Two general sets of problems have played a prominent role in defining the field and will take center stage in the discussion below: (i) the problems of animal thought and reason, and (ii) the problems of animal consciousness. The article begins by examining three historically influential views on animal thought and reason. The first is David Hume's analogical argument for the existence of thought and reason in animals. And the third is Donald Davidson's three arguments against ascribing thought and reason to animals. Next, the article examines contemporary philosophical views on the nature and limits of animal reason by Jonathan Bennett, Jos. Three theories of consciousness. The field has had a long and distinguished history and has of late seen a revival. Table of Contents The Problems of Animal Thought and Reason. Hume's Argument for Animal Thought and Reason. Descartes' Two Arguments Against Animal Thought and Reason. The Language- Test Argument. The Action- Test Argument. This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. Wow be unto the 125 class buyer. It is now officially Decision Time. We’ll take it for granted that you want to win, and you want to spend as little as you have in. Side One Overture Orchestra& Choir, Heaven on Their Minds Carl Anderson, What's the Buzz Ted. Led Zeppelin used to park themselves in big city hotels (New York, LA, Chicago, Dallas) and then fly in and out of the smaller cities and back that same. Press Review: (Wessex Scene) For two days, Southampton was blessed with the presence of the world's top rock band. On the first, it was the turn of the town, with Led. Name: Ted Bundy Alias: Theodore Robert Cowell (birth name) The Campus Killer Richard Burton Chris Hagen Officer Roseland Rolf Miller Kenneth Misner Numerous others. This movie was filmed on location in Israel. The ruins of Avdat, the greatest Nabatean city in the Negev, lie on a limestone hill overlooking the desert. Davidson's Arguments Against Animal Thought and Reason. The Intensionality Test. The Argument from Holism. Davidson's Main Argument. Contemporary Philosophical Arguments on Animal Reason. Contemporary Philosophical Arguments for Animal Thought and Reason. The Intentional Systems Theory Argument. The Argument from Common- Sense Functionalism. The Argument from Biological Naturalism. The Argument from Science. The Problems of Animal Consciousness. Higher- Order Theories of Consciousness. Inner- Sense Theories. Higher- Order Thought Theories. First- Order Theories. Other Issues. References and Further Reading. References. Suggested Further Readings. The Problems of Animal Thought and Reason. Given what we know or can safely assume to be true of their behaviors and brains, can animals have thought and reason? The answer depend in large measure on what one takes thought and reason to be, as well as what animals one is considering. Philosophers have held various views about the nature and possession conditions of thought and reason and, as a result, have offered various arguments for and against thought and reason in animals. Below are the most influential of such arguments. Hume's Argument for Animal Thought and Reason. David Hume (1. 71. The type of thought that Hume had in mind here was belief, which he defined as a . Reason Hume defined as a mere disposition or instinct to form associations among such ideas on the basis of past experience. In the section of A Treatise of Human Nature entitled, . Given Hume's definitions of . Beliefs have propositional content, whereas ideas, as Hume understood them, do not (or need not). To have a belief or thought about some object (for example, the color red) always involves representing some fact or proposition about it (for example, that red is the color of blood), but one can entertain an image of something (for example, the color red) without representing any fact or proposition about it. Also, beliefs aim at the truth, they represent states of affairs as being the case, whereas ideas, even vivid ideas, do not. Upon looking down a railway track, for instance, one could close one's eyes and entertain a vivid idea of the tracks as they appeared a moment ago (that is, as converging in the distance) without thereby believing that the tracks actually converge. And it is further argued, insofar as . Finally, and independently of Hume's definitions of . Toy robotic dogs, computers, and even radios behave in ways that are similar to the ways that human beings behave when we have vivid ideas presented to our consciousness, but few would take this fact alone as incontestable proof that these objects act as a result of vivid ideas presented to their consciousness (Searle 1. Descartes' Two Arguments Against Animal Thought and Reason. Equally as famous as Hume's declaration that animals have thought and reason is Ren. Descartes gave two independent arguments for his denial of animal thought and reason, which have come to be called his language- test argument and his action- test argument, respectively (Radner & Radner 1. The Language- Test Argument. Not surprising, Descartes meant something different from Hume by . Normal adult human beings, of course, express their occurrent thoughts through their declarative speech; and declarative speech and occurrent thoughts share some important features. Both, for example, have propositional content, both are stimulus independent (that is, thoughts can occur to one, and declarative speech can be produced, quite independently of what is going on in one's immediate perceptual environment), and both are action independent (that is, thoughts can occur to one, and declarative speech can be produced, that are quite irrelevant to one's current actions or needs). In light of these commonalities, it is understandable why Descartes took declarative speech to be . In addition to taking speech to be thought's only certain sign, Descartes argued that the absence of speech in animals could only be explained in terms of animals lacking thought. Descartes was well aware that animals produce calls, cries, songs, and various gestures that function to express their . This fact, Descartes reasoned, could not be explained in terms of animals lacking the necessary speech organs, since, he argued, speech organs are not required, as evidenced by the fact that humans born . Rather, Descartes concluded, the best explanation for the absence of speech in animals is the absence of what speech expresses. There are various places in his writings where Descartes appears to go on from this conclusion to maintain that since all modes of thinking and consciousness depend upon the existence of thought, animals are devoid of all forms of thinking and consciousness and are nothing but mindless machines or automata. It should be noted, however, that not every commentator has accepted this interpretation (see Cottingham 1. Various responses have been given to Descartes' language- test argument. Malcolm (1. 97. 3), for example, argued that dispositional thinking is not dependent upon occurrent thought, as Descartes seemed to suppose, and is clearly possessed by many animals. The fact that Fido cannot entertain the thought, the cat is in the tree, Malcolm argued, is not a reason to doubt that he thinks that the cat is in the tree. Noam Chomsky, have argued that the best explanation for the absence of speech in animals is the not the absence of occurrent thought but the absence of the capacity for recursion (that is, the ability to produce and understand a potentially infinite number of expressions from a finite array of expressions). And others (Pepperberg 1. Savage- Rumbaugh et al. Tetzlaff & Rey 2. Descartes and Chomsky, some animals, such as grey parrots, chimpanzee, and honeybees, possess the capacity to put together various signs in order to express their thoughts. Finally, it has been argued that there are behaviors other than declarative speech, such as insight learning, that can reasonably be taken as evidence of occurrent thought in animals (see K. The Action- Test Argument. Whereas Descartes' principal aim in his language- test argument was to prove that animals lack thought, his principal aim in his action- test argument is prove that animals lack reason. For Descartes, to act through reason is to act on general principles that can be applied to an open- ended number of different circumstances. Descartes acknowledged that animals sometime act in accordance with such general rules of reason (for example, as when the kingfisher is said to act in accordance with Snell's Law when it dives into a pond to catch a fish (see Boden 1. Some researchers and philosophers have accepted Descartes' definition of . For example, honey bees that were trained to fly down a corridor that had the same (or different) color as the entry room into which they had initially flown automatically transferred this knowledge to the novel stimulus dimension of smell: those that were trained to choose the corridor with the same color, flew down the corridor with the same smell as in the entry room; and those that were trained to choose the corridor with a different color, flew down the corridor with a different smell as in the entry room. It is difficult to resist interpreting the bees' performance here, as the researchers do, in terms of their grasping and then transferring the general rule, . Other researchers and philosophers, however, have objected to Descartes' definition of . On this view of intelligence, sometimes called the massive modularity thesis, subjects have various distinct mechanisms, or modules, in their brains for solving problems in different domains (for example, a module for solving navigation problems, a module for solving problems in the physical environment, a module for solving social problems within a group, and so on). It is not to be expected on this theory of intelligence that an animal capable of solving problems in one domain, such as exclusion problems for food, should be capable of solving similar problems in a variety of other domains, such as exclusion problems for predators, mates, and offspring. Therefore, on the massive modularity thesis, the fact that . Davidson's Arguments Against Animal Thought and Reason. No 2. 0th century philosopher is better known for his denial of animal thought and reason than Donald Davidson (1. In a series of articles (1. Davidson put forward three distinct but related arguments against animal thought and reason: the intensionality test, the argument from holism, and his main argument. Although Davidson's arguments are not much discussed these days (for exceptions, see Beisecker 2. Glock 2. 00. 0; Fellows 2. The Intensionality Test. The intensionality test rest on the assumption that the contents of beliefs (and thought in general) are finer grained than the states of affairs they are about. Jesus Christ Superstar (1.
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