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866The Philosophers' Brief on Chimpanzee PersonhoodProposed Brief by Amici Curiae Philosophers in Support of the Petitioner-Appelllant Court of Appeals, State of New York,. 2018.In this brief, we argue that there is a diversity of ways in which humans (Homo sapiens) are ‘persons’ and there are no non-arbitrary conceptions of ‘personhood’ that can include all humans and exclude all nonhuman animals. To do so we describe and assess the four most prominent conceptions of ‘personhood’ that can be found in the rulings concerning Kiko and Tommy, with particular focus on the most recent decision, Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc v Lavery.
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152Knowing mental states: The asymmetry of psychological prediction and explanationIn Aleksandar Jokic & Quentin Smith (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2002.Perhaps because both explanation and prediction are key components to understanding, philosophers and psychologists often portray these two abilities as though they arise from the same competence, and sometimes they are taken to be the same competence. When explanation and prediction are associated in this way, they are taken to be two expressions of a single cognitive capacity that differ from one another only pragmatically. If the difference between prediction and explanation of human behavior…Read more
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168Chimpanzee theory of mind: Looking in all the wrong places?Mind and Language 20 (5): 521-536. 2005.I respond to an argument presented by Daniel Povinelli and Jennifer Vonk that the current generation of experiments on chimpanzee theory of mind cannot decide whether chimpanzees have the ability to reason about mental states. I argue that Povinelli and Vonk’s proposed experiment is subject to their own criticisms and that there should be a more radical shift away from experiments that ask subjects to predict behavior. Further, I argue that Povinelli and Vonk’s theoretical commitments should lea…Read more
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256Telling Stories without WordsJournal of Consciousness Studies 16 (6-8): 6-8. 2009.In this review article of Dan Hutto's bok Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons, I argue that we can take a functional approach to FP that identifies it with the practice of explaining behaviour -- that is, we can understand folk psychology as having the purpose of explaining behaviour and promoting social cohesion by making others’ behaviour comprehensible, without thinking that this ability must be limited to those with linguistic abilities. One reason…Read more
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106Speaking without interpreting: A reply to bouma on autism and Davidsonian interpretationPhilosophical Psychology 19 (5). 2006.We clarify some points previously made by Andrews, and defend the claim that Davidson's account of belief can be and is challenged by the existence of some people with autism. We argue that both Bouma and Andrews (Philosophical Psychology, 15) blurred the subtle distinctions between the psychological concepts of theory of mind and joint attention and the Davidsonian concepts of interpretation and triangulation. And we accept that appeal to control group studies is not the appropriate place to lo…Read more
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113I argue that the behavior of other agents is insufficiently described in current debates as a dichotomy between tacit theory (attributing beliefs and desires to predict behavior) and simulation theory (imagining what one would do in similar circumstances in order to predict behavior). I introduce two questions about the foundation and development of our ability both to attribute belief and to simulate it. I then propose that there is one additional method used to predict behavior, namely, an ind…Read more
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60How to learn from our mistakes: Explanation and moral justificationPhilosophical Explorations 7 (3). 2004.A new approach to developing models of folk psychology is suggested, namely that different models exist for different folk psychological practices. This point is made through an example: the explanation and justification of morally heinous actions. Human folk psychology in this area is prone to a specific error of conflating an explanation for behaviour with a justification of it. An analysis of the error leads me to conclude that simulation is used to generate both explanations and justificatio…Read more
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313Confronting Language, Representation, and Belief: A Limited Defense of Mental ContinuityIn Todd Shackelford & Jennifer Vonk (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Evolutionary Psychology, Oxford University Press. pp. 39-60. 2012.According to the mental continuity claim (MCC), human mental faculties are physical and beneficial to human survival, so they must have evolved gradually from ancestral forms and we should expect to see their precursors across species. Materialism of mind coupled with Darwin’s evolutionary theory leads directly to such claims and even today arguments for animal mental properties are often presented with the MCC as a premise. However, the MCC has been often challenged among contemporary scholars.…Read more
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70Ready to Teach or Ready to Learn: A Critique of the Natural Pedagogy TheoryReview of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (4): 465-483. 2014.According to the theory of natural pedagogy, humans have a set of cognitive adaptations specialized for transmitting and receiving knowledge through teaching; young children can acquire generalizable knowledge from ostensive signals even in a single interaction, and adults also actively teach young children. In this article, we critically examine the theory and argue that ostensive signals do not always allow children to learn generalizable knowledge more efficiently, and that the empirical evid…Read more
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85The first step in the case for great ape equality: The argument for other mindsEtica and Animali: The Great Ape Project 131-141. 1996.A defense of equality for great apes must begin with an understanding of the opposition and an acknowledgement of the most basic point of disagreement. For great apes to gain status as persons in our community, we must begin by determining what the multitude of different definitions of "person" have in common. Finding that great apes fulfill the requirements of any one specific theory of personhood is insufficient, for these theories are highly controversial, and a critique of the theory will un…Read more
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229on ). Advice about how to move forward on the mindreading debate, particularly when it comes to overcoming the logical problem, is much needed in comparative psychology. In chapter 4 of his book Ockham’s Razors, Elliott Sober takes on the task by suggesting how we might uncover the mechanism that mediates between the environmental stimuli that is visible to all, and chimpanzee social behavior. I argue that Sober's proposed method for deciding between the behaivor-reading and mindreading hypothe…Read more
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1505Do Apes Read Minds?: Toward a New Folk PsychologyMIT Press. 2012.Andrews argues for a pluralistic folk psychology that employs different kinds of practices and different kinds of cognitive tools (including personality trait attribution, stereotype activation, inductive reasoning about past behavior, and ...
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152Anthropomorphism, anthropectomy, and the null hypothesisBiology and Philosophy 29 (5): 711-729. 2014.We examine the claim that the methodology of psychology leads to a bias in animal cognition research against attributing “anthropomorphic” properties to animals . This charge is examined in light of a debate on the role of folk psychology between primatologists who emphasize similarities between humans and other apes, and those who emphasize differences. We argue that while in practice there is sometimes bias, either in the formulation of the null hypothesis or in the preference of Type-II error…Read more
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159Telling talesPhilosophical Psychology 22 (2): 227-235. 2009.In the twenty-five or so years since Paul Churchland proposed its elimination, defenders of folk psychology have argued for the ubiquity of propositional attitude attribution in human social cognition. If we didn’t understand others in terms of their beliefs and desires, we would see others as ‘‘baffling ciphers’’ and it would be ‘‘the end of the world’’. Because the world continues, and we seem to predict and explain what others do with a remarkable degree of accuracy, the advocates of folk psy…Read more
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2692The study of animal cognition raises profound questions about the minds of animals and philosophy of mind itself. Aristotle argued that humans are the only animal to laugh, but in recent experiments rats have also been shown to laugh. In other experiments, dogs have been shown to respond appropriately to over two hundred words in human language. In this introduction to the philosophy of animal minds Kristin Andrews introduces and assesses the essential topics, problems and debates as they cut ac…Read more
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383Our understanding of other minds: theory of mind and the intentional stanceJournal of Consciousness Studies 7 (7): 12-24. 2000.Psychologists distinguish between intentional systems which have beliefs and those which are also able to attribute beliefs to others. The ability to do the latter is called having a 'theory of mind', and many cognitive ethologists are hoping to find evidence for this ability in animal behaviour. I argue that Dennett's theory entails that any intentional system that interacts with another intentional system (such as vervet monkeys and chess-playing computers) has a theory of mind, which would ma…Read more
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320Interpreting autism: A critique of Davidson on thought and languagePhilosophical Psychology 15 (3): 317-332. 2002.Donald Davidson's account of interpretation purports to be a priori , though I argue that the empirical facts about interpretation, theory of mind, and autism must be considered when examining the merits of Davidson's view. Developmental psychologists have made plausible claims about the existence of some people with autism who use language but who are unable to interpret the minds of others. This empirical claim undermines Davidson's theoretical claims that all speakers must be interpreters of …Read more
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74Chimpanzee mind reading: Don't stop believingPhilosophy Compass 12 (1). 2017.Since the question “Do chimpanzees have a theory of mind?” was raised in 1978, scientists have attempted to answer it, and philosophers have attempted to clarify what the question means and whether it has been, or could be, answered. Mindreading or theory of mind refers to the ability to attribute mental states to other individuals. Some versions of the question focus on whether chimpanzees engage in belief reasoning or can think about false belief, and chimpanzees have been given nonverbal vers…Read more
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100Innovation and the grain problemBehavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (4): 422-423. 2007.Our concern is with Ramsey et al.'s method for identifying innovation. We show that either it yields false positives or the authors offer insufficient guidance for its application. To avoid these results, the authors need to modify the key or offer better guidelines for delineating input. Either choice requires addressing the processes that generate a behavior
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98According to both the traditional model of folk psychology and the social intelligence hypothesis, our folk psychological notions of belief and desire developed in order to make better predictions of behavior, and the fundamental role for our folk psychological notions of belief and desire are for making more accurate predictions of behavior (than predictions made without appeal to folk psychological notions). My strategy in this paper is to show that these claims are false. I argue that we need…Read more
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4Scott Sehon, Teleological Realism: Mind, Agency, and Explanation Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 26 (4): 291-293. 2006.
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73Explaining TerrorismThe Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy 9 167-171. 2006.The official explanations the US gave for the September 11th terrorist attacks are not in fact explanatory, and there has been popular condemnation of those who attempt to offer causal explanations for the attacks. This paper is an investigation of the difficulty people have with finding and accepting explanations for acts they strongly condemn. Using research in the philosophy of mind and moral psychology, I distinguish between explanations for actual immoral behavior and explanations for ficti…Read more
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335Ape Autonomy? Social norms and moral agency in other speciesIn Klaus Petrus & Markus Wild (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Animals: Mind, Ethics, Morals, Transcript. pp. 173-196. 2013.Once upon a time, not too long ago, the question about apes and ethics had to do with moral standing—do apes have interests or rights that humans ought to respect? Given the fifty years of research on great ape cognition, life history, social organization, and behavior, the answer to that question seems obvious. Apes have emotions and projects, they can be harmed, and they have important social relationships
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102Understanding Norms Without a Theory of MindInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 52 (5): 433-448. 2009.I argue that having a theory of mind requires having at least implicit knowledge of the norms of the community, and that an implicit understanding of the normative is what drives the development of a theory of mind. This conclusion is defended by two arguments. First I argue that a theory of mind likely did not develop in order to predict behavior, because before individuals can use propositional attitudes to predict behavior, they have to be able to use them in explanations of behavior. Rather,…Read more
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177The debates about the form of folk psychology and the potential eliminability of folk psychology rest on a particular view about how humans understand other minds. That is, though folk psychology is described as --œour commonsense conception of psychological phenomena--� (Churchland 1981, p. 67), there have been implicit assumptions regarding the nature of that commonsense conception. It has been assumed that folk psychology involves two practices, the prediction and explanation of behavior. And…Read more
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65Pluralistic folk psychology and varieties of self-knowledge: an explorationPhilosophical Explorations 18 (2): 282-296. 2015.Turning the techniques we use to understand other people onto ourselves can provide an insight into the types of self-knowledge that may be possible for us. Adopting Pluralistic Folk Psychology, according to which we understand others not primarily by thinking about invisible beliefs and desires that cause behavior, but instead by modeling others as people - with rich characters, relationships, past histories, cultural embeddedness, personality traits, and so forth. A preliminary investigation s…Read more
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452Critter psychology: On the possibility of nonhuman animal folk psychologyIn Daniel D. Hutto & Matthew Ratcliffe (eds.), Folk Psychology Re-Assessed, Kluwer/springer Press. pp. 191--209. 2007.When we ask the question whether animals have their own folk psychology, we’re asking whether any other species has a commonsense conception of psychological phenomenon. Different versions of this question have been discussed over the past 25 years, but no clear answer has emerged. Perhaps one reason for this lack of progress is that we don’t clearly understand the question. I defend a two-fold view of folk psychology that takes as central the capacity to engage in some folk psychological pra…Read more
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Applied Ethics |
Asian Philosophy |
PhilPapers Editorships
Methodology in Animal Mind Sciences |