Rational Animals?

Erscheinungsjahr 2006
ISBN: 978-0-19-852827-2
Verlag: OUP Oxford

Buch, Englisch, 568 Seiten, Format (B × H): 170 mm x 244 mm, Gewicht: 971 g

The first collection to focus on the topic of animal rationality - central to the ongoing debate over the issue of animal intelligence
- Brings together leading thinkers from philosophy and psychology to give a multidisciplinary approach to this topic
- Includes a substantial introduction by the editors summarising the main points and introducing the concepts for a multidisciplinary readershiop

To what extent can animal behaviour be described as rational? What does it even mean to describe behaviour as rational? This book focuses on one of the major debates in science today - how closely does mental processing in animals resembles mental processing in humans. It addresses the question of whether and to what extent non-human animals are rational, that is, whether any animal behaviour can be regarded as the result of a rational thought processes. It does this with attention to three key questions, which recur throughout the book and which have both empirical and philosophical aspects: What kinds of behavioural tasks can animals successfully perform? What if any mental processes must be postulated to explain their performance at these tasks? What properties must processes have to count as rational? The book is distinctive in pursuing these questions not only in relation to our closest relatives, the primates, whose intelligence usually gets the most attention, but also in relation to birds and dolphins, where striking results are also being obtained.

Some chapters focus on a particular species. They describe some of the extraordinary and complex behaviour of these species - using tools in novel ways to solve foraging problems, for example, or behaving in novel ways to solve complex social problems - and ask whether such behaviour should be explained in rational or merely mechanistic terms. Other chapters address more theoretical issues and ask, for example, what it means for behaviour to be rational, and whether rationality can be understood in the absence of language.

The book includes many of the world's leading figures doing empirical work on rationality in primates, dolphins, and birds, as well as distinguished philosophers of mind and science. The book includes an editors' introduction which summarises the philosophical and empirical work presented, and draws together the issues discussed by the contributors.

Contents
- 1 Susan Hurley & Matthew Nudds: The questions of animal rationality: theory and evidence
- Part I - Types and Levels of Rationality
- 2 Alex Kacelnik: Meanings of rationality
- 3 Fred I Dretske: Minimal rationality
- 4 Ruth Garrett Millikan: Styles of rationality
- 5 Jose Luis Bermudez: Animal reasoning and proto-logic
- 6 Susan Hurley: Making sense of animals
- Part II - Rational versus Associative Processes
- 7 Colin Allen: Transitive inference in animals: reasoning or conditioned associations?
- 8 David Papineau & Cecilia Heyes: Rational or associative: Imitation in Japanese quail
- 9 Nicky Clayton, Nathan Emery & Anthony Dickinson: The rationality of animal memory: complex caching strategies of western scrub jays
- Part III - Metacognition
- 10 Josep Call: Descartes' two errors: reason and reflection in the great apes
- 11 Sara J Shettleworth & Jennifer E Sutton: Do animals know what they know?
- 12 Joelle Proust: Metacognition and animal rationality
- 13 Gregory Currie: Rationality, decentring, and the evidence for pretence in nonhuman animals
- part IV - Social Behavior and Cognition

- 14 Kim Sterelny: Folk logic and animal rationality
- 15 Elsa Addessi & Elisabetta Visalberghi: Rationality in capuchin monkey's feeding behavior?
- 16 Richard Connor & Janet Mann: Social cognition in the wild: Machiavellian dolphins?
- Paart V - Mind Reading and Behavior Reading
- 17 Michael Tomasello & Josep Call: Do chimpanzees know what others see - or only what they are looking at?
- 18 Daniel Povinelli & Jennifer Vonk: We don't need a microscope to explore the chimpanzee's mind
- 19 Alain J-P C Tschudin: Belief attribution tasks with dolphins: what social minds can reveal about animal rationality
- Part VI - Behavior and Cognition in Symbolic Environments
- 20 Louis M Herman: Intelligence and rational behavior in the bottle-nosed dolphin
- 21 Irene M Pepperberg: Intelligence and rationality in parrots
- 22 Sarah T Boysen: Effects of symbols on chimpanzee cognition
- 23 E Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Duane M Rumbaugh & William M Fields: Language as a window on rationality

Zielgruppe

Psychologists and philosophers interested in animal behaviour and animal cognition. Evolutionary psychologists

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hurley, Susan

Nudds, Matthew

Fachgebiete

• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Tierkunde / Zoologie Tierethologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychologie / Allgemeines & Theorie Experimentelle Psychologie
• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften Neurobiologie, Verhaltensbiologie
• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Tierkunde / Zoologie Tierökologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Kognitionspsychologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Philosophie des Geistes, Neurophilosophie
• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften Evolutionsbiologie

Über Autor(innen)

Edited by Susan Hurley, University of Warwick and All Souls College, Oxford, UK and Matthew Nudds, Department of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh, UK

Contributors: Elsa Addessi, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Rome, Italy Colin Allen, Dept of History & Philsophy of Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA Jose Luis Bermudez, Philosophy, Neuroscience & Psychology Program, Washington University, St Louis, USA Sarah T Boysen, The Ohio State University, Columbia, USA Josep Call, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany Nicky Clayton, Dept of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK Richard Connor, Dept of Biology, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, USA Gregory Currie, Dept of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, UK Anthony Dickinson, Dept of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK Fred I Dretske, Dept of Philosophy, Duke University, Durham, USA Nathan Emery, Sub-dept of Animal Behaviour, University of Cambridge, UK William M Fields, Dept of Biology & Language Research Center, Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA Louis M Herman, Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory, Honolulu, USA Cecilia Heyes, Dept of Psychology, University College London, UK Susan Hurley, Dept of Politics & International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK Alex Kacelnik,Dept of Zoology, University of Oxford, UK Janet Mann, Dept of Psychology, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA Ruth Garrett Millikan, University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA Matthew Nudds, Dept of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh, UK David Papineau, Dept of Philosophy, King's College London, UK Irene M Pepperberg, Dept of Psychology, Brandeis University, Waltham, USA Daniel Povinelli, Cognitive Evolution Group, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, USA Joelle Proust, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, France Duane M Rumbaugh, Great Ape Trust of Iowa, Des Moines, USA E Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Dept of Biology & Language Research Center, Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA Sara J Shettleworth, Dept of Psychology, University of Toronto, Canada Kim Sterelny, Philosophy Program, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Jennifer E Sutton, Dept of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, Canada Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany Alain J-P C Tschudin, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, UK Elisabetta Visalberghi, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Rome, Italy Jennifer Vonk, Cognitive Evolution Group, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, USA