Thinking without words: An overview for animal ethics

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 11, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 319-335

  Bermúdez, José Luis ^a  

^a WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Animal cognition; Animal ethics; Thought without language

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248392316     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s10892-007-9013-8     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. J. L. Bermúdez, Thinking without Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
2. See, for example, N. Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
3. S. E. G. Lea, Instinct, Environment, and Behavior (London: Methuen, 1984).
4. But see A. Dickinson and B. Balleine, "Actions and Responses: The Dual Psychology of Behavior," in N. Eilan, B. Brewer, and R. McCarthy (eds.), Spatial Representation (London: Basil Blackwell, 1993) for examples of types of conditioned response that do seem to require a psychological explanation.
5. Michael Dummett, The Origins of Analytical Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1993).
6. Dummett, The Origins of Analytical Philosophy, pp. 122-123.
7. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), Chapter 2.
8. See R.W. Byrne, The Thinking Ape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 97.
9. See Bermúdez, Thinking without Words, Chapters 4 and 5, and, for a shorter overview, J. L. Bermúdez, "Ascribing Thoughts to Non-Linguistic Creatures," Facta Philosophica 5 (2003), pp. 313-334.
10. W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 271.
11. The theory of mental models was first proposed in K. Craik, The Nature of Explanation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943), and is most comprehensively developed in P. Johnson-Laird, Mental Models (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For mental maps see D. Braddon-Mitchell and F. Jackson, The Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, 2nd Edition (London: Blackwell Publishers, 2006), Chapter 10.
12. The thinker who merely thinks such thoughts (as opposed to thinking about them) does not have to grasp these entailment and evidential relations. They simply have to think in ways that respect them.
13. Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson, The Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, p. 171.
14. See, for example, D. Rosenthal, "Two Concepts of Consciousness," Philosophical Studies 49 (1986), pp. 329-359.
15. It may provide indirect support, however, on some ways of developing higher-order theories of consciousness. Authors such as P. Carruthers have argued that the type of higher-order thoughts required for consciousness are only available to creatures possessing a "theory of mind" and as we will see in more detail in the next section, the argument from intentional ascent to semantic ascent does rule out theories of mind at the non-linguistic level [P. Carruthers, "Natural Theories of Consciousness," European Journal of Philosophy 6 (1998), pp. 203-222].
16. See Bermúdez, Thinking without Words, pp. 48-49.
17. F. Dretske, Seeing and Knowing (London: Routledge, 1969), p. 76.
18. See, for example, the papers in R. W. Byrne and A. Whiten (eds.), Machiavellian Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); D. Premack and G. Woodruff. "Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (1978), pp. 515-526;
19. and F. de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982).
20. E.g., D. Povinelli, "Chimpanzee Theory of Mind," in P. Carruthers and P. K. Smith (eds.), Theories of Theory of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
21. and M. D. Hauser, Wild Minds (London: Penguin Books, 2000).
22. Report by Hans Kummer quoted in Byrne, The Thinking Ape, p. 106.
23. See D. Sperber (ed.), Causal Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).