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Morgan’s Canon, meet Hume’s Dictum: avoiding anthropofabulation in cross-species comparisons

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Abstract

How should we determine the distribution of psychological traits—such as Theory of Mind, episodic memory, and metacognition—throughout the Animal kingdom? Researchers have long worried about the distorting effects of anthropomorphic bias on this comparative project. A purported corrective against this bias was offered as a cornerstone of comparative psychology by C. Lloyd Morgan in his famous “Canon”. Also dangerous, however, is a distinct bias that loads the deck against animal mentality: our tendency to tie the competence criteria for cognitive capacities to an exaggerated sense of typical human performance. I dub this error “anthropofabulation”, since it combines anthropocentrism with confabulation about our own prowess. Anthropofabulation has long distorted the debate about animal minds, but it is a bias that has been little discussed and against which the Canon provides no protection. Luckily, there is a venerable corrective against anthropofabulation: a principle offered long ago by David Hume, which I call “Hume’s Dictum”. In this paper, I argue that Hume’s Dictum deserves a privileged place next to Morgan’s Canon in the methodology of comparative psychology, illustrating my point through a discussion of the debate over Theory of Mind in nonhuman animals.

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Notes

  1. In practice, many comparative psychologists read the Canon in a stronger way, as recommending the default position that animal behavior is driven by lower processes unless evidence can be provided that only explanation in terms of higher processes is adequate. On the weaker reading adopted throughout this article, we should instead remain agnostic about results that could be explained by either higher or lower causes. I do not here explore the question as to which interpretation was intended by Morgan (for that see Richards (1989) and Radick (2000), who reach somewhat different conclusions).

  2. This vagueness could be either epistemic or metaphysical. If the disputed terms are natural kind terms, for instance, then they may really have sharp boundaries, and borderline cases are a temporary product of our ignorance of these kinds’ underlying natures. Alternatively, if defining a term requires ineliminable appeal to evaluatives—like “reliable” or “intelligent”—then vagueness may be a permanent feature of its associated concept.

  3. Listing these proponents together is not meant to suggest that there are not subtle differences amongst their positions—only that they share a common thread, denied by Povinelli and colleagues, that existing data from experiments on competitive situations alone provides good evidence that some non-human primates have a perceptual ToM.

  4. As degree of representational reliability is a robust source of vagueness, it is likely that the treatment of this section could be extended to debates over the possession by animals of other capacities characterized in terms of representational contents—including at least metacognition (similarly described as the ability to represent one’s own mental states) and episodic memory (often characterized in terms of the “what-when-where” information recorded in an episodic memory).

  5. Note that we should distinguish skepticism about whether a given experiment is powerful enough to assess some criterion from skepticism about whether animals possess the psychological ability the criterion was elected to assess. For example, Carruthers may be right that existing animal metacognition experiments can be explained in terms of first-order mechanisms, but wrong that this prevents these experiments from providing evidence that animals possess “genuine” metacognition (because this assumption rests on an inflated criterion for metacognition).

  6. Though I will not explore the implications here, semantic anthropocentrism and confabulation about human performance could also be combined with anthropomorphism. This triumvirate of biases would result in the worst outcome yet: a comparative methodology which both presumed an inflated account of some psychological capacity and attributed that inflated capacity to animals on the basis of insufficient evidence. While I suspect this kind of triple error is the mistake that Penn and Povinelli take their critical targets to have committed, this case falls apart if proponents do not share in their semantic anthropocentrism.

  7. The sense in which anthropofabulation is implicit or automatic requires some elaboration. Often, both errors that comprise anthropofabulation will be tacit—anthropofabulists will implicitly confabulate about the complexity of their own performance and implicitly presume that only similarly complex performance is worthy of the name. Penn and Povinelli, however, repeatedly complain that our understanding of ToM has relied too much on what they call “our species' inveterate intuitions about how our own ToM works” (2007, 732), so they cannot be accused of committing the former error unawares. However, there is little evidence that they have critically evaluated the latter semantic assumption that “genuine” ToM requires the kind of domain-general competence presumed by this inflated folk psychology.

  8. For a related discussion of comparisons between taxonomies, see Griffiths (1999, 216–219); and for an in-depth discussion of explanatory power, see Ylikoski and Kuorikoski (2010).

  9. Whiten’s “intervening variable” notion does require the integration of information across some range of perceptually disparate situations to justify the appeal to a hidden variable. However, Call and Tomasello (2008) contend that existing experiments already demonstrate that chimpanzees respond appropriately to the mental states of others across a variety of perceptually disparate situations by integrating a complex combination of cues, including eye-directions, body orientations, whether the line of gaze does or does not terminate in a plausible target, presence or absence of occluders, and the type of occluders involved.

  10. This is not to say that consensus stereotypes cannot change over time. For example, if we learned that the association between autism and ToM-deficits were a statistical artifact, or that ‘autism’ conflates distinct disorders with different etiologies, we might revise our stereotype to modify or exclude property 3.

  11. While the former, definitional form of anthropofabulation is more methodologically troublesome (because it semantically institutionalizes bias), the latter is also a serious and closely-related form of error that can similarly be avoided by attending to Hume’s Dictum.

  12. Unless, of course, verbal acuity is an essential component of the capacity being assessed.

  13. For a brief discussion on how compositional operators can support the accommodation of abstract taxonomies to underlying diversity, see Boyd (1999, 157–158). Note that differences in degree captured by such modifiers may or may not indicate qualitative differences; for example, the two architecturally distinct systems for human ToM postulated by Apperly and Butterfill (2009) might be mapped to ms+ and ms++, respectively.

  14. Indeed, a reviewer points out that Morgan himself would likely have been sympathetic to Hume’s position here. Morgan was well-aware that humans often overestimate their own prowess and that this can interfere with cross-species comparisons—warning that “to interpret animal behavior one must learn also to see one's own mentality at levels of development much lower than one's top-level of reflective self-consciousness. It is not easy, and savors somewhat of paradox" (Morgan 1930, 250).

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Colin Allen, Louise Barrett, Melinda Fagan, Anika Fiebich, Daniel Povinelli, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and discussion. The essay also benefitted from discussions on an early version presented at the 2011 Winter Conference on Animal Learning & Behavior. Finally, I thank the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung for the postdoctoral fellowship that partially supported this research.

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  1. University of Houston, 513 Agnes Arnold Hall, Houston, TX, 77204-3004, USA

    Cameron Buckner

  2. Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Cameron Buckner

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Buckner, C. Morgan’s Canon, meet Hume’s Dictum: avoiding anthropofabulation in cross-species comparisons. Biol Philos 28, 853–871 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-013-9376-0

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