Evolutionary epistemologists aim to explain the evolution of cognitive capacities underlying human knowledge and also the processes that generate knowledge, for example in science. There can be no doubt that our cognitive capacities are due in part to our evolutionary heritage. But this is an uninformative thesis. All features of organism have indeed been shaped by evolution. A substantive evolutionary explanation of cognition would have to provide details about the evolutionary processes involved. Evolutionary epistemology has not provided any details. Considering (...) progress of theorizing in science, evolutionary epistemologists have proposed many different analogies between natural selection and selection in science. As yet, the analogies have not been fruitful. The entire program of evolutionary epistemology is programmatic. Evolutionary epistemologists have also moved beyond explanation to justification, the primary issue in traditional epistemology. It turns out that their program presupposes that we can justify knowledge claims in traditional ways. Evolutionary biology is not a proper tool for the justification of beliefs. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against the holistic claim that the description and explanation of human behaviour is irreducibly social in nature. I focus on the more specific thesis that human behaviour is rule-guided and that 'rule' is an irreducibly social notion. Against this claim I defend a teleofunctional and reductionist view. Following Millikan (1990), who argues that 'rule' can be explicated in functional terms, I extend her argument to cover social rules as well, and argue that rules are laws. (...) I conclude that human rule-guided behaviour can be described and explained in functional, and in the end causal, i.e. causal-historical, terms. (shrink)

Problems are raised with the global workspace hypothesis of consciousness, for example about exactly how global the workspace needs to be for consciousness to suddenly be present. Problems are also raised with Carruthers's version that excludes conceptual representations, and in which phenomenal consciousness can be reduced to physical processes, with instead a different levels of explanation approach to the relation between the brain and the mind advocated. A different theory of phenomenal consciousness is described, in which there is a particular (...) computational system involved in which Higher Order Syntactic Thoughts are used to perform credit assignment on first order thoughts of multiple step plans to correct them by manipulating symbols in a syntactic type of working memory. This provides a good evolutionary reason for the evolution of this kind of computational module, with which, it is proposed, phenomenal consciousness is associated. Some advantages of this HOST approach to phenomenal consciousness are then described with reference not only to the global workspace approach, but also to Higher Order Thought theories. It is hypothesized that the HOST system which requires the ability to manipulate first order symbols in working memory might utilize parts of the prefrontal cortex implicated in working memory, and especially the left inferior frontal gyrus, which is involved in language and probably syntactical processing. Overall, the approach advocated is to identify the computations that are linked to consciousness, and to analyze the neural bases of those computations. [copyright: Copyright © 2020 Rolls.]. (shrink)

On the statute books, New Zealand has a strong regulatory system that protects nonhuman animals on farms. Animals are guaranteed the “Five Freedoms,” including freedom to express normal patterns of behavior. This theoretically strong protection is weakened considerably, however, through institutional structures and practices. A loophole in the law allowing practices that violate the Five Freedoms in “exceptional circumstances” is used frequently. The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry is the government agency that administers animal welfare regulation. This agency is also (...) responsible for increasing primary production, and the farming industry has undue influence with MAF. The National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee is appointed by MAF, and this group is also dominated by industry interests, with a view of animal welfare that excludes behavioral concerns. These factors result in a weakening of welfare requirements. Various solutions to increase protection are proposed, including a requirement that all science and public concerns be taken into account when making decisions on animal welfare and that animal welfare be regulated by an independent government body. (shrink)

Changes in attitudes toward animal welfare, with a greater emphasis on the importance of allowing animals to express normal patterns of behavior has led to an examination of the practice of keeping hens in battery cages. There is widespread scientific consensus that the conditions of confinement and the barren nature of battery cages severely restrict hens’ behavioral repertoire, and are thus detrimental to their welfare. The New Zealand Animal Welfare Act 1999, stipulates that animals must have “the opportunity to display (...) normal patterns of behaviour.” In spite of this provision, the New Zealand government has not acted in phasing out battery cages, arguing instead that there is insufficient evidence that welfare will be improved by a phase-out. There is evidence of strong industry pressure on the government, and the use of tactics common in policy considerations where changes are resisted by powerful interests. It is important that policy processes are better managed so that welfare changes are based on both public preferences and scientific knowledge, and ways of doing this are discussed. (shrink)

Intentionality (‘directedness’, ‘aboutness’) is both a central topic in contemporary philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, and one of the themes with which both analytic and Continental philosophers have separately engaged starting from Brentano and Edmund Husserl’s ground-breaking Logical Investigations (1901) through Roderick M. Chisholm, Daniel C. Dennett’s The Intentional Stance, John Searle’s Intentionality, to the recent work of Tim Crane, Robert Brandom, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, among many others. In this paper, I shall review recent discussions (...) of intentionality, including some recent explorations of the history of the concept (paying particular attention to Anselm), and suggest some ways the phenomenological approach of Husserl and Heidegger can still offer insights for contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness. (shrink)

The Brambell Report of 1965 recommended that animals should have the freedom to stand up, lie down, turn around, groom themselves and stretch their limbs. The Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC) developed these into the Five Freedoms, which are a framework for the analysis of animal welfare. The Five Freedoms are well known in farming, policy making and academic circles. They form the basis of much animal welfare legislation, codes of recommendations and farm animal welfare accreditation schemes, and are the (...) foundation of the Welfare Quality® assessment scheme. The Five Freedoms are also extensively employed for the education of veterinary and animal welfare science students. Hence they have proven to be of great practical utility. In this paper, the Five Freedoms framework is examined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for the analysis of animal welfare. Overall, the Five Freedoms are judged to be individually necessary and jointly sufficient as a framework for the analysis of animal welfare. FAWC has recently criticized the Five Freedoms for concentrating on negative aspects of welfare. However, it is shown here how the satisfaction of the Five Freedoms should lead to good welfare, from the animal’s point of view. The Five Freedoms are formulated as ideals of animal welfare. This has significant advantages that have likely contributed to their impact. However, the ideality of the Five Freedoms means that the framework is without power to determine what a satisfactory level of animal welfare is, in an ethical sense. (shrink)

A conception of the idiotic mind was used to substantiate late 19th-century theories of mental evolution. A new school of animal/comparative psychologists attempted from the 1870s to demonstrate that evolution was a mental as well as a physical process. This intellectual enterprise necessitated the closure, or narrowing, of the ‘consciousness gap’ between human and animal species. A concept of a quasi-non-conscious human mind, set against conscious intention and ability in higher animals, provided an explanatory framework for the human–animal continuum and (...) the evolution of consciousness. The article addresses a significant lacuna in the historiographies of intellectual disability, animal science, and evolutionary psychology, where the application of a conception of human idiocy to advance theories of consciousness evolution has not hitherto been explored. These ideas retain contemporary resonance in ethology and cognitive psychology, and in the theory of ‘speciesism’, outlined by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation (1975), which claims that equal consideration of interests is not arbitrarily restricted to members of the human species, and advocates euthanasia of intellectually disabled human infants. Speciesism remains at the core of animal rights activism today. The article also explores the influence of the idea of the semi-evolved idiot mind in late-Victorian anthropology and neuroscience. These ideas operated in a separate intellectual sphere to eugenic thought. They were (and remain) deeply influential, and were at the heart of the idea of the moral idiot or imbecile, targeted in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, as well as in 20th-century animal and human consciousness theory. (shrink)

Whereas Darwin insisted upon the continuity of human and nonhuman animals, more recent students of animal behavior have largely assumed discontinuity. Lloyd Morgan was a pivotal figure in this transformation. His "canon, " although intended to underpin a psychological approach to animals, has been persistently misunderstood to be a stark prohibition of anthropomorphic description. His extension to animals of the terms "behavior" and "trial-and-error, " previously restricted to human psychology, again largely unwittingly devalued their original meaning and widened the gulf (...) between animals and humans. His insistence that knowledge of animal psychology could be trusted solely to "qualified" observers initiated the exclusion from science of the informal and intimate knowledge of animals gained by pet owners, animal trainers, and other scientific outsiders. The presumption, however, that animals, in contrast to people. are to be understood solely as "strangers, " begs, rather than addresses, the question of animal-human continuity. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that many nonhuman animal beings are conscious and have some sense of self. Rather than ask whether they are conscious, I adopt an evolutionary perspective and ask why consciousness and a sense of self evolved—what are they good for? Comparative studies of animal cognition, ethological investigations that explore what it is like to be a certain animal, are useful for answering this question. Charles Darwin argued that the differences in cognitive abilities and emotions among animals (...) are differences in degree rather than differences in kind, and his view cautions against the unyielding claim that humans, and perhaps other great apes and cetaceans, are the only species in which a sense of self-awareness has evolved. I conclude that there are degrees of consciousness and self among animals and that it is likely that no animal has the same highly developed sense of self as that displayed by most humans. Many animals have a sense of “body-ness” or “mine-ness” but not a sense of “I-ness.” Darwin's ideas about evolutionary continuity, together with empirical data (“science sense”) and common sense, will help us learn more about consciousness and self in animals. Answers to challenging questions about animal self-awareness have wide-ranging significance, because they are often used as the litmus test for determining and defending the sorts of treatments to which animals can be morally subjected. (shrink)

In this paper, I give an account of how our hominin ancestors evolved a conscious ability I call scenario visualization that enabled them to manufacture novel tools so as to survive and flourish in the ever-changing and complex environments in which they lived. I first present the ideas and arguments put forward by evolutionary psychologists that the mind evolved certain mental capacities as adaptive responses to environmental pressures. Specifically, Steven Mithen thinks that the mind has evolved cognitive fluidity, viz., an (...) ability to exchange information flexibly between and among mental modules. Showing the deficiency in Mithen’s view, I then argue that the flexible exchange of information between and among modules together with scenario visualization is what explains the ability to construct the novel tools needed to survive and flourish in the environments in which our hominin ancestors resided. Finally, I trace the development of the multi-purposed javelin, from its meager beginnings as a stick, in order to illustrate scenario visualization in novel tool manufacturing. (shrink)

For many people, laypeople as well as animal scientists and philosophers, animal welfare involves animal feelings. Scientifically, however, animal feelings are problematic. In the concluding remarks of a conference about the welfare of domestic animals in 1994, for example, two questions for further research were proposed: (1) What is the nature of feelings? and (2) Why is it not possible to measure the occurrence of feelings in animals directly? This book intends to give a philosophical and scientific-theoretical answer to both (...) questions. The two questions are transformed into the following: (1) How can we conceptualize animal experiences such as feelings or emotions in a philosophically and theoretically sound way? and (2) Which method is appropriate to gain knowledge of animal experiences?These questions are answered first by examining two ethological animal welfare theories, namely that of Wiepkema and Toates and that of Dawkins. These theories have animal feelings of welfare as their subject matter. My conclusion after examining these welfare theories is that they do not conceptualize and obtain scientific knowledge of animal feelings at all. These theories only study animal behaviour and physical aspects of animals and assume that these aspects refer to animal feelings of welfare. Because they are applications of animal ethology, these theories stick to the natural-scientific method of research. The use of this method leads to two different conceptualizations of animal welfare feelings. The theory developed by Wiepkema and Toates conceives of animal feelings as unobservable, internal causes of animal behaviour. In Dakwins' theory, seen as a logical-behaviouristic theory, "animal feelings" are names for particular forms of law-governed animal behaviour. My comment on both theories is that animal experiences are solely theoretical concepts or designations. These ethologists simply assume rather than demonstrate that particular animal behaviour is caused by or associated with animal experiences.Wiepkema, Toates and Dawkins also acknowledge this. In order to say that animal behaviour refers to subjective animal feelings, they use the argument from analogy that states that because there are similarities between human and vertebrate animal behaviour and (neuro)physiological processes, it is plausible that animals have similar experiences as humans. However, like most animal welfare scientists, they correctly say that this is an unscientific argument. My final conclusion is that it is impossible to infer subjective animal experiences from objectively studied, physical and behavioural phenomena.This conclusion is in line with the main thesis of philosophical hermeneutics. This thesis states that subjects cannot be studied as such in a natural-scientific way because the concept of 'subject' demands a different, non-objectivating method of knowledge. Philosophical hermeneneutics can perhaps answer the question of a proper concept for subjective animal experience, although animals are not the explicit subject matter of this discipline.Two founding fathers of 20th Century hermeneutics, namely Dilthey and Gadamer, are studied concerning the concepts of 'subject' and 'experience'. My conclusion is that the subject-philosophy of these two philosophers is primarily a philosophy for human subjects, thereby more or less excluding the possibility for animal subjectivity. Since Gadamer does not consider animals linguistic beings, he seems to exclude animal experience. However, he opens up the way to a philosophy about animal experiences as bodily experiences. Dilthey, in his later writings, follows the same line of reasoning as Gadamer emphasizing the common, cultural-historical meaning of experiences and their expression and understanding, which is typically human. In his early writings, however, Dilthey underlines the individual, subjective aspects of experiences in humans and higher animals. Although he later does not reject this psychological foundation of experience, he simply fails to ask: what about animal experience? thereby evading the question of how we as cultural and historical humans can understand non-cultural and non-historical animal experience. The line of reasoning these two philosophers have in common is that they say: if animals have experiences, then these experiences must be similar to human experiences. Actually, their subject-philosophy is a philosophy of human subjectivity which can hardly cover animal experiences.Rather than trying to find a philosophical concept of human experience that can cover animal experience, a third possibility between human experience and the absence of experience is looked for. The philosophies of the phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty and Plessner which emphasize the bodily character of human and animal experience offer this possibility.Merleau-Ponty's philosophical phenomenology seems to promise a conceptualization of bodily animal experiences. The conclusion of his analysis of human perceptions is that not the linguistic but the bodily way of human being is the foundation of human perceptions and experiences. He sees the human body as ambiguous: both physical and conscious (i.e., experiencing) and he assumes this philosophical analysis adequate to cover animal relationships with their environment. Inspired by the difference that Merleau-Ponty makes between the bodily comprehension of humans and the hermeneutic understanding of person, I propose the concept of the impersonal meaning of animal experience as an alternative of the personal, cultural and historical character of human experience.Because Merleau-Ponty repeatedly says that all living beings are intertwinings of physical body and consciousness, he seems to say that plants and micro-organisms are also experiencing beings, thereby making no distinction between animals and other non-human organisms.Plessner offers the required specification. He asserts that human as well as animal relationships to their environment are mediated by a self. To him, the human relationship to the environment is mediated by language, personality, culture and history. What Plessner calls a "double human self" - namely a bodily bound self and a reflective "I" - is the foundation of this relationship. He further states that human personality, culture and history give form to bodily experiences. Animals, by contrast, cannot distance themselves from their own body and bodily-bound self. Animals do not have the capacity of reflective, linguistic, personal or cultural-historical experience; they have only bodily and environmentally tied, here-and-now experiences. Thereby, Plessner provides an elaborated, philosophical concept of animal experience that is not similar to the concept of human experience.Buytendijk, who worked as an animal psychologist around the middle of this century, can be seen as applying Plessner's concept of bodily and environmentally tied animal experience to research. He fully adopted Plessner's philosophy of animals and humans and in his own animal experiments and in discussions of those performed by others, he adopts the view that animal behaviour is an expression of their experiences which are bound to the present Umwelt and bodily possibilities of the animals involved.When comparing the method that Buytendijk used with the hermeneutical and phenomenological method of understanding human experiences, one can see that:Unlike the meaning of human experiences, the meaning of animal experiences is not personal within a cultural-historical context. This is a vital, impersonal meaning that is bound to momentary bodily perceptions and actions in the present Umwelt.We can understand this meaning within a species-specific context.This species-specific context is not given beforehand as a standard for interpreting animal behaviour. We attain knowledge of this context by interpreting the meaning of expressions of particular animals of a species under various circumstances.Because animals, contrary to humans, are not open to others, we cannot share with them our knowledge of the meaning of their experiences.The conclusion of these comparisons is that our interpretation of the meaning of animal expressions always remains, conceptually and methodically, our human interpretation. Whether our interpretations of the meaning of animal expressions are more or less adequate depends on whether they meet the usual standards of hermeneutical understanding: coherence between interpretations and accordance with biological knowledge of the animals involved.Finally, two contemporary animal welfare debates are discussed. The first (a conference about welfare of domestic animals in 1994) is a philosophical and theoretical debate about the concept of animal welfare and the method for measuring it. The two main issues at that conference were: are feelings a fundamental aspect of animal welfare? and how can we measure animal welfare? The second question turned out to be the most important. Some participants said that feelings, although important, should not belong to the scientific concept of animal welfare because they cannot be measured; physical indicators of welfare are sufficient for speaking of welfare. Other participants held that we can indirectly know feelings by measuring physical and behavioural indicators. However, most of these indicators are the same as those used by animal welfare scientists who claim that they measure only the physical aspects of animal welfare, irrespective of associated animal feelings. Animal welfare scientists who stress feelings of welfare simply add that these observations refer to the animals' feelings of poor welfare. One participant of the conference argued that physical indicators of animal welfare cannot be used as indicators of feelings of welfare too; these feelings have to be demonstrated independently of physical indicators of welfare.In the second debate about welfare of farm mink, the validity of the argument that feelings have to be demonstrated independently has been exemplified. The question in this debate was whether some particular behaviour of farm mink, called "stereotypic behaviour", counted as expressions of poor welfare. All participants in this debate tried to demonstrate or contest this by means of natural-scientific experiments. A critical reading of this debate demonstrates that scientists only agree upon the designs and results of such experiments if they also agree upon the interpretation of the meaning of the animals' behaviour. Almost all the conclusions from experiments regarding mink's welfare can be contested from the point of view of another interpretation of the mink's behaviour. This debate shows the primacy of the interpretation of animal behaviour as an expression of experiences over results of natural- scientific experiments. This primacy requires an explicit method for interpreting animal behaviour in order to reach an agreement about various interpretations. The type of research into welfare of farm mink as used by one of the participants in this debate is considered as containing elements of such an interpretative method. Contrary to her own intention, the researcher does not see the mink's behaviour only as a causal effect of fulfilled or unfulfilled needs, but primarily as meaningful behaviour. By carefully looking at and comparing the form of the behaviour of farm mink and wild mink, she tries to interpret their behaviour. The aim of these interpretations is not to look into the animals' heads in order to see experiences as causes of animal behaviours. I state that the aim is to attain a coherence between the assumed meanings of various animal behaviours. This coherence provides us with a background for natural-scientific explanations of these behaviours, experimental results and other physical data.At the end of this book, the four principles of animal welfare research as an integration of interpretative and natural-scientific research are evaluated:In order to study animal welfare as subjective experience, a view is needed that conceptually and methodically maintains animal welfare as subjective experience. Saying that animal welfare is not only physical but primarily a matter of feelings, requires something other than physical measurements of welfare. The debate about farm mink shows that scientists studying animal welfare from a natural-scientific angle already take this view, albeit implicitly. The method developed above can make the interpretation of animal behaviour a matter on which ethologists and other animal scientists can attain an argumentative consensus.Although the concept of animal welfare is about what matters to the animal, the animal's point of view should be abandoned as the criterion of knowledge of animal experiences of welfare. Animals are not able to agree upon interpretations of their behaviour. Hence, these interpretations always remain human interpretations.The species-specificity of animal behaviour cannot function as the criterion of animal welfare. Whether a particular animal behaviour is species-specific or not depends on one's interpretations of various behaviours of animals of a certain species.Interpretations of animal behaviour as indications of good or poor animal welfare should not be in contradiction with natural-scientific research data that also refer to good or poor welfare. They should be brought into coherence with each other. Natural science studies the physical aspect and interpretative science the expressive aspect. These two types of research are not independent of each other; they both rely upon background knowledge regarding what counts as good or poor animal welfare. In some cases the results of both types of research can contradict and challenge each other. I argue that one cannot say beforehand which of these views is correct; this can only be decided upon by trying to attain a new consensus about interpretative and natural-scientific assessments of the animals' welfare. (shrink)

Theorien über die Bewusstseinsevolution stehen in engem Zusammenhang mit Theorien über die Präsenz von Bewusstsein. Entsprechende Auffassungen bewegen sich zwischen dem Standpunkt, dass nur menschliche Wesen ein Bewusstsein haben, und der These, dass jegliche Materie in gewisser Weise über ein Bewusstsein verfügt. Allgemein formuliert, können diese Theorien in Diskontinuitäts- und Kontinuitätstheorien eingeteilt werden. Gemäß den Diskontinuitätstheorien ist das Bewusstsein erst dann in Erscheinung getreten, nachdem die Formen der Materie den gegebenen Evolutionsstand erreicht hatten, doch werden verschiedene Kriterien zur Bestimmung ebendieses (...) Evolutionsstandes vorgeschlagen. Die Kontinuitätstheorien vertreten die Ansicht, dass im Falle primärer Lebensformen die Materie stets von Bewusstsein begleitet sei; mit der Weiterentwicklung von Form und Komplexität der Materie habe jedoch auch das Bewusstsein einen Koevolutionsprozess durchlaufen und so beispielsweise Formen erlangt, die wir heute in menschlichen Wesen erkennen. In Anbetracht unseres beschränkten Wissens über die erforderlichen Voraussetzungen für das Vorhandensein von Bewusstsein im Gehirn des Menschen bleiben alle Möglichkeiten offen. Alles in allem jedoch zeichnet sich die Kontinuitätstheorie durch größere Eleganz als die Diskontinuitätstheorie aus. (shrink)

This is a bibliography of books and articles on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience over the last 30 years. There are three main sections, devoted to monographs, edited collections of papers, and articles. The first two of these sections are each divided into three subsections containing books in each of the main areas of research. The third section is divided into 12 subsections, with 10 subject headings for philosophical articles along with two additional subsections for articles in cognitive (...) science and neuroscience. Of course the division is somewhat arbitrary, but I hope that it makes the bibliography easier to use. This bibliography has first been compiled by Thomas Metzinger and David Chalmers to appear in print in two philosophical anthologies on conscious experience . From 1995 onwards it has been continuously updated by Thomas Metzinger, and now is freely available as a PDF-, RTF-, or HTML-file. This bibliography mainly attempts to cover the Anglo-Saxon and German debates, in a non-annotated, fully formatted way that makes it easy to "cut and paste" from the original file. To a certain degree this bibliography also contains items in other languages than English and German - all submissions in other languages are welcome. Last update of current version: July 13th, 2001. (shrink)

In our dealings with animals at least most of us see them as conscious beings. On the other hand the employment of human categories to animals seems to be problematic. Reflecting on the details of human beliefs, for example, casts serious doubt on whether the cat is able to believe anything at all. These theses try to reflect on methodological issues when investigating animal minds. Developing a theory of animal mentality seems to be a test case of the interdisciplinary research (...) programme in cognitive science. From the philosopher`s perspective the most pressing problem is how to talk about animal minds. Can we just employ the vocabulary of human psychology? If not, exploring animal minds contains the non-trivial task of introducing a terminology that allows to see the distinctness of animal minds and to see its connection to the human case. The treatment of some topic in cognitive science has to reach a reflective equilibrium between our intuitions, a phenomenological approach, philosophical conceptual analysis, various empirical approaches and model building. Reflective equilibrium means in this context that we have to reach a coherent model which incorporates as much of our intuitions concerning animal consciousness and integrates at the same time the findings of the different co-operating sciences. There can be various trade-offs in case of conflict between, say, philosophical definitions of mental terms as to be applied to animals, neurophysiology, our reflected intuitions and ethological model building based on a computational theory of animal minds. The paper gives an example of reflective equilibrium in discussing the case for awareness in vertebrates. It considers the role of evolutionary reasoning. The main focus lays on two examples of comparing our human notions with corresponding abilities in animals, and how an appropriate conceptual apparatus dealing with the abilities of animals could be introduced. (shrink)