Stephan Blatti will start the animal section next week.
He's proposed 2 readings. Since one is really long, I suggest you just read it and consider the second on optional.
https://umdrive.memphis.edu/aolney/internal/cogsci_readings/blatti_readings.zip
That means read the BBS article :)
I enjoyed these readings. Certainly easier to digest than some of the others.
ReplyDeleteOne point of contention I have - is it necessary to assume the evolutionary considerations? Why bring it up? Maybe I missed it, but what's the point of bringing evolution into this presentation of data and thoughts? What does it change about our perpetual ineptness to fully understand the human mind? We don't know any more about an animal's mind than we do of ours, so what would verification of an evolutionary link provide?
The arguments presented in the second paper I found to be particularly enriching. The arguments made were reasonable, at least grounded in logical deduction and inference. Though a point of contention I have with that article comes from his statement, "My dog’s proto-desire for food will pick out relevant instantiations of food as things suitable for him to eat even if it does not employ a universal concept of food as stuff that nourishes." Every dog I've ever had ate everything, regardless of potential "nourishinal" value.
Otherwise I found the paper thorough, engaging and questioning. This talk should be interesting.
I enjoyed both of the readings.
ReplyDeleteI would side with the second reading, but the BBS article really makes good points. I have criticisms of both articles however:
The chapter (second reading) was good. Logical arguments seem straightforward enough, but the regular use of anecdotal evidence and ethological observations to back those arguments prevents them from being definitive. Also, like the BBS article, this chapter relies on certain platitudes that one could object to.
The BBS article was good because it critically reviews experiments in comparative psychology. We must always be vigilant for observer bias. Nevertheless, there were many platitudes that could easily be disagreed with in the article.
For example, if a dynamic rather than computational approach was taken then human minds are actually so different than how they are currently perceived that animal minds are in fact similar in different ways than we had imagined.
The first commenter, Barrett, for example, mentions that a very mentalistic view of the mind is implicit in both the negative and positive assertions of the authors. Embodied theorists start from a different perspective entirely so would find think of most of the arguments as nonstarters.
Another commentator, Suddendorf, makes a very important point that comparing humans to chimps is an invalid assumption. Our two species are very different after millions of years of evolution, and we would need other hominids that no longer exist to have a comparative model to make the kinds of strong claims that are often made.
A number of the other commentators point out that it may simply be the kinds of experiments and the assumptions that guide their paradigms that causes the observed results so we therefore should not be so quick to dismiss the idea that animals and humans cognitive abilities are a continuum.
To address Luno's thoughts concerning evolution, I think that, in order to support the major claim that is made by this RR hypothesis (that a fundamental difference exists between humans and all other organisms), one needs to be able to explain why humans are different. Out of the numerous other intelligent species on this planet, what makes humans so special? Looking at evolution seems like a good (if not, the best) way to answer a question like this.
ReplyDeleteAs I was reading, I was waiting for the authors to address this question of "why humans?" and I didn't see a very clear attempt at an explanation in there (I may have overlooked something, though). And their concluding statement appeared to reflect that they do not have a good answer: "whatever 'good trick' was responsible for the advent of human beings’ ability to reinterpret the world in a symbolic-relational fashion, it evolved in only one lineage – ours." At least one commenter seemed to share this concern as well.
The section of the book chapter that Jeremy referenced, struck me as well but in a different way. While every dog I've owned has and will eat everything, I took DeGrazia's statement a little differently. It almost seems as though the dogs do not necessarily have a less developed sense of concept than humans. In many ways dogs do not need to have the full concept of food that humans have. It seems as though dogs (and other animals) are pruning out extra information that does not serve a purpose for them.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I wonder if other animals have a more developed understanding of some concepts. For example, dogs can smell much better than humans. So since dogs have a richer input of olfactory information and rely on this information more greatly, do they have a superior conceptual representation?
It seems to me like this could help to explain the differences between evolutionarily derived conceptual understandings and what separates nonhuman animals and humans, in terms of conceptual representation.
-Blair
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ReplyDeleteUmm, did that BBS paper turn into a scientific slapfight by the end, or was that me reading too far into it? I thought it got a bit snarky near the end there.
ReplyDeleteI was intrigued by the chicken-and-egg problem of language and cognitive faculties. There's some debate in the article and its commentary about whether language is a byproduct of our cognitive faculties, if language itself has rewired our brain, or if the structures in our brain that make us language-capable are also responsible for our cognitive capabilities. I could just feel the ghost of Dr. Louwerse's raised hand at this question. I thought the discussion on how planning was an immediate pre-req to language was very interesting, and could be a sort of third factor in this evolutionary equation. So what do you think, chicken or egg? Or something else entirely? (PS - environment is on the table also). I don't know if anything really got "decided" in this article about the role of language in giving rise to cognitive abilities, but I feel like my classmates might have interesting thoughts on this subject.
As for the other article, I have only this to say - there is definitely some sort of ToM in animals, evidenced at least by cats. My cat knows when I'm frustrated with his silly kitten antics, and once that frustration has been sensed, he performs something I'd categorize as "spite". You cannot do things to spite another creature without knowing the creature's current frame of mind, and the consequences of your spiteful actions. And he's creative, this isn't a learned stimulus-response situation. By the way, the "eat everything" drive is also present in cats, and almost exclusively applies to "especially things that are toxic to my species".
As a personal aside:
The BBS paper had me saying "Did I just read those words?" so many times. This article contained "romantic dinosaur renaissance", "Occam's aftershave", "great tits" (btw, I'm pretty sure there's a world of difference between Great Tits with caps for the species name and great tits without - I did a grammar giggle), and a really awkward Holocaust denying joke. Also, I could have done without the ableist language used by Penn et al. when they referred to the people with "normal cognitive abilities". Othering isn't cool. Is that a typical way of making comparisons between people in comparative psychology??
11-09-2011
ReplyDeletePenn et al. ‘s reading is very enlightening! I have read several Povinelli’s papers, and did not find this one! So I am glad that we have the chance to talk about and think about his relational reinterpretation hypothesis here.
Several comments: (p.122) I agree wth Penn et al.’s point on the seemingly overgeneralized idea of logical form (LF) from some people. I would not agree with the statement below either “all of these uniquely human abilities-- from our ability to reason about higher-order causal relations to our ability to impute unobservable mental states- are causally dependent on LF representations.” LF is a linguistic operation that we linguistic creatures (optionally) use to disambiguate a sentence from constructing an additional meaning representation. It is more like an abstract layer on top of the literal layer of language. Obviously, it could not be used to ‘explain’ or associate with knowledge with state of affairs or all of the linguistic phenamena like inference, or unobservable mental states.
On the other hand, I found DeGrazia’s article not persuasive. Admittedly, both animals and human beings have desires. There are some shared fundamental groundings between us and animal friends, yet most of the evidence he had in the article came from folk belief.
Glancing at the title, it seems that this paper is a fight between Darwin and the Bible: evolved or created. I think human is a superior animal compared with other kinds of animals, so it is not surprised to find some evidence for the brain similarities between them. However, nonhuman brains never surmount human facilities in reasoning and complexities.
ReplyDeleteAnimals live in their own world with their unique communication and ways of problem solving, which I always take for granted and waken me up to notice animals’ capabilities in the PSS.
As for language of thought, I have a doubt with it. Is the language the unique characteristics for human since it has the feature of displacement, productivity and generativity? In this way, do honeybees communicate without language but just body movement?
Every week, one of you make me laugh pretty hard with something in your post, and Whitney wins this week. "the ghost of Dr. Louwerse's hand..." was HILARIOUS! So true. :D
ReplyDeleteThe Darwin's mistake stuff had me vacillating between chicken and egg stuff too. Every time I'd say, "but what about..." they'd come back and address the new "but." Like Max Louwerse, I tend to buy the less extreme, coevolutionary (or coexisting) state of things. We are always interested in the interactions in factorial design experiments, why do we want to avoid interactions in these kind of theoretical propositions? We (all people, I reckon) want to go straight for the cookies and say "it's this, not that." So, I'm leaning toward the case by Penn et al that the relational reinterpretation is a useful model that highlights differences between humans and animals while not trying to definitively say well, it's because of X, and solely X. I also wished that there had been a biological mechanism to account for some of the things proposed here. Some of the response articles would almost go in that direction, but I think everyone knows it's a little too muddy at this point, and no one wants to wade in.
The self-awareness in animals article was AWESOME! It was really fun to read, and gives me lots of ammunition to use when it is said that it's language that sets us apart. :) There were direct contradictions (that I am satisfied with) to my own unscientific notions about animals and their relational past and future, and strengthened my thoughts about social understanding in animals (although, they provide concise evidence, and that is appreciated). Although they show bodily self-awareness and agency, I agree-in their terms animals seem to have that, but does language faculty affect 'how' the organism (we or animals) interprets that awareness? I guess I'm going back to the interaction thing. That most organisms know they have an elbow or whatever, but if it can't be described in language, then their idea of their elbow is going to be drastically different. Does it matter? I don't know. I will ask a scrub jay.
To start off, I was really interested in all the talk of analogical reasoning. They kept saying that analogical reasoning was contingent on having higher order relational structuring, and this made me think. Couldn’t animals have these higher order structural relations, but just not in the same way that we do? This sort of cognitive structure works for us, but do other animals need the same cognitive system that we have? Maybe they have their own relations-based structure, but just not in the way we think of it, or in more simple symbolic terms. Maybe their perceptual-based structures are analogous to our relations-based structures, because that’s all they need. Does that make sense? I think it might.
ReplyDeleteI’m kind of assuming a Theory of Mind (ToM) is similar to metacognition. We have no solid evidence to suggest that non-human animals possess either ability, or at least that’s what I got from the article. Something about this is bothering me though. I mean, we don’t have a definition of what a ‘mind’ is. Can we really say that human and non-human minds are continuous or not if we can’t agree on what the key components of a mind or of human-like cognition are(but then again, we seem to like to disagree with each other, so who knows, maybe we all secretly believe the same thing and just refuse to admit it to ensure we continue to have careers in disagreeing). Oh the joy of defining the undefinable.
The later part which got into BRIDGES, I found very interesting, and especially liked the note that “BRIDGES suggests that animals and humans at various stages of development can be understood as lying along a continuum.” I wish that they would have gone more into this because it seems to me to be a feasible theory which the evidence cited in the article seems to support. So, if this is true, wouldn’t it argue that are minds are not discontinuous?
Whitney- are you sure that is TOM and not just behavior reading? The cat doesn't have to have an understanding of intention/goal, it just has to be able to predict the outcome of whatever given behavior.
ReplyDeleteI still do not know why human and nonuman animals could not be on a continuum. In many cases we all can perform similar behaviors, even more complex ones (pointing, emotion sharing, collaboration, etc.) just to different extents. Why the need to differentiate, just because of language? Just because there are differences does not mean our abilities are not represented along a continuum. Sure, there is obviously a gap somewhere along the way, but it is probably due to a variety of factors, not relational ability alone. It seems an oversimplification to pick one factor and say 'this is why' we have language. Their argument for relational ability is convincing, but I don't think it is the only reason why our cognitive abilities are superior.
I have a question about this idea. -- "Perception of nonlinguistic utterances puts us in touch with emotions, whereas perception of our own language puts us in contact with our ideas. An animal is limited to awareness of its actions and emotional states through this mechanism, but for humans the same mechanism allows the conclusions of a thought process to be articulated by mechanisms that evolved for communication."-- I'm understand the idea is based around language, but I might argue that by animals, too, have communications that will put them in touch with their "ideas" and not just their emotions. Where is the distinct difference??
ReplyDeleteAlso, I agree with Sterling. I'm not convinced that the ABSOLUTE reason for the difference is relational ability. It makes sense, but could there not be other influences?