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186Teleological Notions in BiologyIn Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012.Teleological terms such as "function" and "design" appear frequently in the biological sciences. Examples of teleological claims include: A (biological) function of stotting by antelopes is to communicate to predators that they have been detected. Eagles' wings are (naturally) designed for soaring. Teleological notions were commonly associated with the pre-Darwinian view that the biological realm provides evidence of conscious design by a supernatural creator. Even after creationist viewpoints w…Read more
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148Biological function, adaptation, and natural designPhilosophy of Science 62 (4): 609-622. 1995.Recently something close to a consensus about the best way to naturalize the notion of biological function appears to be emerging. Nonetheless, teleological notions in biology remain controversial. In this paper we provide a naturalistic analysis for the notion of natural design. Many authors assume that natural design should be assimilated directly to function. Others find the notion problematic because it suggests that evolution is a directed process. We argue that both of these views are mist…Read more
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160Species of Mind: The Philosophy and Biology of Cognitive Ethology (edited book)MIT Press. 1997.The heart of this book is the reciprocal relationship between philosophical theories of mind and empirical studies of animal cognition.
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221Animal Concepts Revisited: the use of Self- Monitoring as an Empirical Approach (review)Erkenntnis 51 (1): 537-544. 1999.Many psychologists and philosophers believe that the close correlation between human language and human concepts makes the attribution of concepts to nonhuman animals highly questionable. I argue for a three-part approach to attributing concepts to animals. The approach goes beyond the usual discrimination tests by seeking evidence for self-monitoring of discrimination errors. Such evidence can be collected without relying on language and, I argue, the capacity for error-detection can only be …Read more
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856Mirror, Mirror in the Brain, What's the Monkey Stand to Gain?Noûs 44 (2). 2010.Primatologists generally agree that monkeys lack higher-order intentional capacities related to theory of mind. Yet the discovery of the so-called "mirror neurons" in monkeys suggests to many neuroscientists that they have the rudiments of intentional understanding. Given a standard philosophical view about intentional understanding, which requires higher-order intentionahty, a paradox arises. Different ways of resolving the paradox are assessed, using evidence from neural, cognitive, and behavi…Read more
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62How to reason without words: inference as categorizationCognitive Processing 10 77-88. 2009.The idea that reasoning is a singular accomplishment of the human species has an ancient pedigree.Yet this idea remains as controversial as it is ancient. Those who would deny reasoning to nonhuman animals typically hold a language-based conception of inference which places it beyond the reach of languageless creatures. Others reject such an anthropocentric conception of reasoning on the basis of similar performance by humans and animals in some reasoning tasks, such as transitive inference. Her…Read more
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114Intentionality, social play, and definitionBiology and Philosophy 9 (1): 63-74. 1994.Social play is naturally characterized in intentional terms. An evolutionary account of social play could help scientists to understand the evolution of cognition and intentionality. Alexander Rosenberg (1990) has argued that if play is characterized intentionally or functionally, it is not a behavioral phenotype suitable for evolutionary explanation. If he is right, his arguments would threaten many projects in cognitive ethology. We argue that Rosenberg's arguments are unsound and that intenti…Read more
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51Social play is more than a Pavlovian rompBehavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (2): 250-251. 2000.Some aspects of play may be explained by Pavlovian learning processes, but others are not so easily handled. Especially when there is a chance that specific actions can be misinterpreted; animals alter their behavior to reduce the likelihood that this will occur. The flexibility and fine-tuning of play make it an ideal candidate for comparative and evolutionary cognitive studies.
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170Cognitive ethology and the intentionality of animal behaviorMind and Language 10 (4): 313-328. 1995.Cognitive ethologists are in need of a good theoretical framework for attributing intentional states. Heyes and Dickinson (1990) present criteria that they claim are necessary for an intentional explanation of behavior to be justified. They suggest that questions of intentionality can only be investigated under controlled laboratory conditions and they apply their criteria to laboratory experiments to argue that the common behavior of approaching food is not intentional in most animals. We dispu…Read more
UCLA
Department Of Philosophy
Alumnus
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Computing and Information |
PhilPapers Editorships
Animal Minds |
Animal Communication |
Animal Minds, Misc |