8 - Mindreading in the animal kingdom

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Can non-human animals think and reason about what other creatures are thinking, reasoning, or experiencing? Experimentalists, ethologists, and theorists have answered this deceptively simple question in many different ways. Some researchers have made very strong claims about so-called mindreading abilities in animals (Byrne and Whiten [1988, 1990, 1991]; Dally et al. [2006]; Hare et al. [2001]; Hare et al. [2002]; Premack and Woodruff [1978]; Tomasello and Call [2006]; Tschudin [2001]). Others have been critical of such claims (Heyes [1998]; Penn and Povinelli [2007b]; Povinelli and Vonk [2006]). Even a cursory look at the extensive literature on mindreading in animals reveals considerable variation both in what mindreading abilities are taken to be, and in what is taken as evidence for them. The first aim of this essay is to tackle some important framework questions about how exactly the mindreading hypothesis is to be stated. In sections 2 and 3, three importantly different versions of the mindreading hypothesis are distinguished. The first (which I call minimal mindreading) occurs when a creature's behavior covaries with the psychological states of other participants in social exchanges. The second (which I call substantive mindreading) involves attributions of mental states. In section 3, substantive mindreading is further divided into propositional attitude mindreading and perceptual mindreading. In section 4, I present reasons for thinking that the role of propositional attitude psychology in human social life is very much overstated and show that this very much weakens the analogical case for identifying propositional attitude mindreading in non-linguistic creatures.