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There Is No Special Problem of Mindreading in Nonhuman Animals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Marta Halina
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Abstract

There is currently a consensus among comparative psychologists that nonhuman animals are capable of some forms of mindreading. Several philosophers and psychologists have criticized this consensus, however, arguing that there is a “logical problem” with the experimental approach used to test for mindreading in nonhuman animals. I argue that the logical problem is no more than a version of the general skeptical problem known as the theoretician’s dilemma. As such, it is not a problem that comparative psychologists must solve before providing evidence for mindreading.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 82 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 473 - 490
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

This paper was presented to the Philosophy of Science Research Group at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. I thank the members of that group for their helpful comments and discussion. I also thank William Bechtel, Nancy Cartwright, and C. Kenneth Waters for discussions that led to the development of the main ideas presented here, Carl Craver for detailed comments on the penultimate draft, and three anonymous reviewers for their careful and constructive feedback.

The title of this paper is inspired by Callender and Cohen’s article “There Is No Special Problem about Scientific Representation” (2006). Callender and Cohen argue that the problems of scientific representation are just the problems of representation in general and thus that the proposed solutions for the latter can be applied to the former. Similarly, I argue that the problems involved in establishing the claim that nonhuman animals mindread are no different from the problems involved in establishing any theoretical claim in science. Thus, the proposed solutions to the latter can be applied to the former.

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