Book Review
Folia Primatol 2008;79:52–53
Published online: September 14, 2007
S. Hurley, M. Nudds (eds.)
Rational Animals?
Oxford University Press, Oxford 2006
561 pp.; GBP 29.95
ISBN 0–19–852826–4 (hardback), 0–19–852827–2 (paperback)
If non-human animals are rational, which processes control such performance, and why
knowing about it would matter is the topic of this exciting volume. At stake is the tough question as to how animal behaviour is brought about: is its functionality based on learned experience (e.g. conditioning, trial and error) or on a priori thinking (e.g. insight)?
Answers to such questions became more complicated as and when the distinction between
‘man’ and ‘animal’ became less tenable, due to progress in evolutionary biology. While Descartes declared animals to be machines without reason, 300 years later behaviourists tried to
dispute that humans were thoughtful beings. Thus, it is helpful to relate the book title to both
non-human and human animals – as the former are certainly not simply ‘empiricists’ sensu
Locke and the latter not simply ‘rationalists’ sensu Kant. If anything, both are a complicated
mixture. Nevertheless, whoever tackles the theme has to speculate about something that – despite almost breathless progress in neurobiology – is still largely invisible: the machinations of
the black box called a nervous system. The volume is therefore not for the faint-hearted novice,
who might rather enjoy the lucid introductions by Wynne [2001, 2004].
However, if only for sheer volume: anybody interested in the current knowledge about
knowledge should find enough food for thought in this tome of 561 small-fonted sheets. It is
indispensable to first confront the 81 pages of the editors’ introduction. This synopsis is praiseworthy, as it cannot have been a mean task to reconstruct the intellectual pedigree of 23 contributions, some of which seem to have been conceived on different planets (trademark of most
multi-disciplinary volumes).
The volume originates from a 2002 Oxford conference of the same name, where the editors assembled scientists of their own trade – philosophers – with cognitive psychologists, aiming to ‘bring philosophical arguments about rationality into contact with empirical evidence of
the behavioural and cognitive capacities of animals’ (p. 1). The combined thoughts are sectioned into the 6 parts: ‘Types and levels of rationality’; ‘Rational versus associative processes’;
‘Metacognition’; ‘Social and cognition behaviour’; ‘Mind reading and behaviour reading’; ‘Behaviour and cognition in symbolic environments’.
Within this corral, the editors rounded up many of the usual suspects who made animal
psychology a hot topic – such as Kanzi the bonobo, Sheba the chimpanzee, Akeakamai the
bottlenose dolphin, Betty the New Caledonian crow, Sweetie-Pie the scrub jay and Alex the African grey parrot. The menagerie of potential mentalists reflects that cognitive psychology,
while largely inspired by primatological research such as the pioneering studies of Wolfgang
Köhler, has become biodiverse. Instead of concentrating on a rather narrow segment of the evolutionary continuum – the primate order – and resort to homology as an explanation for similarities, we must now invoke convergent evolution and thus analogy – for example with respect
to a phenomenon such as ‘deception’ in corvids and primates, as their lineages separated hundreds of millions of years ago.
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The volume is thus not restricted to household names in primate cognition research (e.g.
Visalberghi, Tomasello, Call, Boysen, Povinelli, Savage-Rumbaugh, Rumbaugh) but encompasses empirical perspectives on birds (e.g. Heyes, Clayton, Emery, Pepperberg) and dolphins
(Connor, Mann, Tschudin). If they could start over, the editors would probably have included
some of the current attempts to overcome primatocentrism through cognition research on dogs
[Kaminski et al., 2004] and – sic! – fish [Bshary et al., 2002].
Rational Animals? confronts us with fierce jargon when categories are dissected and debunked or expanded and revised until they disappear or spawn a multitude of new terms and
descriptors. This is an inevitable corollary of increased research into animal behaviour but also
a main reason why the volume cannot deliver a clear answer. The alternative would be to believe
that we will one day discover clear-cut neurobiological correlates of broad and often poorly defined terms such as ‘perception’, ‘intention’, ‘desire’, ‘belief’, ‘understanding’, ‘consciousness’,
‘self-awareness’, ‘language’, ‘mind-reading’, etc. Philosophers have grappled with such categories for thousands of years, and ethologists may therefore be forgiven if they try to catch up.
The volume is, however, often clear about one point: that it is outdated to contrast mechanistic explanations of behaviour in terms of associative processes (the ‘empiricist’ stance) with
intentional explanations in terms of flexible interactions between beliefs and desires (the ‘rationalist’ stance). As a consequence, two somewhat related heuristic tools become questionable.
Firstly, there is Morgan’s Canon, which instructs us to avoid postulating higher-level mechanisms for behaviour if lower-level mechanisms seem to provide an equally good explanation.
Secondly, there is the parsimony principle, which aims to employ the simplest possible explanation.
Tomasello and Call are the most explicit, albeit not the only contributors, who exemplify
this. They revisit a series of experiments which aimed to decide whether or not chimpanzees
‘know’ what others are seeing. They contrast the psychologically rich explanations of ‘boosters’
with the leaner interpretations of ‘scoffers’. Their conclusion: scoffers need a multitude of ‘simpler’ explanations (e.g. ‘learned co-orientation’, ‘conditional discrimination’, ‘peripheral feeding’ and ‘evil eye’ hypothesis) to come up with alternatives to the single booster assumption:
that chimpanzees understand seeing. This illustrates nicely how adherence to Morgan’s Canon
can conflict with the parsimony principle.
The editors warn wisely against a ‘double-standard’ in explaining human versus animal
rationality (p. 80). To date, at least, we often have no clue what is going on. Just imagine the parrot (or the primate) that has beautifully mastered a task – but when asked again, stubbornly
provides wrong answers. ‘Is this behaviour irrational? Or is it a rational means of producing
an emotional response from his trainer that he enjoys more than he would enjoy the reward?’
(p. 73). Enjoy thinking about it!
Volker Sommer, London
References
Bshary R, Wickler W, Fricke H (2002). Fish cognition: a primate’s eye view. Animal Cognition 5: 1–13.
Kaminski J, Call J, Fischer J (2004). Word learning in a domestic dog: evidence for ‘fast mapping’. Science 304: 1682–1683.
Wynne CD (2001). Animal Cognition. The Mental Lives of Animals. New York, Palgrave.
Wynne CD (2004). Do Animals Think? Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Book Review
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