Chapter 6. Concepts.
 

1. What does Griffin mean by 'concept'? Give some examples. What do concepts have to do with generalizations? With monadic categories such as food, predator, female, male, adult, and conspecific (one of us), or with polyadic categories like child-of, mother-of, mate-of, friend-of, and even mate-of-mother-of?
 

2. Griffin states that "Environmental conditions vary so much that for an animal's brain to have programmed specifications for optimal behavior in all situations would require an impossibly lengthy instruction book" and that "Whether such instructions stem from the animal's DNA or from learning and environmental influences within its own lifetime, providing for all likely contingencies would require a wasteful volume of specific directions." Relate these claims to Descartes's arguments for his Action Test. How might an animal's ability to form concepts, and to think in terms of concepts, help to solve this design problem? Explain the point of Griffin's analogy of a child's comprehension of the game of baseball and a several-hundred-page baseball rule-book? Is the analogy helpful?
 

3. Suppose that we identify a set of stimuli to which an animal responds in a characteristic way, e.g., it eats or at least tries to eat the things in the set. Does this show that the animal has the concept of food or that it thinks in terms of food?
 

4. The harem male in a colony of the neotropical fruit bat Carollia perspicillata has been observed to crawl discerningly to the mother of an infant who emits a distress call after it has fallen to the floor and to stimulate the mother to retrieve her child. Does this harem male have the monadic concept of a distress call? The dyadic concept mother-of or child-of?
 

5. Suppose Harnad is right about consciousness being an ineffectual epiphenomenon, i.e., that "only after the functioning of our brains has determined what we will do does an illusion of conscious awareness arise, along with the mistaken belief that we have made a choice or had control over our behavior." Does such epiphenomenalism mean that science should -- or even must -- ignore consciousness and subjectivity, human as well as animal?
 

6. According to Griffin, a hallmark of the cognitive revolution in psychology has been to analyze human & animal behavior in terms of information processing, and to apply mentalistic and intentional terms to computers and other information processors. As a consequence, subjective terms that are deemed inapplicable to computers (e.g., terms relating to emotions, feelings, and awareness) have also been deemed inapplicable to animals and even to humans -- in science anyway. Do these considerations help to explain the continuing scientific taboo against consciousness and subjectivity? Do they justify it?
 

7. Some behavioristic psychologists claim that "all animal thinking, and even most human thinking, is unconscious." These latter-day Cartesians redefine mind as information processing, asserting that "an analysis of how information is acquired, stored, and retrieved, and how it affects behavior, is ... all that is required to understand animal minds." Why does Griffin label many of them semantic behaviorists?
 

8. Savory calls the practice described in 6. and 7. the synechdochaic fallacy, i.e., the mistake of confusing a part of something with the totality. Instances of this fallacy are often expressed as X is nothing but Y, so it might also be called the nothing-but fallacy. Do you agree with Griffin that cognitive psychologists routinely commit the synechdochaic fallacy?
 

9. Edward Chace Tolman (1886-1959), U. of Cal. Berkeley psychologist and founder of purposive behaviorism (aka molar behaviorism, a precursor of cognitive psychology), substituted the goal-directed act (encompassing muscular movements organized around the purposes served and guided by cognitive processes) for John B. Watson's conditioned reflex as the unit of behavioral analysis. Tolman did not hesitate to say that his maze-trained rats expected certain outcomes, or that they intended or tried to achieve certain results while seeking to avoid others. Why, then, do you think that Tolman later called himself a cryptophenomenologist? (Historical note: Tolman's older brother, Cal Tech chemist-physicist Richard Chase Tolman (1881-1948), ascertained the mass of the electron and proved that it is the electron which carries the charge in electric currents in metals. Richard Tolman was the senior science advisor to General Leslie Groves who oversaw the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb. After WWII, he was briefly advisor to the tycoon and philanthropist Bernard Baruch, then U.S. representative to the UN Atomic Energy Commission.)
 

10. Do Tinklepaugh's experiments on simian expectation support Griffin's mentalistic account of the monkeys' behavior? Do they embarrass semantic behaviorists who are committed to a cognitive account of anticipation?
 

11. Griffin notes that many animals, invertebrates included, learn that food is available at a certain place at a certain time. Do you agree with his conclusion that "these animals really do expect food at a certain time and place and that they experience disappointment, annoyance, or other subjective emotions when their expectations are not fulfilled."
 

12. To illustrate his claim that "many animals react not to stereotyped patterns of stimulation but to objects [Griffin's emphasis] that they recognize despite wide variation in the detailed sensations transmitted to the central nervous system," Griffin says that "to an alert tommy [a Thompson's gazelle], a lion is a lion whether seen side or head on, whether distant or close, standing still or walking" and that the tommy's "perceptions of lions are obviously separated into at least two categories: dangerous lions ready to attack, and others judged to be less dangerous on the basis of subtle cues not obvious to a human observer without considerable experience." For the sake of argument, concede to Griffin that "the ability to abstract salient features from a complex pattern of stimulation, often involving more than one sense, requires a refined ability to sort and evaluate sensory information so that only particular combinations lead to the appropriate response." Does this impressive cognitive ability entail anything about perceptual or reflective consciousness? What does Griffin seem to think about this? What would Descartes have thought?
 

13. Griffin says that reversal-learning experiments on rats also suggest conscious thinking. Describe these experiments. How do you evaluate them?
 

14. Griffin notes that a variety of experiments have shown "that laboratory animals can learn relatively abstract rules, such as oddity or the difference between a regular and an irregular pattern." He notes further that pigeons don't do very well at these odd-one-out problems, but they nevertheless do better than cats and raccoons. Chimpanzees do very well at these problems and have even "learned to generalize to oddity as such." Describe these experiments. Do they support the hypothesis of conceptual thinking? Of conscious thinking? Are pigeons more sophisticated thinkers than cats and raccoons? Are chimpanzees more sophisticated thinkers than any of these other animals?
 

15. Contra psychologists who express surprise that even lowly goldfish can learn to distinguish perfect squares and perfect circles from squares and circles with bulges or indentations, Griffin says such discriminative abilities should occasion no surprise because "fish can discriminate many types of pattern that signal food or danger" and more generally because "the natural life of almost any active animal requires it to discriminate among a wide variety of objects and to decide that some are edible, others dangerous, and so forth." Who's right?
 

16. What is a Skinner box? What are they used for? What are their advantages and their disadvantages? What do psychologists mean by contingencies of reinforcement? What is variable-ratio reinforcement? Is it as effective as constant reinforcement? Why do psychologists refer to Skinner-box animals as 'food deprived' or 'maintained at 80% of free-feeding weight' rather than as hungry? Why do they say that behavior is 'reinforced' rather than rewarded? Do they say that the pigeon in a Skinner box desires or wants the food hopper to open, or that it believes that pecking the key will produce the food it wants?
 

17. Griffin thinks that the work of Straub & Terrace who "trained pigeons to peck at colored keys in the wall of the Skinner box and to do so while following a particular sequence of colors" plausibly suggests that the pigeons had thoughts something like "I must peck first at red, wherever it is, then blue, next yellow and then green." Evaluate this claim. What bearing does it have on perceptual or reflective consciousness?
 

18. Experiments have established that "hungry pigeons peck the key as though eating, thirsty birds as though drinking." Because of the importance of food and water to these birds, Griffin says that "it seems quite reasonable to infer that they were thinking about eating or drinking when operating the Skinner box mechanism to satisfy their hunger or thirst." Do you agree. What bearing does all this have on perceptual or reflective consciousness?
 

19. Experiments by Herrnstein and others have demonstrated that pigeons are capable of what Herrnstein calls concept learning. In particular, pigeons have learned to distinguish photographs of the following sorts: "(1) oak leaves from leaves of other trees..., (2) scenes with or without trees, (3) scenes with or without bodies of water, (4) pictures showing a particular person from others with no people or different individuals..., and (5) underwater scenes containing fish as contrasted with similar underwater pictures containing no fish". What do these results show about pigeon mentality, pigeon thought, and pigeon consciousness? What do they suggest about animals generally?
 

20. Pigeons also learned "to distinguish pictures of pigeons from other animals and birds." Although trained by pictures of 'normal' pigeons, these pigeons treated photographs of 'weird' pigeons (odd-looking, fancy breeds) as pictures of pigeons. Griffin thinks that this result "suggests recognition of a variety of pigeons as something equivalent to "one of us," although it has not been demonstrated that pigeons can learn more easily to recognize pictures of pigeons than other animals such as dogs or hawks. It is important to bear in mind that in all cases the crucial tests were carried out with brand new pictures, never shown to the pigeons before." Do pigeons have a concept like 'one of us'? If so, what does this suggest about perceptual or reflective consciousness? (Must what looks odd to us also look odd to an animal?)
 

21. What do you make of the fact that Herrnstein & colleagues have successfully "trained pigeons to follow "an abstract relational rule" by pecking at patterns in which one object was inside, rather than outside of a closed linear figure"?
 

22. Experiments have shown that pigeons can acquire, albeit with difficulty, the abstract concepts 'same' and 'different' by learning, when presented with a row of three pictures, to peck at whichever flanking picture was the same as the central picture. What does this show about conceptual thinking in pigeons? About perceptual or reflective consciousness? Could the pigeons be learning to distinguish 'more' and 'less' rather than 'same' and 'different'? How could one tell?
 

23. Griffin suggests that the reason why pigeons do better at recognizing categories of objects than at mastering relations like 'same' and 'different' is that "[n]oticing which two of three objects are the same does not have any particular salience in the real world, where animals live under natural conditions", whereas "learning to recognize some category of important objects such as food or predators is often a matter of life and death." Griffin notes that experiments have also shown that "pigeons could more easily distinguish one kind of bird from another than make more general distinctions such as birds versus other kinds of animal." Do the "results of these experiments make excellent sense from the perspective of a naturalist"? Would Oskar Pfungst have agreed with Griffin when the latter says that "[e]xperiments on animal learning will probably become more significant when they employ stimuli and discriminations comparable to those that are important in the natural lives of the animals concerned"?
 

24. Surprisingly, Griffin seems to equate a pigeon's thinking thoughts like 'Pecking that thing gets me food' with its classifying things into those that produce food and those that don't produce food. Wouldn't even a strict behaviorist concede that animals think in the foregoing sense? Griffin says that "it is difficult to imagine learning to solve such problems [as in 17.-23.] without at least basic and elementary perceptual consciousness", but concedes that although "we cannot prove conclusively whether or not a pigeon making these categorical discriminations thinks consciously about the pictures or the features that lead it to peck or not, its brain must, at the very least, classify complex visual stimuli into one of two categories." What would Descartes and a strict behaviorist say about this concession and conclusion?
 

25. Why did the results of the foregoing pigeon experiments astonish and unsettle psychologists who viewed pigeons (and other animals) as simple learning machines?
 

26. The experiments on conceptual learning by pigeons have prompted some psychologists to inquire into what is meant by the acquisition of a concept and into whether the experiments show that pigeons have the concept of a tree, pigeon, etc. Evaluate Lea's proposal that the acquisition of a concept like 'tree' or 'food' be distinguished from a learned response to a stimulus attribute like color or shape if and only if "there is no simple single perceptual feature on which a discrimination could be based." Griffin says that Lea's proposal incorporates a negative criterion, thereby always permitting the skeptic to postulate that some simple feature that has escaped the notice of the investigators but has been recognized by the pigeons as a signal meaning 'pecking that gets me food'." Griffin claims that the skeptic "avoids granting that pigeons can understand simple concepts only by postulating a literally "superhuman" ability to discern some simple but single feature that is present in the positive but not the negative pictures." Do you agree with Griffin's criticism and analysis? Can you come up with a better proposal than Lea's for explaining concept acquisition?
 

27. Another skeptical interpretation of the experiments on pigeon conceptual learning attempts to explain away their apparent conceptual abilities by invoking "the remarkable ability of pigeons to learn and remember hundreds of specific pictures, and to respond appropriately to most of those that yielded food even weeks or months after they were last seen." Do you agree with Griffin that "the ability of pigeons to respond correctly to most if not all of new positive or negative pictures they have never seen before rules out an explanation based on a simple memory of specific pictures"?

28. One argumentative strategy used by skeptics about animal minds is to show that pigeons are capable of performances similar to those performances by apes that proponents of animal minds claim clearly demonstrate mind, e.g., mirror self-recognition by chimpanzees. Then they conclude that there's no need to posit mind when there is conditioning, especially operant conditioning. Why does Griffin agree with Premack that this strategy might backfire?
 

29. Wasserman et al. have shown that pigeons can learn to recognize and discriminate among four categories (e.g., pictures in which there appeared a cat or a flower or an automobile or a chair) at the same time. These investigators also showed that pigeons could "discriminate between pictures of human faces expressing strong emotions such as anger or sadness." Griffin remarks that "these experiments do show that fairly subtle categories of visual patterns can be learned by birds", but that, of course, "the training could not teach the birds anything about the emotions of the people photographed when sad or angry." Do the pigeons really need to learn what emotions are being expressed, i.e., might they already know this? After all, as Griffin himself remarks, the ability to make subtle bodily discriminations "probably stems from the very widespread need to evaluate the likelihood that a predator will attack or that a given spot is or is not something edible."
 

30. Probably no one would dissent from the conclusion of Wasserman & his colleagues that "the conceptual abilities of pigeons are more advanced than hitherto suspected". These investigators remark further that "these results suggest that many words in our language denote clusters of related visual stimuli which pigeons also see as highly similar." Does this mean that pigeons share with us many of the same concepts? Why do these scientists speak of the 'conceptual behavior' of the pigeons rather than of their conceptual thinking? Do you find it ironic that Wasserman boasts that, like "the more prudent of my professional colleagues", he has "tried to steer clear of the possibility of subjective experience in my animal subjects", and that he insists that "cognitive psychology need not be construed as mentalistic"?
 

31. Experiments have produced fascinating evidence that animals think "in terms of simple concepts such as numbers or even names of individuals." Griffin reports on the work of Otto Koehler & his colleagues at the U. of Freiburg (Germany) concerning "the abilities of birds to solve problems that required what he [Koehler] called "wordless thinking," meaning that they thought about objects and relationships but not in terms of words." For example, "birds were trained to select from a number of covered vessels the one having a certain number of spots on the lid. The spots varied in size, shape, and position, but a well-trained raven could reliably select the pot with any number from one to seven spots." On the basis of such experiments, Koehler concluded that "these birds had the concept of numbers from two to seven, which he called unnamed numbers." Do the birds really have these number concepts? Do they engage in abstract conceptual thinking?
 

32. Is Griffin right when he asserts that there is "little reason to suppose that thinking about unnamed numbers had been useful enough [to birds] in the past for natural selection to have favored it specifically"? Griffin claims further that "when it became important to think in this way to get food, ravens and a few other birds learned to do so, apparently employing general ability to learn simple concepts." Is it really possible to acquire abstract numerical concepts by utilizing a general ability to learn perceptual or physical concepts? For birds, are ravens endowed with unusually high intelligence? Do such comparisons make good sense?

33. Griffin notes that Capaldi & Miller, along with Davis, Mackenzie & Morrison, have recently "demonstrated that rats are capable of a simple form of discriminating what is sometimes called "numerosity" to distinguish it from the sort of counting by mentally assigning successive numbers as we usually do. Numerosity is a rudimentary type of concept that lies within the capabilities of at least some birds and mammals." Does Griffin fail to distinguish ordinal numbers from cardinal numbers? How does this distinction apply to the aforementioned experimental work on rats? Is cardinality more rudimentary than ordinality?
 

34. What is the significance of the fact that many zoo mammals recognize their names when used by their keepers? Do pet dogs and cats have this ability? What conclusion should we draw from the fact that "there is no convincing evidence that one animal addresses another by some individual name"?
 

35. To illustrate the sorts of relationships that animals can learn, Griffin mentions the fact that laboratory rats are able to learn that they can obtain food from a dispensing device only when an experimenter is NOT present. What does this ability show about rat minds?
 

36. Honeybees can integrate information derived in different ways at different times. Scout bees normally communicate to their sisters the location of a desirable food source by symbolically indicating (via stylized dancing) its direction from the beehive relative to the azimuth bearing of the sun. However, the azimuth bearing of the sun changes materially as the sun moves [rather, appears to move] across the sky. So when honeybees are prevented from making a contemporaneous report on the location of a desirable food source, do they later indicate what will then be the wrong direction by indicating the former direction of the food source? Mirabile dictu, they do not. Somehow making a rough & ready compensation for the sun's (apparent) motion during the period of delay, they indicate the present or actual direction of the food source from the beehive, not its former direction. They even manage to compensate for the fact that the rate of change in the azimuth bearing of the sun varies markedly with season, latitude, and time of day (presumably by utilizing in their calculations the rate of change observed when the scout bee flew to and from the food source). What does all this show about the integrative powers of honeybee minds?
 

37. Honeybees can remember food locations relative to landmarks. Under certain conditions, this ability enables scout bees to communicate to their sisters the direction of a desirable food source even when the sky is completely overcast. "Gould (1981) found that after displacement [of the beehive] to a new location under a completely overcast sky their directional communication is still expressed relative to the sun even when this direction must be remembered. Furthermore, this memory must include at least an approximate compensation for the time of day. This sort of directional communication cannot help to recruit completely naive bees [ones that aren't already familiar with the area], but in many cases the active foragers from a particular colony are likely to be familiar with major local landmarks, so that the information that food is available in a particular direction can presumably be interpreted as meaning to fly along a conspicuous linear landmark such as the edge of a wooded area bounding an open field." What does all this show about the mnemonic and integrative powers of honeybee minds?
 

38. Gould (1986) observed the initial flight directions of honeybees "captured as they left the hive to return to a desirable food source that they had been visiting for some time." The captured bees were "carried in dark closed boxes to another location" where they were "released, and their initial flight directions observed. The hive, the food site, and the experimental release point were located at the apices of an equilateral triangle, so that the direct route from the new location to the food source was 60 degrees different from the original flight direction from hive to food." So where did the released bees initially head? Most of them headed directly for the food source, i.e., they flew off in a direction 60 degrees different from the direction from their hive to the desirable food source. Variations on this experiment showed that the released bees head directly for the food source unless the release point is more than 4,000 meters from the hive, in which case they fly off randomly in many directions. Do you concur with Gould who" interprets these data as demonstrating that honeybees employ what are called "cognitive maps," that is, they have some sort of internal representation of the geometrical relationships of important objects and major landmarks, and use this to orient their flight when displaced to a novel location within the area with which they are familiar"? What does all this show about the mnemonic and integrative powers of honeybee minds?
 

39. A number of other experimenters have been unable to replicate the results that support Gould's hypothesis of cognitive maps in honeybees. In defense of his hypothesis, Gould tries to account for this experimental discrepancy on the grounds that "in his experiments [in contrast to those of the other experimenters] the local terrain did not provide specific landmarks that were within the resolution of honeybee pattern vision." Griffin suggests that "[p]erhaps differences in local topography or in the experience of the bees underly this difference in experimental results" and concludes that "the question remains an open one, and further experiments are needed to clarify the situation." How does the Duhem-Quine thesis bear upon these matters?
 

40. Where do you think that hungry rats [or other familiar mammals] would initially head upon release in situations analogous to those described in 38.? Do these animals construct and use cognitive maps? If so, why are people so impressed when insects construct and use them (if indeed they do)?
 

41. What do you now think that Griffin takes conceptual thinking to be? Are (some, many, all) animals capable of it? What bearing does it have on perceptual and/or reflective consciousness?

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