Charles Beasley

From humble beginnings, minds in the natural world have come to take on endless forms. Yet, our best way of studying these minds has come up short. By its own lights, comparative cognitive science has repeatedly struggled to achieve the goals that it has set out for itself. Why is this, and what can be done about it? This dissertation is directed at answering these questions. It does so in two parts. The first addresses the issue of replication; both the looming threat that a replication crisis holds for comparative cognitive science as well as the broader issue of what a replication is. Here, a deflationary account of replication is defended. This view is argued to hold implications for the practice of replication, interpreting replicability as a demarcation criterion, evaluating the replication crisis across the sciences, and evaluating results of replication experiments. Moreover, this analysis holds direct consequences for the evaluation of evidence in comparative cognitive science. Most pointedly, it is not ‘mature’ enough to experience a genuine replication crisis. Nevertheless, replication experiments, when properly framed, can still make valuable contributions to the discipline. The second part builds on the analysis in the first and shows how comparative cognitive science is inhibited by what is termed the ‘validity cycle’. Here, the causes of the validity cycle are initially identified (weak theory, underspecified hypotheses, and underdetermined experiments). Then, four ameliorative proposals that have been made are introduced and their shortcomings are analyzed. These are (1) adopting a bottom-up approach, (2) breaking cognitive capacities into dimensions, (3) formalizing the theories, and (4) identifying signatures of cognitive capacities. Modified versions of each are introduced. Taken together, it is argued that these modified proposals represent the most promising way forward for the science particularly when run simultaneously in a complementary manner.

While the science of animal consciousness has seen a surge of new work, its most basic methodology remains highly disputed. In this paper I identify four candidate norms of inquiry that have been implicitly introduced in the recent literature. I call these (1) expansive theorizing, (2) indirect inquiry, (3) lowering epistemic standards, and (4) inflating epistemic standards. In each section, an instantiation of the norm of inquiry is discussed, and the broader lessons that can be taken from avoiding it are drawn out. Interestingly, each of these candidate norms of inquiry have something in common: they implicitly hold that, to study animal consciousness, ordinary scientific standards must in some way be departed from. The overarching claim of this paper is that this is a mistake. In response to this, I propose four alternative candidate norms of inquiry. I call these (1) weighted development, (2) evidential foundations, (3) knowledge directed, and (4) anti-proof. The overarching norm of ‘no exceptionalism’ is then proposed with the goal of establishing a minimal methodological consensus.