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Does the sentience framework imply all animals are sentient?
The eight criteria proposed in Crump et al.'s framework for evaluating pain sentience in decapod crustaceans are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to markers that could increase confidence in an animal's sentience more generally. Some of the commentaries have already pointed out that pain is only one kind of sentience (Souza Valente). It has also already been pointed out that there are other criteria for pain that could be usefully added to the framework's eight (Burrell). This expansive thinking about criteria that can be used to increase confidence in sentience raisess the question: in an expansive framework for evaluating sentience generally, will there be any animals we could study where confidence wouldn't be increased were we to use a general model of evaluating sentience via marker frameworks? I consider how the general approach could increase confidence in the sentience of animals such as C. elegans and Porifera.
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Does the sentience framework imply all animals are sentient?
The eight criteria proposed in Crump et al.'s framework for evaluating pain sentience in decapod crustaceans are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to markers that could increase confidence in an animal's sentience more generally. Some of the commentaries have already pointed out that pain is only one kind of sentience (Souza Valente). It has also already been pointed out that there are other criteria for pain that could be usefully added to the framework's eight (Burrell). This expansive thinking about criteria that can be used to increase confidence in sentience raisess the question: in an expansive framework for evaluating sentience generally, will there be any animals we could study where confidence wouldn't be increased were we to use a general model of evaluating sentience via marker frameworks? I consider how the general approach could increase confidence in the sentience of animals such as C. elegans and Porifera.
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Chicken minds and moral standing
Some of the cognitive traits that Marino reviews are not in themselves relevant to ethics, either for chickens or human infants, but affective traits are, among them desires.
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Snipping or editing? Parsimony in the chimpanzee mind-reading debate: Elliott Sober: Ockham's razors: A user's manual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 322 pp, $ 29.99 PB, $ 99.99 HB
In: Metascience: an international review journal for the history, philosophy and social studies of science, Band 25, Heft 3, S. 377-386
ISSN: 1467-9981
The psychological concept of "person"
Reluctance to overextend personhood seems to drive many of the skeptical responses in the first round of commentaries on Rowlands's target article. Despite Rowlands's straightforward Response that we already accept some nonhumans as persons, there is still hesitation to accept that other nonhuman animals are persons. Rowlands's argument is sound but the skeptics don't accept the Lockean notion of person. The metaphysical sense of person is a psychological one, however, and psychological properties grant one moral status according to many ethical theories.
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Understanding Norms Without a Theory of Mind
In: Inquiry: an interdisciplinary journal of philosophy and the social sciences, Band 52, Heft 5, S. 433-448
ISSN: 1502-3923
Politics or Metaphysics? On Attributing Psychological Properties to Animals
Following recent arguments that there is no logical problem with attributing mental or agential states to animals, I address the epistemological problem of how to go about making accurate attributions. I suggest that there is a two-part general method for determining whether a psychological property can be accurately attributed to a member of another species: folk expert opinion and functionality. This method is based on well-known assessments used to attribute mental states to humans who are unable to self-ascribe due to an early stage of development or impairment, and can be used to describe social and emotional development as well as personality. I describe how instruments such as the Child Behavior Checklist, which relies on intersubjective expert opinion, could be modified to assess other species subjects. The measures are validated via the accuracy of the predictions that are derived, which is an example of the functionality of attribution. I respond to theoretical criticisms against use of this method, and argue that if the method counts as good science for infant cognition research, then it should count as good science for animal cognition research as well. Correspondingly, if the method doesn't count as good science for animal cognition research, then we must be very skeptical of its use with nonverbal humans
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It's in your nature: a pluralistic folk psychology
In: Synthese: an international journal for epistemology, methodology and philosophy of science, Band 165, Heft 1, S. 13-29
ISSN: 1573-0964
If Skill is Normative, Then Norms are Everywhere
In: Analyse & Kritik: journal of philosophy and social theory, Band 43, Heft 1, S. 203-218
ISSN: 2365-9858
Abstract
Birch sketches out an ingenious account of how the psychology of social norms emerged from individual-level norms of skill. We suggest that these individual-level norms of skill are likely to be much more widespread than Birch suggests, extending deeper into the hominid lineage, across modern great ape species, all the way to distantly related creatures like honeybees. This suggests that there would have been multiple opportunities for social norms to emerge from skill norms in human prehistory.
Animal Cognition
Debates in applied ethics about the proper treatment of animals often refer to empirical data about animal cognition, emotion, and behavior. In addition, there is increasing interest in the question of whether any nonhuman animal could be something like a moral agent.
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How Not to Find Over-Imitation in Animals
In: Human development, Band 68, Heft 2, S. 77-89
ISSN: 1423-0054
While more species are being identified as cultural on a regular basis, stark differences between human and animal cultures remain. Humans are more richly cultural, with group-specific practices and social norms guiding almost every element of our lives. Furthermore, human culture is seen as cumulative, cooperative, and normative, in contrast to animal cultures. One hypothesis to explain these differences is grounded in the observation that human children across cultures appear to spontaneously over-imitate silly or causally irrelevant behaviors that they observe. The few studies on over-imitation in other species are largely taken as evidence that spontaneous over-imitation is not present in other species. This leads to <i>the over-imitation hypothesis</i> – that the differences between human culture and animal cultures can be traced to the human unique tendency to over-imitate. In this paper, we analyze the current state of the literature on animal over-imitation and challenge the adequacy of the over-imitation hypothesis for the differences between humans and animal cultures. To make this argument, we first argue that the function of human over-imitation is norm-learning and that over-imitation, like skill-learning, should be subject to selective social learning effects. Then we review the empirical evidence against animal over-imitation and argue that these studies do not take into account the relevant variables given the normative and selective nature of over-imitation. We then analyze positive empirical evidence of over-imitation in great apes and canids from the experimental literature and conclude that the current body of evidence suggests that some canids and primates may have the capacity for over-imitation. This paper offers a methodological suggestion for how to study animal over-imitation, and a theoretical suggestion that over-imitation might be much more widely found among species. The larger implication for claims about human uniqueness suggests that if we do find widespread evidence of over-imitation across species, many of the current theories of human uniqueness that focus on human hyper-cooperation or social norms may have only identified a difference of degree, not of kind, between humans and other animals.
Introduction to Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches
In: Synthese: an international journal for epistemology, methodology and philosophy of science, Band 199, Heft 1-2, S. 1685-1700
ISSN: 1573-0964