WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 27, 1999

READING ASSIGNMENT #3. Donald R. Griffin. Animal Minds. Preface & Chapters 1-3.
 

Preface, pp. vii-x.

What is cognitive ethology?

The analysis of cognitive processes in animals.
 

Characterize the following three schools of thought concerning animal mentality: the commonsense position; the strict behaviorist position; and the position of cognitive [comparative] psychology.

Commonsense holds that animals think about what they do and the results of their actions, especially when animals adapt their actions to varying and unpredictable circumstances Strict behaviorists treat the animal mind as a black box, and hold that science can deal only with external influences and overt behavior. Cognitive psychologists hold that the insides of the 'black box' are crucially important to understanding the behavior of animals and humans.
 

What does the unconscious character of the vast majority of human brain functioning show about animal mentality?

Many scientists think it shows that it's possible that all animal cognition is unconscious.
 

Why are some cognitive ethologists and cognitive comparative psychologists unwilling to move beyond cognition to consciousness in animals?

They are still in the methodological grip of strict behaviorism.
 

Why is Griffin so interested in animal communicative behavior that expresses thoughts and/or feelings, and in highly versatile animal behavior?

He thinks they provide the best evidence of animal consciousness. {Note the relevance of Descartes's Two Tests to these two types of evidence.}
 

Chapter One: Animal Mentality, pp. 1-27.

What does Griffin think is required to know or to understand another species fully?

We must know their thoughts and feelings -- if they should have any.
 

What is the prevailing view in science about animal minds?

That they are thoroughly unconscious.
 

What is the aim of Griffin's book?

The aim is "to reopen the basic question of what life is like, subjectively, to nonhuman animals, and to outline how we can begin to answer this challenging question by analyzing the versatility of animal behavior, especially the communicative signals by which animals sometimes appear to express their thoughts and feelings."
 

What does Griffin take to be the most basic and essential feature of consciousness?

Thinking about objects and events, i.e., intentionality; such thinking is usually accompanied by feelings toward the objects or events thought about.
 

What significance does Griffin attach to the fact that -- so far as we know -- the basic structure & functioning of neurons & synapses are similar [to the basic structure & functioning of neurons & synapses in humans] in all animals with organized central nervous systems?

Griffin thinks it suggests that animals have conscious thoughts. [Argument from analogy.]
 

How important is the conscious component of central nervous system functioning?

It's what makes life real, important, and worth living.
 

What is emergent materialism? What does it rule out? What's Griffin's attitude toward it?

Emergent materialism holds that behavior and consciousness, whether human or animal, result entirely from events in their central nervous systems. It rules out immaterial, spiritual, and vitalistic principles of thought and behavior. Griffin takes this view for granted.
 

What does Griffin think are the consequences of the scientific taboo against considering the subjective experiences of animals?

It has become a serious impediment to scientific investigation and progress.
 

Computer analogies have been central to cognitive scientists who by and large are methodological behaviorists. What is methodological behaviorism?

It is "the reliance on observations of behavior as [the only legitimate] data about internal mental states and processes without following the strict behaviorists in denying their existence or importance."
 

Are mental images directly observable? Can cognitive science deal with them? How?

The are indirectly observable. E.g., by postulating mental images and operations on them, one can predict and make sense of many otherwise inexplicable phenomena.
 

What is meant by Consciousness 3 or perceptual consciousness?

Awareness of one's perceptions, thoughts, and/or feelings.
 

What is meant by Consciousness 4 or reflective consciousness?

An awareness that one is perceiving or thinking or feeling in a certain way.
 

What's the relation between reflective consciousness and knowing that one knows?

They are roughly equivalent.
 

Does the evidence marshalled by Griffin bear on reflective consciousness or perceptual consciousness?

For the most part, on perceptual consciousness only. Therefore, the species chauvinist can still hold out for the uniqueness of reflective consciousness or introspection in humans.
 

Can one hold that an animal species lacks reflective consciousness but has perceptual consciousness of some of its own actions or behaviors?

Not easily. Such animals would doubtless be aware of agency in other animals (e.g., who is copulating with whom) while being strangely ignorant of their own agency.
 
 
 

Ruth Millikan occupies an intermediate position with respect to animal thoughts, viz., animals have them but their thoughts are quite different from ours, e.g., unlike us, animals can't combine beliefs to get new beliefs, and they don't distinguish indicative from imperatival illocutionary force in their communications. Are these claims true?

Animals clearly combine beliefs. The second claim is harder to evaluate.
 

What approach does Griffin take to trying to understand what life is like, subjectively, for various animals?

On the tentative hypothesis that certain animals are "conscious, mindful creatures with their own points of view", Griffin "will attempt to infer, as far as the available evidence permits, what it is like to be an animal of a particular species under various conditions." In particular, he will distinguish what animals do, from what happens to them.
 

Formulate what Griffin calls the three major points or dogmas of behaviorism.

(1) Learning & experience account for almost all behavior not directly controlled by the animal's structural capabilities; (2) Only external influences and directly observable behavior should be considered in explained what animals or people do; behavioral scientists should limit their concern to observable inputs to and outputs from the black box known as the organism; and (3) Subjective mental experiences, especially conscious thinking, should be eschewed for two reasons: {a} since they are unmeasurable and private phenomena, statements about them cannot be verified; and {b} they have no influence on behavior, i.e., they are epiphenomenal byproducts of brain function.
 

What is the current status of these three behaviorist dogmas?

(1) has been abandoned, because much animal learning is species specific, and animals learn some things more easily than others. (2) has also been largely abandoned because of the cognitive revolution. (3) remains in force as an effective taboo.
 

What is Donald Davidson's position about human-like language and thought?

They are inextricably bound together.
 

How does Griffin modify Karl Popper's position about the adaptiveness of thinking?

Thinking enables animals to run hypothetical scenarios in their minds in order to evaluate alternative courses of possible action in given circumstances, thereby substituting mental trial-and-error for dangerous physical trial-and-error in the real world.
 

What's Griffin's attitude toward the behaviorist rejection of hypotheses about conscious experience in animals on the grounds that behaviorists can't conceive how such hypotheses could possibly be confirmed or disconfirmed?

He thinks it shows their poverty of imagination.
 

What does evolutionary continuity suggest about consciousness?

Consciousness is found in one species, so it's probably found in others, too, at least to some degree .
 

What are Clever Hans errors? What does Griffin mean by the inverse Clever Hans error?

Clever Hans errors are inferences to conceptual thought from phenomena caused by experimenter expectancy. The inverse Clever Hans error is apparently the inference from the inability to do arithmetic to the total absence of thoughts.
 

What importance does Griffin attach to communicative behavior?

We frequently make useful and correct inferences to the conscious thoughts of other people by observing their behavior, especially their communicative behavior. The same approach is valid for animals. "To the extent that [animal] communicative signals convey conscious thoughts and subjective feelings, they can be used as objective, independently verifiable evidence about the mental experiences of the animals themselves."
 

What three types of evidence does Griffin think are the most promising evidence of conscious thought in animals?

(1) "Versatile adaptability of behavior to novel challenges"; (2) "Physiological signals from the brain that may be correlated with conscious thinking"; and (3) "data concerning communicative behavior by which animals sometimes appear to convey to others at least some of their thoughts". [Cf. Descartes's Two Tests]