Do Apes Read Minds?

Do Apes Read Minds?
Author: Kristin Andrews
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2012-07-20
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 026230483X

An argument that as folk psychologists humans (and perhaps other animals) don't so much read minds as see one another as persons with traits, emotions, and social relations. By adulthood, most of us have become experts in human behavior, able to make sense of the myriad behaviors we find in environments ranging from the family home to the local mall and beyond. In philosophy of mind, our understanding of others has been largely explained in terms of knowing others' beliefs and desires; describing others' behavior in these terms is the core of what is known as folk psychology. In Do Apes Read Minds? Kristin Andrews challenges this view of folk psychology, arguing that we don't consider others' beliefs and desires when predicting most quotidian behavior, and that our explanations in these terms are often inaccurate or unhelpful. Rather than mindreading, or understanding others as receptacles for propositional attitudes, Andrews claims that folk psychologists see others first as whole persons with traits, emotions, and social relations. Drawing on research in developmental psychology, social psychology, and animal cognition, Andrews argues for a pluralistic folk psychology that employs different kinds of practices (including prediction, explanation, and justification) and different kinds of cognitive tools (including personality trait attribution, stereotype activation, inductive reasoning about past behavior, and generalization from self) that are involved in our folk psychological practices. According to this understanding of folk psychology—which does not require the sophisticated cognitive machinery of second-order metacognition associated with having a theory of mind—animals (including the other great apes) may be folk psychologists, too.

Do Apes Read Minds?

Do Apes Read Minds?
Author: Kristin Andrews
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2012-07-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262017555

Andrews argues for a pluralistic folk psychology that employs different kinds of practices and different kinds of cognitive tools (including personality trait attribution, stereotype activation, inductive reasoning about past behavior, and generalization from self) that are involved in our folk psychological practices.

Apes, Language, and the Human Mind

Apes, Language, and the Human Mind
Author: Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 1998-06-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0198026978

Current primate research has yielded stunning results that not only threaten our underlying assumptions about the cognitive and communicative abilities of nonhuman primates, but also bring into question what it means to be human. At the forefront of this research, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh recently has achieved a scientific breakthrough of impressive proportions. Her work with Kanzi, a laboratory-reared bonobo, has led to Kanzi's acquisition of linguistic and cognitive skills similar to those of a two and a half year-old human child. Apes, Language, and the Human Mind skillfully combines a fascinating narrative of the Kanzi research with incisive critical analysis of the research's broader linguistic, psychological, and anthropological implications. The first part of the book provides a detailed, personal account of Kanzi's infancy, youth, and upbringing, while the second part addresses the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological issues raised by the Kanzi research. The authors discuss the challenge to the foundations of modern cognitive science presented by the Kanzi research; the methods by which we represent and evaluate the abilities of both primates and humans; and the implications which ape language research has for the study of the evolution of human language. Sure to be controversial, this exciting new volume offers a radical revision of the sciences of language and mind, and will be important reading for all those working in the fields of primatology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy of mind, and cognitive and developmental psychology.

Beautiful Minds

Beautiful Minds
Author: Maddalena Bearzi
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0674033795

Apes and dolphins: primates and cetaceans. Could any creatures appear to be more different? Yet both are large-brained intelligent mammals with complex communication and social interaction. In the first book to study apes and dolphins side by side, Maddalena Bearzi and Craig B. Stanford, a dolphin biologist and a primatologist who have spent their careers studying these animals in the wild, combine their insights with compelling results. Beautiful Minds explains how and why apes and dolphins are so distantly related yet so cognitively alike and what this teaches us about another large-brained mammal: Homo sapiens. Noting that apes and dolphins have had no common ancestor in nearly 100 million years, Bearzi and Stanford describe the parallel evolution that gave rise to their intelligence. And they closely observe that intelligence in action, in the territorial grassland and rainforest communities of chimpanzees and other apes, and in groups of dolphins moving freely through open coastal waters. The authors detail their subjects’ ability to develop family bonds, form alliances, and care for their young. They offer an understanding of their culture, politics, social structure, personality, and capacity for emotion. The resulting dual portrait—with striking overlaps in behavior—is key to understanding the nature of “beautiful minds.”

The Mind of the Chimpanzee

The Mind of the Chimpanzee
Author: Elizabeth V. Lonsdorf
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2010-08-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0226492818

Understanding the chimpanzee mind is akin to opening a window onto human consciousness. Many of our complex cognitive processes have origins that can be seen in the way that chimpanzees think, learn, and behave. The Mind of the Chimpanzee brings together scores of prominent scientists from around the world to share the most recent research into what goes on inside the mind of our closest living relative. Intertwining a range of topics—including imitation, tool use, face recognition, culture, cooperation, and reconciliation—with critical commentaries on conservation and welfare, the collection aims to understand how chimpanzees learn, think, and feel, so that researchers can not only gain insight into the origins of human cognition, but also crystallize collective efforts to protect wild chimpanzee populations and ensure appropriate care in captive settings. With a breadth of material on cognition and culture from the lab and the field, The Mind of the Chimpanzee is a first-rate synthesis of contemporary studies of these fascinating mammals that will appeal to all those interested in animal minds and what we can learn from them.

Armstrong's Materialist Theory of Mind

Armstrong's Materialist Theory of Mind
Author: Peter R. Anstey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2021-12-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0192843729

A Materialist Theory of Mind (1968) by David Armstrong is one of a handful of texts that began the physicalist revolution in the philosophy of mind. It is perhaps the most influential book in the field of the second half of the twentieth century. In this volume a distinguished international team of philosophers examine what we still owe to Armstrong's theory, and how to expand it, as well as looking back on how it came about. The first four chapters are historical in orientation, exploring how the book fits into the history of materialism in the twentieth century. The chapters that follow discuss perception, belief, the supposed explanatory gap between the physical and the mental, introspection, conation, causality, and functionalism.

Animal Minds & Animal Ethics

Animal Minds & Animal Ethics
Author: Klaus Petrus
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2014-03-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839424623

Animal minds and animal ethics - different origins, connecting similarities. Philosophers working on questions of animal ethics usually draw on research into animal cognition and subscribe to strong positions regarding animal minds. Whereas philosophers interested in the question of animal minds sometimes draw ethical conclusions from the positions they argue for. In spite of such overlaps, these two areas of research have grown up separately. One reason for this separation stems from the institutional distinction between theoretical and practical philosophy. The principal aim of this anthology is to build bridges between the fields and different philosophical approaches of animal ethics and of animal minds and cognition.

How to Study Animal Minds

How to Study Animal Minds
Author: Kristin Andrews
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2020-06-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 110857498X

Comparative psychology, the multidisciplinary study of animal behavior and psychology, confronts the challenge of how to study animals we find cute and easy to anthropomorphize, and animals we find odd and easy to objectify, without letting these biases negatively impact the science. In this Element, Kristin Andrews identifies and critically examines the principles of comparative psychology and shows how they can introduce other biases by objectifying animal subjects and encouraging scientists to remain detached. Andrews outlines the scientific benefits of treating animals as sentient research participants who come from their own social contexts and with whom we will be in relationship. With discussions of science's quest for objectivity, worries about romantic and killjoy theories, and debates about chimpanzee cognition between primatologists who work in the field and those in the lab, Andrews shows how scientists can address the different biases through greater integration of the subdisciplines of comparative psychology.

The Social Mind

The Social Mind
Author: Jane Suilin Lavelle
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317564251

We spend a lot of time thinking about other people: their motivations, what they are thinking, why they want particular things. Sometimes we are aware of it, but it often occurs without conscious thought, and we can respond appropriately to other people's thoughts in a diverse range of situations. The Social Mind: A Philosophical Introduction examines the cognitive capacities that facilitate this amazing ability. It explains and critiques key philosophical theories about how we think about other people's minds, measuring them against empirical findings from neuroscience, anthropology, developmental psychology and cognitive ethology. Some of the fascinating questions addressed include: How do we think about other people's minds? Do we put ourselves in another's shoes to work out what they think? When do we need to think about another person's thoughts? What kinds of thoughts do we attribute to others? Are they propositional attitudes like beliefs and desires as analytic philosophers have often assumed, or could they be something else? What sorts of neural mechanisms underlie our ability to think about other people's thoughts? How is the ability to think about other minds different for individuals on the autism Spectrum? Is a preoccupation with other people's thoughts a Western phenomenon or is it found in all cultures? How do children learn to think about other minds? Can non-human animals think about other minds? These questions are applied to case studies throughout the book, including mirror neurons, recent research on infant social cognition, false belief tasks, and cross-cultural studies. Covering complex interdisciplinary debates in an accessible and clear way, with chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary, The Social Mind: A Philosophical Introduction is an ideal entry point into this fast-moving and exciting field. It is essential reading for students of philosophy of mind and psychology, and also of interest to those in related subjects such as cognitive science, social and developmental psychology, and anthropology.