Time to stop pretending we don’t know other animals are sentient beings

Do We Know What We Do not Know? A Response to Celine Bonnet

Molecular approaches to diagnosis of invasive aspergillosis what we know and what we do not know.

Invasive aspergillosis (IA) are a major complication in immunocompromized patients where can be serious and rapidly fatal. Early diagnosis and early appropriate antifungal treatment is important in reducing mortality and morbidity. But despite many efforts to develop detection methods, the diagnosis of IA still remains challenging and current conventional methods are limited for adequate diagno...

MCMC: how do we know when to stop?

1 Introduction Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), which enables estimation in complex models via simulation, is now a widespread and accepted statistical tool, particularly in Bayesian analysis. Here, a distribution of interest, or target distribution, π, is approximated by a simulated chain {x

Metacognition in animals: how do we know that they know?

Research on animal metacognition has typically used choice discriminations whose difficulty can be varied. Animals are given some opportunity to escape the discrimination task by emitting a so-called uncertain response. The usual claim is that an animal possesses metacognition if (a) the probability of picking the uncertain response increases with task difficulty, and (b) animals are more accur...

The Moral Consideration of Nonhuman Animals: How Can We Identify Which Beings Are Conscious?1

A variety of ethical positions consider that the ability of an individual to be aware of what befalls him or her —in a more o less complex manner— is the indispensable attribute for that being to be per se morally considered. Nowadays, nevertheless, we lack a direct method to identify the ability of an individual to be conscious and, therefore, to corroborate the belief that certain beings —man...