Robert W. Lurz

The philosophy of animal minds

This volume is a collection of fourteen new essays by leading philosophers on issues concerning the nature, the existence, and our knowledge of animal minds. The nature of animal minds has been a topic of interest to philosophers since the origins of philosophy, and recent years have seen significant philosophical engagement with the subject. However, there is no volume that represents the current state of play in this important and growing field. The purpose of this volume is to highlight the state of the debate. The issues which are covered include whether and to what degree animals think in a language or in iconic structures, possess concepts, are conscious and self-aware, metacognize, attribute states of mind to others, and have emotions, as well as issues pertaining to our knowledge of mental states in animals and the scientific standards for attributing them.

If chimpanzees are mindreaders, could behavioral science tell? Toward a solution of the logical problem

There is a persistent methodological problem in primate mindreading research, dubbed the ‘logical problem,’ over how to determine experimentally whether chimpanzees are mindreaders or just clever behavior-readers of a certain sort. The problem has persisted long enough that some researchers have concluded that it is intractable. The logical problem, I argue, is tractable but only with experimental protocols that are fundamentally different from those that have been currently used or suggested. In the first section, I describe what the logical problem is (and is not) and how it can, in principle, be solved. In the second section, I illustrate how a well-known experimental protocol by Hare et al. (2000) fails to solve the logical problem. In the third section, I do the same for a protocol by Heyes (1998). (I do the same in the appendix for a recently suggested protocol by Penn and Povinelli (2007).) In the fourth section, I describe a novel experimental protocol for visual perspective-taking and argue that it succeeds to discriminate between the relevant mindreading and behavior-reading hypotheses. In addition, this new experimental protocol employs procedures that are realistic enough to suppose that chimpanzees might very well succeed in passing them.

Begging the question: a reply to Lycan

There are two competing types of account of state consciousness on the philosophical market: higher-order representational (HOR) accounts and first-order representational (FOR) accounts.1 HOR accounts attempt to explain state consciousness in terms of a mental states relation to higherorder mental states. FOR accounts, on the other hand, attempt to explain state consciousness in terms of a mental states relations to environmental

I know you see it wrong! Children use others’ false perceptions to predict their behaviors

Research on childrens ability to attribute false mental states to others has focused exclusively on false beliefs. We developed a novel paradigm that focuses instead on another type of false mental state: false perceptions. From approximately 4years of age, children begin to recognize that their perception of an illusory object can be at odds with its true properties. Our question was whether they also recognize that another individual viewing the object will similarly experience a false perception. We tested 33 preschool children with a task in which distorting lenses caused a small object to appear large and a large object to appear small. To succeed, children needed to recognize that a naive agent would falsely perceive the relative size of the objects and to correctly anticipate the agents actions on that basis. Children performed significantly better than chance in our false perception test, and there was a developmental progression in performance from 4 to 5years of age similar to that seen in standard false belief tests. Our findings demonstrate that preschool children are capable of understanding that other individuals will be perceptually misled by illusory objects and that these false perceptions will influence their actions in predictable ways.

Egocentric bias across mental and non-mental representations in the Sandbox Task

In the Sandbox Task, participants indicate where a protagonist who has a false belief about the location of an object will look for that object in a trough filled with a substrate that conceals the hidden object’s location. Previous findings that participants tend to indicate a location closer to where they themselves know the object to be located have been interpreted as evidence of egocentric bias when attributing mental states to others. We tested the assumption that such biases occur as a result of reasoning about mental states specifically. We found that participants showed more egocentric bias when reasoning from a protagonist’s false belief than from their own memory, but found equivalent levels of bias when they were asked to indicate where a false film would depict the object as when they were asked about a protagonist’s false belief. Our findings suggest that that egocentric biases found in adult false belief tasks are more likely due to a general difficulty with reasoning about false representations than a specialised difficulty with reasoning about false mental states.

Origins of Objectivity

properties are indeed represented by individuals in perception, though this requires the perceptual systems of individuals to anticipate (without the individual predicting) the future movement and arrangements of the objects. However, in reply, one might wonder how, on Burge’s account, if the individual’s perceptual systems, and not the individual, anticipate such future events, the individual (i.e., the whole animal) is understood to represent these non-occurrent properties in perception. Spelke’s second (ii) use of ‘‘abstract’’ is found in her interpretation of the crossmodal transfer studies mentioned above. In those studies, an infant is initially habituated to feeling (but not seeing) common motion between two surfaces of an object that it holds and, as a result, comes to apprehends those surfaces as belonging to one cohesive object. In the transfer test, the infant is allowed to see (but not feel) those surfaces connected by a bar but without any distinguishing motion. In such cases, the infant responds to the test stimulus as if it were having the very same kind of representation (‘‘one cohesive body’’) that it had in the habituation phase. But for the representation to be the same kind in the habituation phase as in the transfer test, it must abstract away all reference to any distinctive sensory mode of presentation, and that is the job of cognition. ‘‘Mechanisms of thought,’’ Spelke writes, ‘‘do not center on a single modality but operate on the world as it is perceived, regardless of the sensory source of one’s perception’’ (1988, p. 215). Thus, infant performance in the studies appears most economically explained, according to Spelke, by the hypothesis that infants’ common representation of one cohesive body occurs in a central, amodal system (i.e., cognition). In comparison, Burge’s own explanation of infant performance appears unparsimonious: it is not clear what further explanatory 780 Book Review