Conwy Lloyd Morgan (1852-1936): Influential British psychologist, Professor and later Vice-Chancellor of the U. of Bristol, careful experimenter in animal learning, and a principal founder of comparative psychology. Much of the technical vocabulary of contemporary animal science comes from Lloyd Morgan, e.g., 'trial-and-error learning', 'reinforcement', and 'inhibition.' In his 1894 book, Introduction to Comparative Psychology, Lloyd Morgan enunciated his celebrated and influential methodological canon, to wit:

MORGAN'S CANON: "In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of one which stands lower in the psychological scale."

Chagrined that scientists were (mis)using his canon to rule out all attributions to animals of highermental faculties, Lloyd Morgan added the following rider in his 1900 book, Animal Behavior:

RIDER TO MORGAN'S CANON: "To this [Morgan's canon] it may be added --

lest the range of the principle be misunderstood -- that the canon by no means

excludes the interpretation of a particular act as the outcome of the higher mental

processes if we already have independent evidence of their occurrence in the agent."

THINGS TO THINK ABOUT:

(1) How does Morgan's canon apply to the case of Clever Hans?

(2) Morgan's canon presupposes an ordering, from lower to higher, of psychical or mental faculties. Does there exist objective ordering(s) of this sort, i.e., ones that are not biassed or culturally determined or whimsical? What was Lloyd Morgan's own view of this matter?

(3) Does Morgan's canon really do what Lloyd Morgan wanted it to do, viz., to prevent scientists from using his canon to deny higher mental processes to animals when the evidence strongly supported such an attribution?
 

ON DECEPTION BY ANIMALS:

(1) What is meant by 'theory of mind' in cognitive ethology and comparative psychology?

(2) Massey claims that any episode of apparent bonafide deception by animals can always be

interpreted as the result of the animal following low-level procedural rules, i.e., without crediting the 'deceiving' animal with theory of mind. Evaluate this claim.

(3) What is the intellectual or scientific cost of interpreting episodes of apparent deception by

animals as the result of the animal's following procedural rules? [Hints: What additional hypotheses are needed to make the low-level interpretation go through? If the probabilities of events E1,...,En are P1,...,Pn and if these probabilities are independent of each other, what is the probability of the sequence of events <E1,...,En>?]

(4) What is the intellectual or scientific cost of interpreting an episode of apparent deception by animals as bonafide or genuine deception?

(5) What's the difference between local and global simplicity? Give examples. How do these two simplicity concepts apply to animal deception?