Kelle Dhein

In the twentieth century, the distinction between instinct and learning motivated international debates that reshaped the disciplinary landscape of animal behavior studies. When the dust settled, a new consensus emerged: the development of behavioral traits involves complex interactions between organisms, genetic inheritance, and experience with the environment. This insight has spurred some philosophers and scientists to eschew instinct versus learning dichotomies—and instinct concepts in particular—on epistemic grounds. In this paper, I reassess influential twentieth-century arguments against instinct concepts and instinct versus learning dichotomies to show that these arguments have limited scope. Then, I use historical case studies to demonstrate the combinatorial flexibility of instinct and learning concepts. Although instinct and learning are often framed as mutually exclusive opposites, scientists continue to combine them in causal physiological accounts of behavior. I conclude by suggesting that instinct concepts help scientists achieve their epistemic aims because of the way they facilitate abductive inferences.

Recent accounts of multiscale modeling investigate ontic and epistemic constraints imposed by relations between component models at varying relative scales (macro, meso, micro). These accounts often focus especially on the role of the meso, or intermediate, relative scale in a multiscale model. We aid this effort by highlighting a novel role for mesoscale models: they can function as a focal point, and rationale, for disagreement between researchers who otherwise share theoretical commitments. We illustrate with a case study in multiscale modeling of insect behavior, arguing that the cognitive map debate in neuroethology research is best understood as a mesoscale disagreement.

In 1973, the discipline of ethology came into its own when three of its most prominent practitioners—Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch—jointly received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Historians have shown how Lorenz and Tinbergen were central to the practical and theoretical innovations that came to define ethology as a distinct form of animal behavior research in the twentieth century. Frisch is rarely mentioned in such histories. In this paper, I ask, What is Frisch’s relationship to the discipline of ethology? To answer that question, I examine Tinbergen’s relationship to Frisch’s grey card experiments between Tinbergen’s time as a student at the University of Leiden in the mid 1920s and his 1951 publication of The Study of Instinct. In doing so, I highlight previously neglected affinities between Frisch’s early career research and the program of classical ethology, and I show how Frisch’s research meant different things at different times to Tinbergen and others working in the ethological tradition.

In the course of investigating the living world, biologists regularly attribute semantic content to the phenomena they study. In this paper, I examine the case of a contemporary research program studying the navigation behaviors of ants and develop an account of the norms governing researchers’ ascriptions of semantic content in their research practices. The account holds that researchers assign semantic content to behaviors that reliably achieve a difficult goal-directed function, and it also suggests a productive role for attributions of semantic content in the process of animal behavior research.