Q&A: Cognitive ethology - inside the minds of other species

Animal Minds, Cognitive Ethology, and Ethics

Our goal in this paper is to provide enough of an account of the origins of cognitive ethology and the controversy surrounding it to help ethicists to gauge for themselves how to balance skepticism and credulity about animal minds when communicating with scientists. We believe that ethicists’ arguments would benefit from better understanding of the historical roots of ongoing controversies. It ...

On the Proper Definition of Cognitive Ethology

Cognitive ethology 1 COGNITIVE ETHOLOGY: GIVING REAL LIFE TO ATTENTION RESEARCH

Studies of attention, often conducted in artificial laboratory experiments, may have limited validity when performance in the natural world is considered. For instance, for over two decades investigations of "reflexive" and "volitional" attention have tended to be grounded in methodologies that do not capture the demands of attention in everyday life. Recent studies suggest these laboratory inv...

Emotion and Other Minds

What is the relation between emotional experience and its behavioural expression? As very preliminary clarification, I mean by ‘emotional experience’ such things as the subjective feeling of being afraid of something, or of being angry at someone. On the side of behavioural expression, I focus on such things as cowering in fear, or shaking a fist or thumping the table in anger. Very crudely, th...

Descartes and Other Minds

Descartes's distinction between material and thinking substance gives rise to a question both about our knowledge of the external world and about our knowledge of another mind. Descartes says surprinsingly little about this second question. In the Second Meditation he writes of our (single) judgement that the figures outside his window are men and not automatic machines. It is argued in this pa...