Cognitive Ethology Research Articles

Cognition, natural selection and the intentional stance

Abstract Daniel Dennett advocates the use of the intentional stance in adaptationist biology and in cognitive ethology. He sees intentional system theory as closely related to decision theory and game theory. In biological decision and game theory models, nature “chooses” the strategy by which the animal chooses a course of action. The design of the animal imposes constraints on the model. For Dennett, by contrast, the description of nature's rationale imposes constraints on the design of the animal. Dennett's oversimplified conception of nature's rationale undermines the usefulness of the intentional stance as a tool in cognitive ethology. Intentional system theory can be made more useful in investigating animal cognition by modifying its application to questions of biological function.

Interview with Daniel C. Dennett

Daniel Dennett was educated at Harvard and Oxford, receiving his D.Phil. in 1965. After six years at University of California Irvine, he moved to Tufts, where he is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies. It is the author of articles on many issues in artificial intelligence, psychology, and cognitive ethology, as well as in philosophy. His books are Content and Consciousness (1969), Brainstorms (1978), The Mind's I (with Douglas Hofstadter, 1981). Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), and Consciousness Explained (1991). His new book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, will be published by Simon & Schuster in spring, 1995.

Editorial AI and the tyranny of Galen, or Why evolutionary psychology and cognitive ethology are important to artificial intelligence

Editorial AI and the tyranny of Galen, or Why evolutionary psychology and cognitive ethology are important to artificial intelligence

Cognitive Ethology and the Treatment of Non-Human Animals: How Matters of Mind Inform Matters of Welfare

AbstractAnthropocentric claims about the ways in which non-human animals (hereafter animals) interact in their social and non-social worlds are often used to influence decisions on how animals can or should be used by humans in various sorts of activities. Thus, the treatment of individuals is often tightly linked to how they are perceived with respect to their ability to perform behaviour patterns that suggest that they can think - have beliefs, desires, or make plans and have expectations about the future. Here, I review some basic issues in the comparative study of animal minds and discuss how matters of mind are related to matters of welfare and well-being. Much comparative research still needs to be done before any stipulative claims can be made about how an individual's cognitive abilities can be used to influence decisions about how she or he should be treated. More individuals from diverse species whose lives, sensory worlds, motor abilities and nervous systems are different from those of animals with whom we identify most readily or with whom we are the most familiar, need to be studied. As others, I stress the importance of subjectivity and common sense along with the use of empirical data in making decisions about animal welfare, and that subjective assessments should be viewed in the same critical light as are supposedly objective scientific facts. I also argue that whatever connections there are between an individual's cognitive abilities and what sorts of treatment are permissible can be overridden by that individual's ability to feel pain and to suffer. When we are uncertain, even only slightly, about their ability to experience pain or to suffer, individual animals should be given the benefit of the doubt. There is a great deal of uncertainty about the phylogenetic distribution of pain and suffering.

Intentionality, social play, and definition

Social play is naturally characterized in intentional terms. An evolutionary account of social play could help scientists to understand the evolution of cognition and intentionality. Alexander Rosenberg (1990) has argued that if play is characterized intentionally or functionally, it is not a behavioral phenotype suitable for evolutionary explanation. If he is right, his arguments would threaten many projects in cognitive ethology. We argue that Rosenberg's arguments are unsound and that intentionally and functionally characterized phenotypes are a proper domain for ethological investigation.

Fish behaviour, partner choice experiments and cognitive ethology

Recently, evidence for ‘partner choice’ in many different contexts (e.g. foraging, anti-predator behaviour) has been accumulating in the fish behavioural ecology literature. In addition to demonstrating relatively complex behaviour in fish, these studies suggest that work on partner choice may benefit by incorporating a cognitive ethological approach to behaviour. We believe that using this approach when studying partner choice, and social behaviour in general, will allow us to address new questions of interest both to fish biologists and to cognitive ethologists.

Fraud detection: Intentionality and deception in cognition

Fraud detection is made difficult in part due to the fact that most auditors have relatively little experience with it. We address the issue of what kind of knowledge supports success in financial statement fraud detection by examining the more general information processing problem of detecting a deception. We define deception as a process in which a deceiver (e.g. management) has intentionally manipulated an environment (a financial statement) so as to elicit a misleading representation in a target agent (e.g. an auditor). We develop a theory of the knowledge that the deceiver and the target use for respectively constructing and detecting deceptions. Drawing on the literature in several fields (e.g. cognitive ethology, military strategy, child development) we identify specific strategies and tactics for creating a deception. We then hypothesize that reasoning about a deceiver's goals is one of the main strategies for detecting deception. We use the strategies and tactics for creating a deception to propose what the knowledge that would lead to the detection of financial statement fraud must be like based on a proposed hierarchy of the manager's (deceiver's) goals. We compare the proposed detection knowledge with the knowledge base of a computer (expert system) model of financial statement fraud detection task that was successful in solving several real fraud cases (and was built independently from the proposed theory). We also compare properties of the detection knowledge proposed in our theory with the knowledge employed by several experienced auditors who performed the task of concurring partner review on one of the fraud cases successfully analyzed by the model.

Reply to Dale Jamieson and Marc Bekoff

2. Cognitive ethology can provide an epistemic infrastructure necessary for the philosophical argument for and the public acceptance of that kinship. We should add that the emerging subfield of animal also can make an important contribution to that necessary empirical base. This enterprise, which provides social scientific studies of the ways in which nonhuman animals figure in our lives, already has given rise to academic programs and journals (Anthrowos and the forthcoming Society and Animals).

Response to Kenneth Joel Shapiro: Some Problems and Prospects for Cognitive Ethology

Response to Kenneth Joel Shapiro: Some Problems and Prospects for Cognitive Ethology

Cognitive ethology comes of age

Cognitive ethology comes of age

Intentional Icons: Towards an Evolutionary Cognitive Ethology

AbstractIn most species in which social play has been observed, play‐soliciting signals have evolved. These social signals appear to be important in communicating play intention. Here, using the work of Ruth Millikan as a working guide and canid play bows as an example, we argue that (i) some play signals may be simple “intentional icons” and (ii) senders and receivers are “cooperating devices,” in that the disposition of senders to produce play‐soliciting signals and the disposition of receivers of play signals to respond appropriately to play invitations, have evolved together. Millikan's views of social communication are difficult to render and are virtually untested. However, her stance, while philosophically controversial, is somewhat consistent with early ethological views of social communication. Thus, in combination with classical ethological positions, Millikan's position could serve as a useful guide not only to inform and motivate future empirical research in cognitive ethology, but also to stimulate ethologists to reconsider, in innovative ways, nonhuman animal cognition. To reject the empirical utility of Millikan's theory because of its difficulty or on philosophical grounds would be premature and would represent a confusion of empirical with philosophical issues.

Cognitive Ethology: Past, Present and Speculations on the Future

Cognitive ethology began with Donald R. Griffin's 1976 publication of The Question of Animal Awareness. More recently mutual influences can be found between cognitive ethology and comparative, developmental, experimental and cognitive psychology and philosophy of science and of mind. Present scientific work emphasizes: 1) animal cognitive capacities including discrimination, categorization, spatial knowledge, predator/prey relations such as injury feigning by birds, deception and attribution of intention, 2) communication, both natural systems and artificial language and cognition projects undertaken with apes, birds, and sea mammals and 3) the possibility of animal consciousness. For the future, one hopes for developments in those areas, more field research, conceptual and methodological bridges to other disciplines, and philosophical work on the theoretical foundations of cognitive ethology and naturalizing intentionality.

Mental content and evolutionary explanation

Cognitive ethology is the comparative study of animal cognition from an evolutionary perspective. As a sub-discipline of biology it shares interest in questions concerning the immediate causes and development of behavior. As a part of ethology it is also concerned with questions about the function and evolution of behavior. I examine some recent work in cognitive ethology, and I argue that the notions of mental content and representation are important to enable researchers to answer questions and state generalizations about the function and volution of behavior.

Communication and Cognition: Is Information the Connection?

Donald Griffin has suggested that cognitive ethologists can use communication between non-human animals as a window into animal minds. Underlying this metaphor seems to be a conception of cognition as information processing and communication as information transfer from signaller to receiver. We examine various analyses of information and discuss how these analyses affect an ongoing debate among ethologists about whether the communicative signals of some animals should be interpreted as referential signals or whether emotional accounts of such signals are adequate. We discuss the food-calling behavior of a group of rhesus monkeys to develop these issues.

On Aims and Methods of Cognitive Ethology

In 1963 Niko Tinbergen published a paper, On Aims and Methods of Ethology, dedicated to his friend Konrad Lorenz. Here Tinbergen defines ethology as biological study of behavior, and seeks to demonstrate close affinity between Ethology and the rest of Biology. Tinbergen identifies four major areas of ethology: causation, survival value, evolution, and ontogeny. Our goal is to attempt for cognitive ethology what Tinbergen succeeded in doing for ethology: to clarify its aims and methods, to distinguish some of its varieties, and to defend the fruitfulness of the research strategies that it has spawned.

BRUTE INTELLECT

COGNITIVE ETHOLOGY The Minds of Other Animals Essays in Honor of Donald R. Griffin edited by Caroline A. Ristau HOW MONKEYS SEE THE WORLD Inside the Mind of Another Species by Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth

The Continuing Question of Animal Awareness: Cognitive Ethology . The Minds of Other Animals. Essays in Honor of Donald R. Griffin. Carolyn A. Ristau, Ed. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1991. xx, 332 pp., illus. $49.95; paper, $22.50. Comparative Cognition and Neuroscience. From a symposium, Williamstown, MA, June 1987.

The Continuing Question of Animal Awareness: <i>Cognitive Ethology</i> . The Minds of Other Animals. Essays in Honor of Donald R. Griffin. Carolyn A. Ristau, Ed. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1991. xx, 332 pp., illus. $49.95; paper, $22.50. Comparative Cognition and Neuroscience. From a symposium, Williamstown, MA, June 1987.

Cognitive ethology and applied philosophy: The significance of an evolutionary biology of mind

The broad field of cognitive ethology, in which internal mental states are inferred from the behavior they explain, is receiving increased attention nowadays from diverse scientists and philosophers. The nature of the results and how they are presented greatly influence how humans assess their place in the natural world and how they view other animals. The attribution of consciousness and intelligence to other animals suggests that they have moral rights. The results of comparative cognitive ethological analyses and how they are presented may play a large role in defining the domain of morally permissible research, and in the development of research strategies including decisions on feeding and housing, treatment, handling, and what happens to animal subjects when the research is completed. Scientists and philosophers interested in the evolution of behavior and mental continuity can have a significant impact on how others view the world.

Animal communication: Do animals mean what they say?

Although much of animal communication can be understood without ascribing intentions, some of it must be recognized as intentional. Attributing communicative intentions to animals is often justified, but not on the usual scientific grounds. Dennett's pragmatic approach is supported but found not to deal adequately with the question of whether creatures for which the intentional stance is warranted really do have intentions, beliefs, and desires. A distinction is made between intentional and quasi-intentional systems, and it is argued that what identifies the former is the fact that for such systems, the distinction between ascribing intentions and describing intentional terms is one that cannot meaningfully be drawn. Cognitive ethologists are therefore justified in believing that animals have communicative intentions when, and only when, the use of intentional idiom is irresistible.

Dennett on cognitive ethology: A broader view

Dennett on cognitive ethology: A broader view