (shrink)

The kinds of social interaction necessary for the existence of human cultural practices and institutions and the human ability to change and survive depended on at least four conditions: biological brain evolution, cognition/affective processes, ethnographically-based cultural beliefs and practices, and the kinds of interpersonal relations that motivate or constrain social interaction. Thus human biological and cultural evolution could not have occurred without the interaction of brain processes, cognition/affective mechanisms, language, cultural beliefs, and social organization. No single one of these elements (...) could have emerged without the others. We know little about how the four elements evolved, but can at least speculate about the necessity of each for human development. For example, the kinds of socialization experiences and skills infants acquire gradually to be called competent ‘adults,’ and how adult status begins to fade towards the end of life as adults seek to retain the properties that sustain human life. (shrink)

Sterelny’s Thought in a Hostile World ([ 2003 ]) presents a complex, systematically structured theory of the evolution of cognition centered on a concept of decoupled representation. Taking Godfrey-Smith’s ([ 1996 ]) analysis of the evolution of behavioral flexibility as a framework, the theory describes increasingly complex grades of representation beginning with simple detection and culminating with decoupled representation, said to be belief-like, and it characterizes selection forces that drive evolutionary transformations in these forms of representation. Sterelny’s ultimate explanatory target (...) is the evolution of human agency. This paper develops a detailed analysis of the main cognitive aspects. It is argued that some of the major claims are not correct: decoupled representation as defined doesn’t capture belief-like representation, and, properly understood, decoupled representation turns out to be ubiquitous among multicellular animals. However, some of the key ideas are right, or along the right lines, and suggestions are made for modifying and expanding the conceptual framework. (shrink)

Sterelny's Thought in a Hostile World ([2003]) presents a complex, systematically structured theory of the evolution of cognition centered on a concept of decoupled representation. Taking Godfrey-Smith's ([1996]) analysis of the evolution of behavioral flexibility as a framework, the theory describes increasingly complex grades of representation beginning with simple detection and culminating with decoupled representation, said to be belief-like, and it characterizes selection forces that drive evolutionary transformations in these forms of representation. Sterelny's ultimate explanatory target is the evolution of (...) human agency. This paper develops a detailed analysis of the main cognitive aspects. It is argued that some of the major claims are not correct: decoupled representation as defined doesn't capture belief-like representation, and, properly understood, decoupled representation turns out to be ubiquitous among multicellular animals. However, some of the key ideas are right, or along the right lines, and suggestions are made for modifying and expanding the conceptual framework. (shrink)

Our target article argued that a genetically specified Universal Grammar (UG), capturing arbitrary properties of languages, is not tenable on evolutionary grounds, and that the close fit between language and language learners arises because language is shaped by the brain, rather than the reverse. Few commentaries defend a genetically specified UG. Some commentators argue that we underestimate the importance of processes of cultural transmission; some propose additional cognitive and brain mechanisms that may constrain language and perhaps differentiate humans from nonhuman (...) primates; and others argue that we overstate or understate the case against co-evolution of language genes. In engaging with these issues, we suggest that a new synthesis concerning the relationship between brains, genes, and language may be emerging. (shrink)

Preston & de Waal are understandably cautious in applying their model to autism. They emphasise multiple cognitive impairments in autism, including prefrontal-executive, cerebellar-attention, and amygdala-emotion recognition deficits. Further empirical examination of imitation ability in autism may reveal deficits in the neural and cognitive basis of perception-action mapping that have a specific relation to the empathic deficit.

In a series of classic papers, Donald Davidson put forward an ingenious argument to challenge the ascription of minds to nonlinguistic animals. Davidson's conclusions have been mercilessly demolished in the literature by cognitive ethologists, but none of them have directly addressed Davidson's argument. First, this paper is an attempt to elucidate and evaluate Davidson's central argument for denying minds to nonlinguistic animals. Davidson's central argument puts forth a challenge to those of us who want to attribute minds to nonlinguistic animals. (...) Second, this paper uses counterexamples offered in the cognitive ethology literature to meet Davidson's challenge directly. (shrink)

According to the dual inheritance theory, cultural learning in our species is a biased and highly efficient process of transmitting cultural traits. Here we define a model of cultural learning where social learning is integrated as a complementary element that facilitates the discovery of a specific behavior by an apprentice, and not as a mechanism that works in opposition to individual learning. In that context, we propose that the emergence of the ability to approve or disapprove of offspring behavior, orienting (...) their learning, transformed primate social learning into a cultural transmission system, like that which characterizes our species. Assessor teaching facilitates the replication and/or reconstruction of behaviors that are difficult to imitate and helps to determine which behaviors should be imitated. We also explore the form in which assessor teaching has conditioned the evolution of our abilities to develop cultures in the hominin line, converting us into individuals equipped with what we call a suadens psychology. Our main point is to defend the hypothesis that suadens psychology determines the stability and dynamics that affect the trajectories of many cultural characters. We compare our proposal with other theories about cultural evolution, specifically with dual inheritance theory and cultural attraction theory. (shrink)

This paper presents the hypothesis that linguistic capacity evolved through the action of natural selection as an instrument which increased the efficiency of the cultural transmission system of early hominids. We suggest that during the early stages of hominization, hominid social learning, based on indirect social learning mechanisms and true imitation, came to constitute cumulative cultural transmission based on true imitation and the approval or disapproval of the learned behaviour of offspring. A key factor for this transformation was the development (...) of a conceptual capacity for categorizing learned behaviour in value terms - positive or negative, good or bad. We believe that some hominids developed this capacity for categorizing behaviour, and such an ability allowed them to approve or disapprove of their offsprings- learned behaviour. With such an ability, hominids were favoured, as they could transmit to their offspring all their behavioural experience about what can and cannot be done. This capacity triggered a cultural transmission system similar to the human one, though pre-linguistic. We suggest that the adaptive advantage provided by this new system of social learning generated a selection pressure in favour of the development of a linguistic capacity allowing children to better understand the new kind of evaluative information received from parents. (shrink)

Humans have developed the capacity to approve or disapprove of the behavior of their children and of unrelated individuals. The ability to approve or disapprove transformed social learning into a system of cumulative cultural inheritance, because it increased the reliability of cultural transmission. Moreover, people can transmit their behavioral experiences (regarding what can and cannot be done) to their offspring, thereby avoiding the costs of a laborious, and sometimes dangerous, evaluation of different cultural alternatives. Our thesis is that, during ontogeny, (...) the evaluative communication (approval/disapproval) between parents and offspring is substituted by other evaluative communications among peers, like individuals of the same generation. Each person belongs to a reference social group with individuals that interact more intensively. Humans have developed psychological mechanisms that enable cultural transmission by being receptive to parental advice as well as their reference social group. The selective pressure that promoted these new evaluative interactions arose to facilitate the establishment of efficient cooperative relationships. In short, the social control of behavior is essential to understand human cultural transmission. (shrink)

We consider the evolutionary scheme of morality proposed by Tomasello to defend the idea that the ability to orient the learning of offspring using signs of approval/disapproval could be a decisive and necessary step in the evolution of human morality. Those basic forms of intentional evaluative feedback, something we have called assessor teaching, allow parents to transmit their accumulated experience to their children, both about the behaviors that should be learned as well as how they should be copied. The rationale (...) underlying this process is as follows: if a behavior is approved, then it is good; if it is disapproved, then it is bad. The evaluative guidance on how to behave most probably spread among peers in situations of mutual benefit, such as cooperative child rearing. We argue that our hominin ancestors provided with this capacity for assessor teaching were ideally positioned to develop the two specifically human levels of morality proposed by Tomasello: the morality of fairness and the morality of justice. Assessor teaching could have facilitated the genesis of rudimentary codes of behavior tied with the need to agree about how to behave to succeed in joint cooperative activities. Moreover, learning through assessor teaching provides a plausible explanation for the origin of the objectivist and prescriptive dimensions of human morality. First, we emphasize that individuals feel that they evaluate the behavior of others objectively to guide their learning, and, second, we underline the imperative intention that any moral manifestation possesses. (shrink)

Susan Hurley's shared circuits model (SCM) rightly begins in action and progresses through a series of layers; but it fails to reach action understanding because it relies on mirroring as a driving force, draws on heavily criticized theories, and neglects the need for shared experience in our grasp of social understanding.

Human “free will” has been made problematic by several recent arguments against mental causation, the unity of the I or “self,” and the possibility that conscious decision-making could be temporally prior to action. This paper suggests a pathway through this thicket for free will or self-determination. Doing so requires an account of mind as an emergent process in the context of animal psychology and mental causation. Consciousness, a palpable but theoretically more obscure property of some minds, is likely to derive (...) from complex animals’ real-time monitoring of internal state in relation to environment. Following Antonio Damasio, human mind appears to add to nonhuman “core consciousness” an additional narrative “self-consciousness.” The neurological argument against free will, most famously from Benjamin Libet, can be avoided as long as “free will” means, not an impossible event devoid of prior causation, but an occasional causal role played by narrative self-consciousness in behavioral determination. There is no necessary incompatibility between the scientific and evolutionary exploration of mind and consciousness and the uniquely self-determining capabilities of human mentality which are based on the former. (shrink)

To explain social learning without invoking the cognitively complex concept of imitation, many learning mechanisms have been proposed. Borrowing an idea used routinely in cognitive psychology, we argue that most of these alternatives can be subsumed under a single process, priming, in which input increases the activation of stored internal representations. Imitation itself has generally been seen as a This has diverted much research towards the all-or-none question of whether an animal can imitate, with disappointingly inconclusive results. In the great (...) apes, however, voluntary, learned behaviour is organized hierarchically. This means that imitation can occur at various levels, of which we single out two clearly distinct ones: the a rather detailed and linear specification of sequential acts, and the a broader description of subroutine structure and the hierarchical layout of a behavioural Program level imitation is a high-level, constructive mechanism, adapted for the efficient learning of complex skills and thus not evident in the simple manipulations used to test for imitation in the laboratory. As examples, we describe the food-preparation techniques of wild mountain gorillas and the imitative behaviour of orangutans undergoing to the wild. Representing and manipulating relations between objects seems to be one basic building block in their hierarchical programs. There is evidence that great apes suffer from a stricter capacity limit than humans in the hierarchical depth of planning. We re-interpret some chimpanzee behaviour previously described as and suggest that all great apes may be able to imitate at the program level. Action level imitation is seldom observed in great ape skill learning, and may have a largely social role, even in humans. (shrink)

The presence of general intelligence poses a major evolutionary puzzle, which has led to increased interest in its presence in nonhuman animals. The aim of this review is to critically evaluate this question and to explore the implications for current theories about the evolution of cognition. We first review domain-general and domain-specific accounts of human cognition in order to situate attempts to identify general intelligence in nonhuman animals. Recent studies are consistent with the presence of general intelligence in mammals. However, (...) the interpretation of a psychometricgfactor as general intelligence needs to be validated, in particular in primates, and we propose a range of such tests. We then evaluate the implications of general intelligence in nonhuman animals for current theories about its evolution and find support for the cultural intelligence approach, which stresses the critical importance of social inputs during the ontogenetic construction of survival-relevant skills. The presence of general intelligence in nonhumans implies that modular abilities can arise in two ways, primarily through automatic development with fixed content and secondarily through learning and automatization with more variable content. The currently best-supported model, for humans and nonhuman vertebrates alike, thus construes the mind as a mix of skills based on primary and secondary modules. The relative importance of these two components is expected to vary widely among species, and we formulate tests to quantify their strength. (shrink)

We trace the difference between the ways in which apes and humans co–operate to differences in communicative abilities, claiming that the pressure for future–directed co–operation was a major force behind the evolution of language. Competitive co–operation concerns goals that are present in the environment and have stable values. It relies on either signalling or joint attention. Future–directed co–operation concerns new goals that lack fixed values. It requires symbolic communication and context–independent representations of means and goals. We analyse these ways of (...) co–operating in game–theoretic terms and submit that the co–operative strategy of games that involve shared representations of future goals may provide new equilibrium solutions. (shrink)

Intentional communication is perceptually based and about attentional objects. Three attention mechanisms are distinguished: scanning, attention attraction, and attention-focusing. Attention-focusing directs the subject towards attentional objects. Attention-focusing is goal-governed (controlled by stimulus) or goal-intended (under the control of the subject). Attentional objects are perceptually categorised functional entities that emerge in the interaction between subjects and environment. Joint attention allows for focusing on the same attentional object simultaneously (mutual object-focused attention), provided that the subjects have focused on each other beforehand (subject-subject (...) attention). It results in intentional communication if the subjects attend to each other as subjects (i) capable of attending, and (ii) attending in a goal-intended way. Intentional communication is fundamentally imperative and adapted to action. (shrink)

A common deflationary tendency has emerged recently in both philosophical accounts and comparative animal studies concerned with how subjects understand the actions of others. The suggestion emerging from both arenas is that the default mechanism for understanding action involves only a sensitivity to the observable, behavioural (non-mental) features of a situation. This kind of ‘smart behaviour reading’ thus suggests that, typically, predicting or explaining the behaviour of conspecifics does not require seeing the other through the lens of mental state attribution. (...) This paper aims to explore and assess this deflationary move. In §1 I clarify what might be involved in a smart behaviour reading account via looking at some concrete examples. Then in §2 I critically assess the deflationary move, arguing that, at least in the human case, it would in fact be a mistake to assume that our default method of action understanding proceeds without appeal to mental state attribution. Finally in §3 I consider briefly how the positive view proposed here relates to discussions about standard two-system models of cognition. (shrink)

We aim to show that far-related primates like humans and the capuchin monkeys show interesting correspondences in terms of artifact characterization and categorization. We investigate this issue by using a philosophically-inspired definition of physical artifact which, developed for human artifacts, turns out to be applicable for cross-species comparison. In this approach an artifact is created when an entity is intentionally selected and some capacities attributed to it (often characterizing a purpose). Behavioral studies suggest that this notion of artifact is not (...) specific to the human kind. On the basis of the results of a series of field observations and experiments on wild capuchin monkeys that routinely use stone hammers and anvils, we show that the notions of intentional selection and attributed capacity appear to be at play in capuchins as well. The study also suggests that functional criteria and contextualization play a fundamental role in terms of artifact recognition and categorization in nonhuman primates. (shrink)

Communication by shared meaning, themastery of word semantics,metarepresentation and metamentation aremental abilities, uniquely human, that share a sense ofintentionality or reference. The latteris developed by a naive psychology or interpretation – acompetence dedicated to representingintentional relations between conspecifics and the world. Theidea that interpretation builds new mentalabilities around a sense of reference is based on three linesof analysis – conceptual, psychological andevolutionary. The conceptual analysis reveals that a senseof reference is at the heart of the abilitiesin question. Psychological data track (...) tight developmentalcorrelations between interpretation and theabilities it designs. Finally, an evolutionary hypothesislooks at why interpretation designed thosenew abilities around a sense of reference. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that we can learn much about wild justice and the evolutionary origins of social morality – behaving fairly – by studying social play behavior in group-living animals, and that interdisciplinary cooperation will help immensely. In our efforts to learn more about the evolution of morality we need to broaden our comparative research to include animals other than non-human primates. If one is a good Darwinian, it is premature to claim that only humans can be empathic (...) and moral beings. By asking the question What is it like to be another animal? we can discover rules of engagement that guide animals in their social encounters. When I study dogs, for example, I try to be a dogocentrist and practice dogomorphism. My major arguments center on the following big questions: Can animals be moral beings or do they merely act as if they are? What are the evolutionary roots of cooperation, fairness, trust, forgiveness, and morality? What do animals do when they engage in social play? How do animals negotiate agreements to cooperate, to forgive, to behave fairly, to develop trust? Can animals forgive? Why cooperate and play fairly? Why did play evolve as it has? Does being fair mean being more fit – do individual variations in play influence an individual''s reproductive fitness, are more virtuous individuals more fit than less virtuous individuals? What is the taxonomic distribution of cognitive skills and emotional capacities necessary for individuals to be able to behave fairly, to empathize, to behave morally? Can we use information about moral behavior in animals to help us understand ourselves? I conclude that there is strong selection for cooperative fair play in which individuals establish and maintain a social contract to play because there are mutual benefits when individuals adopt this strategy and group stability may be also be fostered. Numerous mechanisms have evolved to facilitate the initiation and maintenance of social play to keep others engaged, so that agreeing to play fairly and the resulting benefits of doing so can be readily achieved. I also claim that the ability to make accurate predictions about what an individual is likely to do in a given social situation is a useful litmus test for explaining what might be happening in an individual''s brain during social encounters, and that intentional or representational explanations are often important for making these predictions. (shrink)

In this essay I consider various aspects of the rapidly growing field of cognitive ethology, concentrating mainly on evolutionary and comparative discussion of the notion of intentionality. I am not concerned with consciousness, per se, for a concentration on consciousness deflects attention from other, and in many cases more interesting, problems in the study of animal cognition. I consider how, when, where, and (attempt to discuss) why individuals from different taxa exchange social information concerning their beliefs, desires, and goals. My (...) main examples come from studies of social play in mammals and antipredator behavior in birds. Basically, I argue that although not all individuals always display behavior patterns that are best explained by appeals to intentionality, it is misleading to argue that such explanations have no place in the study of animal cognition. (shrink)

Literature on the mental capacities and cognitive mechanisms of the great apes has been silent about whether they can act autonomously. This paper provides a philosophical theory of autonomy supported by psychological studies of the cognitive mechanisms that underlie chimpanzee behavior to argue that chimpanzees can act autonomously even though their psychological mechanisms differ from those of humans. Chimpanzees satisfy the two basic conditions of autonomy: (1) liberty (the absence of controlling influences) and (2) agency (self-initiated intentional action), each of (...) which is specified here in terms of conditions of understanding, intention, and self-control. In this account, chimpanzees make knowledge-based choices reflecting a richly information-based and socially sophisticated understanding of the world. Finally, two major theories of autonomy (Kantian theory and two-level theory) are rejected as too narrow to adequately address these issues, necessitating the modifications made in the present approach. (shrink)

In order to determine whether current (or future) machines have a welfare that we as agents ought to take into account in our moral deliberations, we must determine which capacities give rise to interests and whether current machines have those capacities. After developing an account of moral patiency, I argue that current machines should be treated as mere machines. That is, current machines should be treated as if they lack those capacities that would give rise to psychological interests. Therefore, they (...) are moral patients only if they have non-psychological interests. I then provide an account of what I call teleo interests that constitute the most plausible type of non-psychological interest that a being might have. I then argue that even if current machines have teleo interests, they are such that agents need not concern themselves with these interests. Therefore, for all intents and purposes, current machines are not moral patients. (shrink)

Prior to the twentieth century, theories of knowledge were inherently perceptual. Since then, developments in logic, statis- tics, and programming languages have inspired amodal theories that rest on principles fundamentally different from those underlying perception. In addition, perceptual approaches have become widely viewed as untenable because they are assumed to implement record- ing systems, not conceptual systems. A perceptual theory of knowledge is developed here in the context of current cognitive science and neuroscience. During perceptual experience, association areas in the (...) brain capture bottom-up patterns of activation in sensory-motor areas. Later, in a top-down manner, association areas partially reactivate sensory-motor areas to implement perceptual symbols. The stor- age and reactivation of perceptual symbols operates at the level of perceptual components – not at the level of holistic perceptual expe- riences. Through the use of selective attention, schematic representations of perceptual components are extracted from experience and stored in memory (e.g., individual memories of green, purr, hot). As memories of the same component become organized around a com- mon frame, they implement a simulator that produces limitless simulations of the component (e.g., simulations of purr). Not only do such simulators develop for aspects of sensory experience, they also develop for aspects of proprioception (e.g., lift, run) and introspec- tion (e.g., compare, memory, happy, hungry). Once established, these simulators implement a basic conceptual system that represents types, supports categorization, and produces categorical inferences. These simulators further support productivity, propositions, and ab- stract concepts, thereby implementing a fully functional conceptual system. Productivity results from integrating simulators combinato- rially and recursively to produce complex simulations. Propositions result from binding simulators to perceived individuals to represent type-token relations. Abstract concepts are grounded in complex simulations of combined physical and introspective events. Thus, a per- ceptual theory of knowledge can implement a fully functional conceptual system while avoiding problems associated with amodal sym- bol systems. Implications for cognition, neuroscience, evolution, development, and artificial intelligence are explored. (shrink)

Various defenses of amodal symbol systems are addressed, including amodal symbols in sensory-motor areas, the causal theory of concepts, supramodal concepts, latent semantic analysis, and abstracted amodal symbols. Various aspects of perceptual symbol systems are clarified and developed, including perception, features, simulators, category structure, frames, analogy, introspection, situated action, and development. Particular attention is given to abstract concepts, language, and computational mechanisms.

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 (...) even the complexity of the structures of manufactured object are not exclusive to human beings. I will suggest a different way of analyzing objects created by non-human animals, one that tries to explain the gradualness of the structure, but also the plasticity of the behavior exhibited by non-human animals. These two elements allow a deeper understanding of the great variety of objects that other animals also manufacture and use. (shrink)

We provide an account of chimpanzee-specific agency within the context of philosophy of action. We do so by showing that chimpanzees are capable of what we call reason-directed action, even though they may be incapable of more full-blown action, which we call reason-considered action. Although chimpanzee agency does not possess all the features of typical adult human agency, chimpanzee agency is evolutionarily responsive to their environment and overlaps considerably with our own. As such, it is an evolved set of capacities (...) for goal-directed behavior, which solves problems that chimpanzees naturally encounter. Thus, it ought not be understood as a deficient instance of human agency. (shrink)

The central claim of my paper is that pragmatics has a wider scope of application than has been generally appreciated. In particular, I will argue that many discussions of pragmatics are guilty of a problematic form of provincialism. The provincialism at issue restricts the class of target systems of study to those involving groups of developmentally typical humans (or slightly idealized versions thereof), either explicitly as a matter of principle or implicitly as consequence of how it construes the underlying pragmatic (...) notions. In what follows, I will argue that this kind of provincialism is problematic because there are patterns of non-human animal social interaction that cannot be properly explained without recourse to the theoretical tool-kit of pragmatics. Crucially, rejecting provincialism about pragmatics does not entail that there are not important theoretical differences between human and non-human systems of pragmatics. It does, however, require that our core philosophical theories of social interaction and communication be centered on features independent not merely of those at work in human languages but also of uniquely human features of cognition and sociality more generally. (shrink)

This paper explores the significance of intelligent social behavior among non-human animals for philosophical theories of communication. Using the alarm call system of vervet monkeys as a case study, I argue that interpersonal communication (or what I call “minded communication”) can and does take place in the absence of the production and recognition of communicative intentions. More generally, I argue that evolutionary theory provides good reasons for maintaining that minded communication is both temporally and explanatorily prior to the use of (...) communicative intentions. After developing these negative points about the place of communicative intentions in detail, I provide a novel alternative account according to which minded communication is characterized in terms of patterns of action and response that function to coordinate the representational mental states of agents. I show that an account which centers on patterns of representational coordination of this sort is well suited to capture the theoretical roles associated with minded communication and that it does so in a way that provides a good fit with comparative facts about the presence of minded communication among non-human animals. (shrink)

As the cognitive revolution was slow to come to the study of animal behavior, the vast majority of what we know about primate cognition has been discovered in the last 30 years. Building on the recognition that the physical and social worlds of humans and their living primate relatives pose many of the same evolutionary challenges, programs of research have established that the most basic cognitive skills and mental representations that humans use to navigate those worlds are already possessed by (...) other primates. There may be differences between humans and other primates, however, in more complex cognitive skills, such as reasoning about relations, causality, time, and other minds. Of special importance, the human primate seems to possess a species-unique set of adaptations for “cultural intelligence,” which are broad reaching in their effects on human cognition. (shrink)

Primatologists generally agree that monkeys lack higher-order intentional capacities related to theory of mind. Yet the discovery of the so-called "mirror neurons" in monkeys suggests to many neuroscientists that they have the rudiments of intentional understanding. Given a standard philosophical view about intentional understanding, which requires higher-order intentionahty, a paradox arises. Different ways of resolving the paradox are assessed, using evidence from neural, cognitive, and behavioral studies of humans and monkeys. A decisive resolution to the paradox requires substantial additional empirical (...) work and perhaps a rejection of the standard philosophical view. (shrink)