Abstract
Folk Physics in the Twenty-first Century: Understanding Tooling as Embodied
Highlights
Povinelli’s (2000) book Folk Physics for Apes, with the collaboration of J
Giambrone, has been highly influential in the field of comparative psychology not just because of its elegant exposition, but rather because it was firmly grounded in a specific theory of knowledge (Indirect realism in the form of Cartesian dualism)
We present Direct realism as an epistemological alternative to Indirect realism/Cartesian dualism, and illustrate how that epistemology, in the form of Ecological psychology, leads to a different understanding of the problems that Povinelli presented to the chimpanzees, and different understanding of their behavior as they attempted to solve the problems
Summary
Povinelli adopted the philosophical position that dominated much of cognitive psychology in the second half of the twentieth century, which is that the mind constructs knowledge from atomistic sensory information, and that representations of the world constructed by the mind guide action (Bennett & Hacker, 2003; Dennett & Kinsbourne, 1992; Fodor, 1974). Povinelli concluded that, despite their spontaneous use of tools in natural settings and many other sophisticated actions with objects, chimpanzees do not reason about causal relations as do humans. This conclusion was useful to the field because it prompted people to question what other explanations could fit the data better and to consider alternative theories
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