Phil 101: What I Want Us to Learn from our Discussion of Animal Cognition

In addition to mental properties we’d already naturally attribute to many animals — like the capacities for pain, fear, hunger, desire to mate, interest in the wellbeing of their offspring, and in various cases good eyesight or hearing or smell — we surveyed a range of further mental properties that suggest more intelligence or cognitive sophistication. Our list (not claimed to be exhaustive) was:

1. language and communication
2. cultural transmission of skills and behavior
3. reasoning and problem solving
4. making and using tools
5. creative art
6. complex emotions (grief, empathy, sense of unfairness)
7. advanced social cognition
8. can learn abstract concepts (general patterns; similarites based on how we use/relate to things not just their intrinsic properties; general concepts of same/different)
9. self-awareness (mirror test; recognizing/compensating for one’s own lack of knowledge)

Some animals show signs of possessing each of these, at least to some degree.

We started to discuss item 7 and then item 1 in more detail.

Item 7. Advanced Social Cognition

Plenty of animals have complex social relationships: sometimes cooperating, other times not, keeping track of and responding to the social status of themselves and others.

What’s more unusual is for animals to show evidence of understanding that others aren’t just sources of behavior they like/dislike, but that others have minds of some kind.

• there’s evidence that some animals attribute intentions to others, such as distinguishing between your being unable versus unwilling to give them a reward
• some animals keep track of what other animals can perceive: I described some evidence of this sort about ravens hiding their food caches
• what’s least clear is which animals are able to attribute false beliefs — that is, representations they themselves know to be false — to others. Humans are thought not to do this until age 4-5.

Item 1. Language and Communication

1. One question is whether some signals (sounds or gestures) only express an animal’s internal state, or whether they communicate something about the outside world. If the latter, can they ever be about things that aren’t (don’t seem to be) immediately present (“displacement”)?

   For at least some animals — vervet monkeys in wild, some apes in lab settings, Alex the gray parrot — there’s good evidence that signals can be about outside objects, and can in some cases request items that aren’t yet present.

2. Sometimes animals combine multiple signals. Do these combinations ever have a “syntactic structure” in the way human languages do, or are they only an unstructured “linguistic soup”?

   No one would expect animals to have the same syntax as any human language; but do they at least exhibit grasp of some of the elemental, fundamental structural properties of our languages? These include:

   • Words combine into phrases that group together:

     Mary is across the street. Mary’s dog is across the street. Mary’s small dog is across the street. Mary’s small dog that is afraid of Paula is across the street.

   • Different phrase structures can look superficially alike:

     Pat ridiculed [Harry’s theory that Mary was across the street]. Pat persuaded [Harry’s students] [that Mary was across the street.]

   • Syntactic structure can look different “under the hood” than its surface form suggests.

     Whose rabbits do you think is/are in the hutch? Mary is eager _ to please [X]. Mary is easy [for X] to please _.

   In Chapter 10 the author of the Dr Dolittle reading argues there is no compelling evidence for attributing structures with these elements to animal communications.

Take-Away Lessons

First lesson all of this teaches us: it’s less clear that humans are special in kind from other animals than we might have thought, and many in the past did think. (As opposed to merely special in degree.)

Second lesson: Setting aside the question of which species count as special and which don’t, it’s not clear where the sharpest and deepest lines are in this list. What should we think about animals who have some of these mental capacities but lack others? Do some of the capacities count as fundamentally most important? If so which ones, and why?

Third lesson: More useful to our discussion than the details of which animals can do what, are the ways that one can effectively argue that so-and-so animals have such-and-such a capacity, and argue that so-and-so other animals don’t.

Examples of Such Arguments

1. The author discusses the “broken-wing displays” of piping plovers on pp. 37, 45-8. Predators are effectively deceived by this, and drawn away from the bird’s nest. But does the bird “intend to mislead” them, or are they just doing something they know will result in the predator moving away?

   The simplest possible interpretation of the bird’s actions would be that the broken-wing behavior is no more than a reflexive and completely automatic response to danger. Ristau shows that cannot be correct, however. When the predator does not follow the mother, she comes back toward it, repeats the display, and moves away again, until finally she attracts its attention. (p. 46)

   Also, the plovers use other strategies to repel large animals like cows that aren’t predators (p. 46).

   So the behavior seems to be more than just a reflex; it’s instead a voluntary attempt to lead some animals away. But is it a case of “intentionally misleading” the predators?

   That more sophisticated interpretation of the bird’s behavior attributes to them a “theory of the predator’s mind,” that is, an understanding that predators have a perspective on the world, that the plover can manipulate into representing the world falsely (p. 45, 47-8). There does not seem to be good evidence that the birds do understand this. Also, We have no evidence that the plover deceives other animals (or other plovers) about other things in other ways (p. 46).

2. The author also discusses apparently deceptive behavior in vervet monkeys. Sometimes a monkey gives a fake alarm call not because it’s itself scared or about to run for cover, but because it wants other monkeys to run away (p. 190).

   Did it only intend to affect the behavior of its companions, or did it understand that it was doing so by way of their having a perspective or representation of the world, that it could manipulate? (p. 190)

   While the monkey’s tendency to call depends on the audience, it does not seem to depend on the state of knowledge that members of that audience can be inferred to have. If the point of calling “Leopard!” were to make sure that everyone knew there was a leopard, one monkey would not need to call if other monkeys had already called, or could perfectly well see the leopard. That is not what happens. When one calls, the others also call, regardless. There is no evidence that they take one another’s state of awareness of the danger into account in signaling. (p. 190)

   Lster the author concludes:

   [V]ervets have a system which they use with the apparent purpose of influencing one another’s behavior. There is no evidence that they…have a theory of mind in the sense of an understanding that other monkeys have their own knowledge of the world, that this knowledge plays a role in determining their actions, and that one can influence another’s behavior by affecting that knowledge. As a result, we can conclude only that vervets intend to modify one another’s actions, not that they try to deceive or otherwise shape one another’s beliefs. (p. 192)

3. When is it reasonable to interpret alarm calls as referring to (“denoting,” “meaning”) things in the outside world — such as particular kinds/categories of danger — as opposed to just expressing “I’m scared” or some other aspect of the animal’s internal state, such as “I’m going to run!”?

   For ground squirrels, our evidence best supports that alarm calls just reflect the animal’s internal feeling of urgency or fright (pp. 170-1). With vervet monkeys, on the other hand, our evidence supports that their alarm calls also communicate information about the kind/category of external danger. Arguments for this are summarized starting on p. 171.

   Against the hypothesis that an alarm call means the action a vervet is about to take, the author counters: [W]hat the vervet actually does after giving the call varies. The monkey may do nothing at all, or may climb up a tree, or may climb down from a tree, without any necessary and inflexible relation between call and action. (p. 189)

   Against the hypothesis that it means “I’m scared” or something like that, the author points out that vervets don’t give the calls when alone, and are more likely to give them in the presence of their close family than other members of their group. The author concludes: [A]ll of these features demonstrate that alarm calling is sensitive (at least) to the audience, which means it cannot simply be a direct reflection of the monkey’s internal state of alarm. Rather than being merely expressive, vervets perhaps produce alarm calls in order to influence the behavior of the other vervets, to get them to take appropriate evasive action with respect to the specific threat that is at hand. (p. 189)

4. These arguments tell us that the monkeys’ alarm calls don’t just mean “I’m scared” or “I’m going to run.” Instead they seem to mean something about the outside world. But it’s still an open question what they say about the outside world. Does a given alarm call mean “Leopard”? Or perhaps “Predator that attacks from the ground”? Or perhaps “Danger: go climb a tree!” On pp. 190-1, the author discusses some considerations that might better support this last interpretation.

5. Some other interesting discussion concerns monkeys who “cry wolf”; see pp. 171, 190, 191-2.