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202Mental content and evolutionary explanationBiology and Philosophy 7 (1): 1-12. 1992.Cognitive ethology is the comparative study of animal cognition from an evolutionary perspective. As a sub-discipline of biology it shares interest in questions concerning the immediate causes and development of behavior. As a part of ethology it is also concerned with questions about the function and evolution of behavior. I examine some recent work in cognitive ethology, and I argue that the notions of mental content and representation are important to enable researchers to answer questions an…Read more
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193Fish Cognition and ConsciousnessJournal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 26 (1): 25-39. 2013.Questions about fish consciousness and cognition are receiving increasing attention. In this paper, I explain why one must be careful to avoid drawing conclusions too hastily about this hugely diverse set of species
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97Umwelt or Umwelten? How should shared representation be understood given such diversity?Semiotica 2014 (198): 137-158. 2014.It is a truism among ethologists that one must not forget that animals perceive and represent the world differently from humans. Sometimes this caution is phrased in terms of von Uexküll’s Umwelt concept. Yet it seems possible (perhaps even unavoidable) to adopt a common ontological framework when comparing different species of mind. For some purposes it seems sufficient to anchor comparative cognition in common-sense categories; bats echolocate insects (or a subset of them) after all. But for …Read more
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71Conditioned anti-anthropomorphismComparative Cognition and Behavior Reviews 2 147-150. 2007.How should scientists react to anthropomorphism (defined for the purposes of this paper as the attribution of mental states or properties to nonhuman animals)? Many thoughtful scientists have attempted to accommodate some measure of anthropomorphism in their approaches to animal behavior. But Wynne will have none of it. We reject his argument against anthropomorphism and argue that he does not pay sufficient attention to the historical facts or to the details of alternative approaches.
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178The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy: A developed dynamic reference workIn James Moor & Terrell Ward Bynum (eds.), Cyberphilosophy: the intersection of philosophy and computing, Blackwell. pp. 210-228. 2002.In this entry, the authors outline the goals of a "dynamic reference work", and explain how the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has been designed to achieve those goals.
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201Animal Minds, Cognitive Ethology, and EthicsThe Journal of Ethics 11 (3): 299-317. 2007.Our goal in this paper is to provide enough of an account of the origins of cognitive ethology and the controversy surrounding it to help ethicists to gauge for themselves how to balance skepticism and credulity about animal minds when communicating with scientists. We believe that ethicists’ arguments would benefit from better understanding of the historical roots of ongoing controversies. It is not appropriate to treat some widely reported results in animal cognition as if their interpretation…Read more
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122Synthese special issue: representing philosophySynthese 182 (2): 181-183. 2011.This special issue of Synthese discusses conceptual, ontological, technological, ethical, political, and professional dimensions of attempts to represent the entire discipline of philosophy. One of our goals with this issue was to collect in one place several of the leading projects in digital philosophy so that the profession can begin to discern and debate what might be the best practices for the representation of philosophy in the 21st century.
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553Primatologists 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 intentionality, a paradox arises. Different ways of resolving the paradox are assessed, using evidence from neural, cognitive, and behav…Read more
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5John Macnamara and Gonzalo E. Reyes, eds., The Logical Foundations of Cognition Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 15 (3): 188-190. 1995.
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125Consciousness and ethics: Artificially conscious moral agentsInternational Journal of Machine Consciousness 3 (01): 177-192. 2011.
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 |