![]() I doubt that there is any plausible sense according to which the word ‘believe’ is semantically vague. This is not to say that Jamieson is wrong. Given that context is powerful enough to transform a tall man into a short one, I am baffled by this argument. Context may be powerful enough to affect how to specify a belief correctly … but it is not powerful enough to transform a non-belief state into a belief, or a non-believer into a believer (p. About the former, Jamieson entertains the suggestion that whether an animal’s state counts as a belief depends upon a contextually determined degree of similarity to the corresponding human belief but against this view goes on to say that: ![]() Of course, these two positions are not really at odds with one another. Brute content views assert that animals possess beliefs and hence there must be a fact of the matter about their content, but this content is inaccessible to us. The first claims that animals have states which are similar to human belief states - similar enough to count as beliefs but at the same time different enough to explain the intuitive attractiveness of (2). Jamieson considers and rejects two possible views which he calls ‘wet eliminativism’ and ‘brute content’. Jamieson’s worry is over the tension in what he takes to be the intuitively correct position which accepts that (1) animals think but (2) exactly what they think is not characterizable. Once the bare fact of animal thought is accepted there remains a residual Davidsonian problem about the contents of animal thought. Although the argument is successful at undermining Davidson’s linguistically and verificationist-oriented premises about the nature of belief, Jamieson’s positive proposals are less successful. The first paper, by Dale Jamieson, attacks and effectively demolishes Davidson’s argument that animals lack beliefs and by implication all intentional mental states. Although the papers in the collection seldom explicitly refer to each other they form a lively implicit debate with some hints of an emerging consensus about the nature of animal thought which I will attempt to bring out in the course of a brief examination of each paper. What remains at stake is the nature of animal thought and the degree to which it is similar to human thought. With regard to (2), the contributors again provide a unanimously positive answer. The papers collected here predominantly discuss (2), and those papers that broach (3) tend to do so from viewpoints that link consciousness and thought. ![]() Nonetheless, it will be useful to sketch out a map of the issues beginning with this foundational question: (1) do animals have minds or, which I take to be equivalent, do animals have mental states? A positive answer to this question leads to a division of topics: (2) do animals think? and (3) do animals feel? Question (3) should be taken broadly as including the general issue of whether animals are conscious. The volume might have been better balanced if some animal mind skeptics had been included but its contents accurately reflect current views. Only two of its fourteen papers address the issue directly and both support animal minds. The volume under review expends very little of its three hundred or so pages defending the existence of animal minds. ![]() However, due to the ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology as well as sophisticated and detailed studies of animal behavior both in the wild and in captivity, skepticism about animal mentality has virtually disappeared. In the 20th century, Donald Davidson, using a different argument, echoed Descartes’s opinion that in the absence of language minds could not be attributed to animals (Davidson, however, restricted his claim to intentional mental states and glossed over the issue of consciousness). In the 17th century, Descartes famously argued that animals’ inability to use language made it ‘morally certain’ that they lacked minds. Over more than four hundred years, various influential philosophers have seriously maintained that animals do not possess minds. Whatever success these replies may enjoy, animals suffer from being obviously less similar to us than are other humans. Typical responses invoke, in various respects and in different ways, the similarity between oneself and other human beings. The traditional problem seeks the ground for our knowledge that other people enjoy mental states. The problem of animal minds is an especially difficult and, for a philosophical issue, unusually practical version of the classic problem of other minds.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |