Phenomenology and the Study of Animal Behavior

Abstract

Has the research on animal behavior anything to gain from phenomenology? And vice versa: has phenomenology something to learn from the different disciplines operating in this field, or is it a self-sufficing doctrine without any serious aspiration to look outside its immediate scope? After all, one might argue that it follows from the phenomenological reduction that the claims made by the empirical sciences are put aside in order to make room for lived experience. Using Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy as my point of departure, I will show, however, that the experiental material collected by the empirical sciences can, nevertheless, be valuable to phenomenology, and moreover, that phenomenology can be helpful to the study of animal behavior, by elucidating the role of the scientist in her investigations. Nowadays, animal behavior is studied from several perspectives, which partly overlap, including, comparative psychology, ethology, cognitive ethology 1 , sociobiology, and social ecology. These approaches differ from each other in how much emphasis is given to general psychological theories, to the theory of evolution, and to physiology, and depending upon whether the research is performed predominantly in a laboratory or in field conditions. In this paper, I will focus my discussion on recent studies in two-way communication between humans and non-human animals, from the fields of comparative psychology and cognitive ethology. I will argue that phenomenological insights assist the study of animal communication, primarily by clarifying the relationship between the scientist and the research subject.