Earl Williams
English Comp 1001
Draft Paper
Animals....Beliefs?
I have conducted my research paper of evolves psychologically speaking of do animals have
beliefs and how. The question of whether animals have beliefs is also difficult to answer given the lack of
theoretical agreement about the nature of belief. The most common view is that beliefs are a
representational state, and that the mental representation, fixes content that expresses debatable
circumstances.
The answer is not obvious, and the question is not simple. The issue is remote because it is not for
the lack of bad information about details of animal psychology; no it is more to that than what it seems to
be. The concept is more of how do beliefs apply to animals. To attribute a belief to animals, I am
assuming that the first claim is to having an explanation of animals’ behavior.
Belief is naturally born in a network of views use in explaining action or behavior. The network
makes up a commonsense theory about how is behavior explained.
Do animals have beliefs? One of the problems with this question. Which has provoked a lot of
controversy among animal researchers and the ideologues of cognitive science, is that there is scant
agreement on the meaning of the term “belief” as it appears in the question? "Belief" has come to have a
special, non-ordinary, sense in the English of many (but not all) of these combatants: it is supposed by
them to be the generic, least-marked term for a cognitive state. Thus if you look out the window and see
that a cow is in the garden, you ipso facto have a belief that a cow is in the garden.
"Belief" is ordinarily reserved for more dignified contents, such as religious belief, political
belief, or--sliding back to more quotidian issues--specific conjectures or hypotheses considered. But for
Anglophone philosophers of mind in particular, and other theoreticians in cognitive science, the verb
"believe" and the noun "belief" have been adopted to cover all s uch cases; whatever information guides
an agent's actions is counted under the rubric of belief.
One can often predict or explain what an animal will do by simply noticing what it notices and
figuring out what it wants. For an example, the raccoon wants the food in the box-trap, but knows better
than to walk into a potential trap where it can't see its way out. That's why you have to put two open doors
on the trap--so that the animal will dare to enter the first, planning to leave by the second if there's any
trouble. You'll have a hard time getting a raccoon to enter a trap that doesn't have an apparent "emergency
exit" that closes along with the entrance. I take it that this style of explanation and prediction is
uncontroversially valuable--it works, and it works because raccoons (for instance) are that smart. That
fact suffices, given what I mean by "belief", to show that raccoons have beliefs--and desires, of course.
One might call the latter items preferences, or goals, or wants, or values, but whatever you call them, their
specification involves the use of intentional mentalist idioms.
In my field of research I related my research to animal cognition. This is the study of the
processes used to generate adaptive or flexible behavior in animal species. Much of the work on animal
cognition is more appropriately described by the term comparative cognition, because the processes and
capacities underlying behavior are compared between species (Shettleworth 2010). In the context of
animal cognition research, cognition usually refers to the cognitive mechanisms involved in learning,
memory, perception, and decision-making. As a part of cognitive science, research in animal cognition
aims to uncover the different cognitive mechanisms at play across species, with the purpose of
understanding the varieties of cognition, the similarities between humans and other species, and the
evolution and function of cognitive processes.
Animal cognition is one of my major points relating to my research question because behavior of
the animals is adaptable like human behavior. Animal’s minds may not be as similar as the humans but
there methods are the same in different ways. Animals understand emotions from humans which make
animals be in a psychological state of belief. Animals can adapt those feelings and emotions and turns
those into beliefs because of how they adapt to humanity.
Rather than starting with the introspection of one's own mind and then generalizing to all other
humans, the argument for animal minds takes as given that all humans have minds and generalizes from
the human species to other species. Nevertheless, in another sense the analogical argument for animal
minds is weaker, since the strength of the argument is a function of the degree of similarity between the
reference class and the target class. Humans are probably more similar to one another than they are to
members of another species.
Rather than identifying concept acquisition with sorting behavior, Allen and Hauser suggest
alternative methodologies for identifying concepts in other species. For example, they offer a possible test
for a death concept among vervet monkeys (Allen & Hauser 1996). Vervet mothers are capable of
recognizing the alarm cries of their infants, and when they hear such a cry the mother will look towards
her infant, and the other females will look towards the mother. Allen and Hauser suggest that playing a
recording of a recently deceased infant's alarm cry would help to determine whether vervets have a
concept of death. If the mother responds to these recordings in an atypical fashion, unlike the usual
response made to a living infant, that response provides evidence that vervet monkeys have the concept of
death. According to Allen and Hauser, having a concept permits different responses to identical stimuli.
The actual sound of the infant's alarm cry during life is identical to the sound played back after death.
I am pointing this out because it involves the animals’ concepts which connect to language which
relates to behavior. For example when I was young I had two rottweilers one was a boy and one was a
girl. They made little puppies together, the whole family stayed in the basement. Every time one of us
went down stairs to do laundry the mother would growl at us because she has her mother protective
behavior mode on she thinks we might hurt her puppies but were not. This example relates to humans too,
because women don’t want any stranger kidnapping their baby or even thinking about abusing her baby.
Those protective modes of animals and humans relate as behavior and emotions.
Animals are rational because they can act in light of reasons understood objectively, in an agentneutral fashion, and that the animal is sensitive to these reasons (Glock 2009). However, discussions of
animal rationality are confounded by the lack of consensus on what is required for rationality. Because
there are many different kinds of rationality (e.g. practical vs. theoretical, process vs. product), and given
the disagreements both about the cognitive mechanisms implicated in rationality, and the extent to which
different kinds of normativity are implicated in rationality, there is no straightforward way to answer the
question about whether members of any other species are rational agents.
Behavioral ecology developed into a unique field oriented towards determining how a behavior
evolved and the functions of that behavior. Cognitive ethology was born as a field focused on animal
consciousness, though in this literature consciousness is as much of a focus as beliefs, intentions, selfawareness, deception, and theory of mind. Griffin's use of the word “consciousness” belies his greater
interest in cognition, given that most of the topics he discusses (e.g. perception, memory, spatial
cognition, language, tool use etc.) are cognitive (Griffin 1992). Today few researchers welcome the
cognitive ethology label (Allen 2004; Shettleworth 2010a). Rather, we witness an integration of the
experimental and ethological approaches to studying cognition by scientists in psychology, biology, and
anthropology, among other fields (Shettleworth 2010a). Some now use the term “cognitive ecology” to
refer to the study of cognitive processes in an animals' natural environment.
Contemporary scientific interest in animal minds and cognitive capacities is often traced back to
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. In The Descent of Man, Darwin introduced
many of the issues that motivate the research programs in animal cognition today, including tool use,
reasoning, learning, concepts, consciousness, social cognition, artistic abilities, and moral cognition. In
addition, Darwin anticipated current interest in implicit reasoning with his comment “The savage would
certainly neither know nor care by what law the desired movements were effected; yet his act would be
guided by a rude process of reasoning, as surely as would a philosopher in his longest chain of
deductions” (Darwin 1974, 75).
The various research programs in animal cognition can all be seen as an attempt to uncover the
underlying mechanisms involved in behavior. The functional approach aims to categorize behavior
functionally to either ultimate or proximate function, and to discover the cognitive mechanisms that are
used in such behaviors. The initial problem, of course, is to know whether the behavior counts as having a
particular function; this is particularly troublesome when a certain function has a mechanism closely
identified with it. For example, while communication understood by a biologist in terms of ultimate
function is nothing more than an adaptive process of information exchange between two individuals that
does not require cognition, the use of the term to describe a behavior may have Gricean implications to
others, which in turn can lead to unjustified inferences about the about mechanism.
Animal behavior has been long explained in terms of what are sometimes thought to be “simple”
associative learning methods such as classical and instrumental conditioning, or in terms of speciesspecific responses. Species-specific responses are what are sometimes called innate behaviors, but this
term is problematic for a number of reasons, and has largely been abandoned by scientists; they refer
instead to the predispositions demonstrated by typical members of the species or subset of species.
Associative learning comes about through experiencing relationships between events, and results in an
expectation that the relationship will continue. However, the more we learn about the processes involved
in building associations, and the more it seems we can do with them, the less “simple” and the more
cognitive they appear to be (Carruthers 2009, De Wit & Dickinson 2009; Dickinson 2009; Rescorla 1988;
Shettleworth 2010a). Other processes thought to be involved in some instances of animal behavior are
transitive inference, causal learning, and path-integration. Questions arise about the nature and cognitive
requirements of these processes, and their relation to associative learning.
For others, the lack of an external language (and the lack of an error theory to account for why
animals would have a language of thought while lacking external language) suggests that animals do not
have beliefs at all (Dennett 1996; Davidson 1982, Stich 1978). Donald Davidson has offered an argument
against animal rationality based on an association between concepts, beliefs, and language. On Davidson's
view, believers must have the concept of belief, because in order to have a belief, one must recognize that
beliefs can be true or false, and one cannot understand objective truth without understanding the nature of
beliefs. In order to develop an understanding of objective truth, one must be able to triangulate with
others, to talk to others about the world, and hence all believers must be language users. Since other
species lack language, they do not have beliefs (Davidson 1982). Davidson also argues against animal
beliefs based on the claim that having a notion of error is necessary for counting as a believer (Davidson
1975). These arguments have been widely discussed in the literature.
A different argument against animal belief has been presented by Stephen Stich, who argues that
we cannot attribute propositional attitudes to animals in any metaphysically robust sense, given our
inability to attribute content to an animal's purported belief. On Stich's view, if attribution of belief to
animals is understood purely instrumentally, then animals have beliefs. However, if attribution of beliefs
to animals requires that we can accurately describe the content of those beliefs, then animals don't have
beliefs. In response how can the content of animal belief be fixed (Armstrong 1973), Stich argues that
cannot make attributions because this would violate the truth-preserving role of attribution. In addition,
because “nothing we could discover would enable us to attribute content to an animal's belief. Hence, we
can make no attribution, and if we can't say what an animal's belief is about, it makes no sense to say that
an animal has a belief. The worry here is similar to the worry about anthropomorphism; when we use our
language to ascribe content to other species, we may be attributing to them more than is appropriate. Stich
is concerned that when we say (dog) believes there is a meaty bone buried in the backyard we are
attributing to dog concepts he cannot possibility have, concepts like “backyard” which are only
comprehensible if one has corresponding concepts such as “property line”, “house”, “fence”, and so on.
Stich's argument can be formulated as:
In order for something to have a belief, it must have a concept.
In order to have a concept, one must have particular kinds of knowledge, including knowledge of how the
concept relates to other concepts. Non-human animals don't have such knowledge. Therefore, non-human
animals don't have beliefs.
I do not believe that the negative or the positive cases here are particularly persuasive. The main
philosophical arguments against belief attribution in animals appear to be invalid, and the empirical
studies that confirm these arguments’ conclusions are, at best, weak. Nor do I think that the positive
empirical studies mentioned above provide any reason to hold that animals can attribute beliefs. The
studies fail to provide evidence of belief attribution over and above perceptual-state attribution or
complementary behavior-reading (i.e., a non-mindreading strategy that tracks the observable cues that are
the de facto grounds for ascribing mental states but does not interpret these cues as such). What is needed
to move the debate and the field forward, I argue, is a fundamentally new experimental approach for
testing belief attribution in animals, one that is capable of distinguishing genuine belief- attributing
subjects from their perceptual-state and complementary behavior-reading counterparts. In the last section
of the paper, I present just such an experimental protocol that can deliver the required evidence.