Perspectives on the animal mind*

Abstract

Charles Darwin was one of the first to propose a unified framework with which to understand human and animal behavior. The foundation of Darwin’s framework is his theory of descent with modification. What Darwin was convinced that theory allowed him to say about human and animal behavior is exemplified in the ‘continuity thesis.’ As Darwin put it, ‘there is a much wider interval in mental power between one of the lowest fishes, as a lamprey or lancelet, and one of the higher apes, than between an ape and a man; yet this interval is filled up by numberless gradations’ (Darwin 1871 [1936]: 453). Darwin’s continuity thesis is the foundation of contemporary studies of animal behavior; it is, along with contemporary evolutionary theory, what unifies the field of animal behavior. This special issue brings together papers in the tradition of the cognitive approach to animal behavior, an approach to animal behavior which attributes ‘mentality’ to animals. Donald Griffin (1978) named this approach ‘cognitive ethology’ in 1978 with the specific aim of creating a research program that explored the mental lives of non-human animals. Notice what Griffin was after: He wanted to explore the mental lives of non-human animals, not justify the claim that non-human animals have mental lives. In this effort, Griffin reflected earlier critics in psychology who came to the view that psychological behaviorism was not viable as an approach to explaining adequately human capacities. Griffin’s cognitive ethology is Darwin’s continuity thesis full steam ahead. Ultimately, the perspectives on animal minds staked out in the papers collected here are driven by a cognitive approach to the study of animal behavior. Indeed, the perspectives run deep, articulating differences in approach to such study as well as to the sorts of conclusions that such studies support. There is a mix of historical, philosophical, and scientific papers covering considerable * Save for Browne’s paper, the work collected here was originally presented at the 39th Annual