© 2000 by The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
Introduction to the Symposium: Animal Consciousness: Historical, Theoretical, and Empirical Perspectives1
1 Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy, Box 3170, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina 27710
As materialists and Darwinians, scientists are compelled to recognize our close animal relatives as being in effect deformed human beings, differing from us only in certain genetic rearrangements that make them grow up funny-looking and stupid. Since our closest relatives have brains, bodies, and behavior that correspond to our own in many ways, it seems reasonable to assume as a null hypothesis that they probably have minds and experiences something like ours.
Yet many scientists do not see the world in these terms. Natural scientists in general, and biologists in particular, often adopt some version of the Cartesian presumption that nonhuman animals are insensate machines made of meat. Although our close animal relatives are literally anthropomorphic—that is, human-shaped—scientists are trained to regard psychic anthropomorphism as a serious error. It is axiomatic in the psychology lab that all animals are mindless unless proven otherwise.
The image of animals as insensate mechanisms is not something that today's scientists and philosophers have absorbed from the contemporary cultural background. Artistic and literary images of animals, as well as the assumptions and opinions of people whose jobs involve daily interaction with animals, support the common-sense belief that certain animals have emotions, intentions, and experiences something like ours. Moralists have argued with increasing frequency in recent years that the facts of evolutionary biology and the evident psychological similarities between people and other animals entail some version of the doctrine of animal rights. The contrary assumption—Morgan's Canon—is largely restricted to scientists and post-Cartesian philosophers.
Why does the proposition that dogs feel pain when you kick them and disappointment when you refuse to play ball with them seem dangerously anthropomorphic to scientists and transparently self-evident to just about everybody else? As humanistic critics of science have pointed out, the canonical scientific position reflects certain presumptions of the scientific method itself, which denies evidential status to subjective experiences, and thus makes it awkward to ask questions about them. The canonical position also expresses the interests of researchers who find it inconvenient to ask moral questions about experimental animals. But the canonical position is also grounded in empirical findings. The neurology and behavior of most animals, including the lower vertebrates, indicate that they do not have mental lives of any remotely human sort.
These facts affirm our conviction that these matters are susceptible to empirical as well as theoretical inquiry. In recent years, the issue of animal awareness has assumed a central position in several arenas of debate. Many biologists have begun posing and testing hypotheses concerning animal experience and cognition. Experimental psychologists have demonstrated that a wide range of warm-blooded vertebrates, from parrots to bonobos, evince surprising antecedents of human linguistic capacities. Postulates, arguments, and conjectures concerning animal sentience (or the lack of it) play important roles in contemporary philosophies of mind and of morals. The concept of conscious awareness and its neurological, adaptive, cognitive, and linguistic correlates is the focus of widespread discussion in the literatures of philosophy, psychology, cognitive and computer science, and evolutionary biology.
The following papers are contributions to a symposium on these topics presented at the 1999 meetings of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. This interdisciplinary symposium brought together scientists, philosophers, and historians to discuss the issue of animal consciousness. Its participants, chosen to represent all the facets of the many-sided debates surrounding this issue, include many of the most distinguished and important—and in some cases controversial—investigators in their respective fields. Irene Pepperberg and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh are the leading experimental researchers into the linguistic capacities of nonhuman animals. Derek Bickerton is a major figure in the study of language evolution and an important critic of animal-language experiments. John Staddon is a distinguished experimentalist and historian and a thoughtful exponent of the behaviorist school of comparative psychology. Marian Dawkins is one of the world's foremost students of animal behavior, and has also written extensively on the subject of animal welfare. Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney are the leading students of cognition in wild, free-ranging nonhuman primates. Harriet Ritvo and William Kimler are prominent historians of the relationships between scientific and other beliefs about animals and their cultural, social, and political context. Finally, we were fortunate enough to have as our discussant Donald Griffin, whose books and articles have provided perhaps the most important single impetus behind the revival of scientific interest in animal mentation.
We are grateful to all these men and women for their participation in and contributions to the symposium, and to the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology for providing the funding that made this gathering possible. We hope that the proceedings of this meeting will contribute to interdisciplinary dialogue and help to stimulate fruitful inquiry into these uniquely important and difficult questions.
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1 From the Symposium Animal Consciousness: Historical, Theoretical, and Empirical Perspectives presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, 6–10 January 1999, at Denver, Colorado.
2 E-mail: matt_cartmill{at}baa.mc.duke.edu
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