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Rational Animals?
Edited by Susan Hurley and Matthew Nudds
568 pages
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Figures and tables
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234x156mm
978-0-19-852827-2
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Paperback
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06 April 2006
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This item is printed to order. Items which are printed to order are normally despatched and charged within 5-10 days.
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- 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 readership
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 resemble 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.Readership: Psychologists and philosophers interested in animal
behaviour and animal cognition. Evolutionary psychologists
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Edited by Susan Hurley, Department of Philosophy, Bristol University, and All Souls College, University of 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, Department of History and 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, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK; Richard Connor, Department of Biology, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, USA; Gregory Currie, Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, UK; Anthony Dickinson, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK; Fred I. Dretske, Department of Philosophy, Duke University, Durham, USA; Nathan Emery, Sub-department of Animal Behaviour, University of Cambridge, UK; William M. Fields, Department of Biology and Language Research Center, Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA; Louis M. Herman, Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory, Honolulu, USA; Cecilia Heyes, Department of Psychology, University College London, UK; Susan Hurley, Department of Politics and International Studies, University
of Warwick, Coventry, UK; Alex Kacelnik, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, UK; Janet Mann, Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA; Ruth Garrett Millikan, University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA; Matthew Nudds, Department of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh, UK; David Papineau, Department 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, Department fo Biology and Language Research Center, Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA; Sara J. Shettleworth, Department of
Psychology, University of Toronto, Canada; Kim Sterelny, Philosophy Program, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia; Jennifer E. Sutton, Department 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
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"this volume offers a useful overview of current thinking about animal rationality from a variety of academic perspectives. It provides an invaluable point of entry for students new to the area, while offering researchers an insight into the perspectives of those whose approaches to animal rationality are grounded in disciplines other than their own." - Applied Cognitive Psychology, Vol 21 "Rational Animals? is thoughtful, thought-provoking, informative and fascinating and will do a great deal to further interdisciplinary understanding and informed debate." - Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol 13, No 12 "This is an excellent, informative book on animal rationality." - Doody's
Notes
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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?
Part V - Mind reading and behaviour 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 behaviour 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
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