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717Deciphering animal painIn Murat Aydede (ed.), Pain: New Essays on Its Nature and the Methodology of Its Study, Bradford Book/mit Press. 2005.In this paper we1 assess the potential for research on nonhuman animals to address questions about the phenomenology of painful experiences. Nociception, the basic capacity for sensing noxious stimuli, is widespread in the animal kingdom. Even rel- atively primitive animals such as leeches and sea slugs possess nociceptors, neurons that are functionally specialized for sensing noxious stimuli (Walters 1996). Vertebrate spinal cords play a sophisticated role in processing and modulating nocicepti…Read more
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176The Geometry of Partial UnderstandingAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 50 (3): 249-262. 2013.Wittgenstein famously ended his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 1922) by writing: "Whereof one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence." (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.) In that earliest work, Wittgenstein gives no clue about whether this aphorism applied to animal minds, or whether he would have included philosophical discussions about animal minds as among those displaying "the most fundamental confusions (of which the whole of philosophy is full)" …Read more
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114Answer Set Programming on Expert Feedback to Populate and ExtendIn David Wilson & H. Chad Lane (eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference, Aaai Press. pp. 500-505. 2008.dynamic ontologies must be inferred and populated in part from the reference corpora themselves, but ontological rela-.
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89214. Real Traits, Real Functions?In Andre Ariew, Robert Cummins & Mark Perlman (eds.), Functions: New Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology and Biology, Oxford University Press. pp. 373. 2002.Discussions of the functions of biological traits generally take the notion of a trait for granted. Defining this notion is a non-trivial problem. Different approaches to function place different constraints on adequate accounts of the notion of a trait. Accounts of function based on engineering-style analyses allow trait boundaries to be a matter of human interest. Accounts of function based on natural selection have typically been taken to require trait boundaries that are objectively real. Af…Read more
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93Animal conceptsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1): 66-66. 1998.Millikan's account of concepts is applicable to questions about concepts in nonhuman animals. I raise three questions in this context: (1) Does classical conditioning entail the possession of simple concepts? (2) Are movement property concepts more basic than substance concepts? (3) What is the empirical content of claiming that concept meanings do not necessarily change as dispositions change?
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96From cell-surface receptors to higher learning: A whole world of experienceIn Karola Stotz & Colin Allen (eds.), Philosophy of Behavioral Biology, eds, Katie Plaisance and Thomas Reydon. Boston: Springer, . pp. 85-123. 2012.In the last decade it has become en vogue for cognitive comparative psychologists to study animal behavior in an ‘integrated’ fashion to account for both the ‘innate’ and the ‘acquired’. We will argue that these studies, instead of really integrating the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, rather cement this old dichotomy. They combine empty nativist interpretation of behavior systems with blatantly environmentalist explanations of learning. We identify the main culprit as the failure to take de…Read more
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47Working the crowd: Design principles and early lessons from the social-semantic webProceedings of Workshop on Web 3.0: Merging Semantic Web and Social Web 2009 (SW)^2 Turin, Italy, June 29, 2009, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073. 2009.The Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project is presented as one of the first social-semantic web endeavors which aims to bootstrap feedback from users unskilled in ontology design into a precise representation of a specific domain. Our approach combines statistical text processing methods with expert feedback and logic programming approaches to create a dynamic semantic representation of the discipline of philosophy. We describe the basic principles and initial experimental results of our sy…Read more
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174Concept attribution in nonhuman animals: Theoretical and methodological problems in ascribing complex mental processesPhilosophy of Science 58 (2): 221-240. 1991.The demise of behaviorism has made ethologists more willing to ascribe mental states to animals. However, a methodology that can avoid the charge of excessive anthropomorphism is needed. We describe a series of experiments that could help determine whether the behavior of nonhuman animals towards dead conspecifics is concept mediated. These experiments form the basis of a general point. The behavior of some animals is clearly guided by complex mental processes. The techniques developed by compar…Read more
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94Toward a functionalist theory of consciousnessBehavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (3): 438-439. 1991.
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375Artificial morality: Top-down, bottom-up, and hybrid approaches (review)Ethics and Information Technology 7 (3): 149-155. 2005.A principal goal of the discipline of artificial morality is to design artificial agents to act as if they are moral agents. Intermediate goals of artificial morality are directed at building into AI systems sensitivity to the values, ethics, and legality of activities. The development of an effective foundation for the field of artificial morality involves exploring the technological and philosophical issues involved in making computers into explicit moral reasoners. The goal of this paper is t…Read more
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16Nature’s Purposes: Analyses of Function and Design in Biology (edited book)The MIT Press. 1997.This volume provides a guide to the discussion among biologists and philosophersabout the role of concepts such as function and design in an evolutionary understanding oflife.
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418Animal BehaviorIn Michael Ruse (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Biology, Oxford University Press. pp. 327--348. 2008.Few areas of scientific investigation have spawned more alternative approaches than animal behavior: comparative psychology, ethology, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, behavioral endocrinology, behavioral neuroscience, neuroethology, behavioral genetics, cognitive ethology, developmental psychobiology---the list goes on. Add in the behavioral sciences focused on the human animal, and you can continue the list with ethnography, biological anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology (c…Read more
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17Logic primerMIT Press. 2022.Presents a self-contained introduction to logic suitable for majors and nonmajors, and can be covered entirely in a one-semester course. Natural deduction systems of sentential logic and of first-order logic, truth tables, and the basic ideas of model theory are presented without superfluous discussion.
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97Framing robot arms controlEthics and Information Technology 15 (2): 125-135. 2013.The development of autonomous, robotic weaponry is progressing rapidly. Many observers agree that banning the initiation of lethal activity by autonomous weapons is a worthy goal. Some disagree with this goal, on the grounds that robots may equal and exceed the ethical conduct of human soldiers on the battlefield. Those who seek arms-control agreements limiting the use of military robots face practical difficulties. One such difficulty concerns defining the notion of an autonomous action by a ro…Read more
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180From encyclopedia to ontology: toward dynamic representation of the discipline of philosophySynthese 182 (2): 205-233. 2011.The application of digital humanities techniques to philosophy is changing the way scholars approach the discipline. This paper seeks to open a discussion about the difficulties, methods, opportunities, and dangers of creating and utilizing a formal representation of the discipline of philosophy. We review our current project, the Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project, which uses a combination of automated methods and expert feedback to create a dynamic computational ontology for the disci…Read more
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5Transitive inference in animals: Reasoning or conditioned associations?In Susan Hurley & Matthew Nudds (eds.), Rational Animals?, Oxford University Press. 2006.
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468A Tale of Two FroggiesCanadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (sup1): 104-115. 2001.In this paper I argue that selection of the best theory of content is not a matter for mere philosophical reflection on the consequences of each theory for our intuitive judgments about content. Rather, the theories must be judged in a different way that is based on the putative roles of content attribution in the behavioural sciences. The ultimate test of any theory of content will be the success of the sciences that adopt it. Furthermore, alternative semantic theories may be seen as complement…Read more
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522This is an incomplete entry that should be mapped to ALLTII on this site (see link below)
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119Animal cognition and animal mindsIn Martin Carrier & Peter K. Machamer (eds.), Mindscapes: Philosophy, Science, and the Mind, Pittsburgh University Press. 1997.Psychology, according to a standard dictionary definition, is the science of mind and behavior. For a major part of the twentieth century, (nonhuman) animal psychology was on a behavioristic track that explicitly denied the possibility of a science of animal mind. While many comparative psychologists remain wedded to behavioristic methods, they have more recently adopted a cognitive, information-processing approach that does not adhere to the strictures of stimulus-response explanations of anima…Read more
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94Models, Mechanisms, and Animal MindsSouthern Journal of Philosophy 52 (S1): 75-97. 2014.In this paper, I describe grounds for dissatisfaction with certain aspects of the sciences of animal cognition and argue that a turn toward mathematical modeling of animal cognition is warranted. I consider some objections to this call and argue that the implications of such a turn are not as drastic for ordinary, commonsense understanding of animal minds as they might seem
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135Recognizing group cognitionCognitive Systems Research 11 (4): 378-395. 2010.In this paper, we approach the idea of group cognition from the perspective of the “extended mind” thesis, as a special case of the more general claim that systems larger than the individual human, but containing that human, are capable of cognition (Clark, 2008; Clark & Chalmers, 1998). Instead of deliberating about “the mark of the cognitive” (Adams & Aizawa, 2008), our discussion of group cognition is tied to particular cognitive capacities. We review recent studies of group problem-solving a…Read more
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68Cognitive ethology: Slayers, skeptics, and proponentsIn R. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson & H. L. Miles (eds.), Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals, Suny Press. pp. 313--334. 1997.
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41Comparative cognitive studies, not folk phylogeny, pleaseBehavioral and Brain Sciences 19 (1): 122-123. 1996.Barresi & Moore (B&M) provide a useful tool for the comparative study of social cognition that could, however, be improved by more subtle analysis of first person information about intentional relations. Knowledge of misrepresentation also needs to be better handled within the theory. I urge skepticism about B&M's sweeping phylogenetic claims.
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170The discovery of animal consciousness: An optimistic assessment (review)Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 10 (3): 217-225. 1997.
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200Animal play and the evolution of morality: An ethological approachTopoi 24 (2): 125-135. 2005.In this paper we argue that there is much to learn about “wild justice” and the evolutionary origins of morality – behaving fairly – by studying social play behavior in group-living mammals. Because of its relatively wide distribution among the mammals, ethological investigation of play, informed by interdisciplinary cooperation, can provide a comparative perspective on the evolution of ethical behavior that is broader than is provided by the usual focus on primate sociality. Careful analysis …Read more
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41
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 |