Abstract
Debates in animal cognition are frequently polarized between the romantic view that some species have human-like causal understanding and the killjoy view that human causal reasoning is unique. These apparently endless debates are often characterized by conceptual confusions and accusations of straw-men positions. What is needed is an account of causal understanding that enables researchers to investigate both similarities and differences in cognitive abilities in an incremental evolutionary framework. Here we outline the ways in which a three-dimensional model of causal understanding fulfills these criteria. We describe how this approach clarifies what is at stake, illuminates recent experiments on both physical and social cognition, and plots a path for productive future research that avoids the romantic/killjoy dichotomy.
Highlights
Academic debates are a little like popular music
We proposed a step towards ending the animal cognition war
After identifying conceptual disagreement concerning the notion of causal understanding as one of the main forces driving the controversy, we suggested bracketing off normative issues concerning the notion of understanding and shifting the debate towards empirically tractable questions concerning the less contentious notion of causal cognition
Summary
Academic debates are a little like popular music. A few have a strange ABBA-like “annoying-but-addictive” quality that makes them impossible to get out of your head. Debates in animal cognition often fall into this latter
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