Mindreading Animals: The Debate over What Animals Know About Other Minds

by Robert W. Lurz

Animals live in a world of other minds, human and nonhuman, and their well-being and survival often depends on what is going on in the minds of these other creatures. But do animals know that other creatures have minds? And how would we know if they do? In Mind-reading Animals, Robert Lurz offers a fresh approach tothe hotly debated question of mental-state attribution in nonhuman animals. Some empirical researchers and philosophers claim that some animals are capable of anticipating other creatures' behaviors by interpreting observable cues as signs of underlying mental states; others claim that animals are merely clever behavior-readers, capable of using such cues to anticipate others' behaviors without interpreting them as evidence of underlying mental states. Lurz argues that neither position is compelling, and proposes a way to move the debate, and the field, forward. Lurz presents a new approach to understanding what mind-reading in animals might be, offering a bottom-up model of mental-state attribution that is built upon cognitive abilities that animals are known to possess rather than on a preconceived view of the mind applicable to mind-reading abilities in humans. Lurz goes on to describe an innovative series of new experimental protocols for animal mind-reading research that overcome a persistent methodological problem in the field, known as the "logical problem" or "Povinelli's challenge." These protocols show in detail how various types of animals--from apes to monkeys to ravens to dogs--can be tested for perceptual state and belief attribution.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Animals

245 pages, Hardcover

First published July 29, 2011

Reviews

[Ryan Soucy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This would be a great book for anyone interested in psychologically testing animals for their capacity to make inferences about the minds of other animals, but unfortunately there have been no convincing experiments to distinguish between when an animal is mind-reading and when it is behavior-reading. The great thing about the book was that it provided experiments which could make that distinction, though they have yet to be tested. If I were an animal researcher, this would have been an easy 4 star, if not 5 star rating. Since I'm not, and was really more interested in solving "the logical problem" and the fundamental question of the possibility of whether animals could be mind-readers at all, I gave it a 3. The sections which dealt with the questions relative to these particular issues are short and can be summarized in even less time (though in no way unclear or unconvincing).

Typically, my reviews run much longer. This is not because there is nothing to say about or for this book, my sympathies simply lie elsewhere. I hope that won't deter anyone interested in the subject from reading this book. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating read and is really is expertly presented an analyzed.