Invertebrate minds: A challenge for ethical theory

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 11, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 275-297

  Carruthers, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

Author keywords

Belief; Desire; Ethics; Insect; Mind; Pain; Planning; Spider; Suffering; Sympathy

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248394770     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s10892-007-9015-6     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. Donald Davidson, "Thought and Talk," in S. Guttenplan (ed.), Mind and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 7-23.
2. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), Lecture 6.
3. Christopher Cherniak, Minimal Rationality (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986), Chapter 4.
4. See D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, Judgment Under Uncertainty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982);
5. and Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter Todd, and the ABC Research Group, Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
6. See Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); and Elizabeth Camp, "Who Can Think Conceptual Thoughts?" (accessed on April, 2006 at: www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~ecamp/) .
7. See C. Jarrold, P. Carruthers, P. Smith, and J. Boucher, "Pretend Play: Is it Meta-representational?" Mind and Language 9 (1994), pp. 445-468;
8. Paul Harris, The Work of the Imagination (London: Blackwell Publishers, 2000);
9. and Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich, Mindreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
10. Peter Carruthers, The Architecture of the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
11. James Gould and Carol Gould, The Animal Mind (New York: Scientific American Library, 1994), pp. 39-43.
12. Peter Carruthers, Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Chapter 9.
13. D. Z. Young, Philosophy and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), Chapter 19.
14. Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1978);
15. and The Intentional Stance (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987).
16. See W. Ramsey, S. Stich, and J. Garon, "Connectionism, Eliminativism, and the Future of Folk Psychology," in J. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives 4: Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind (Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing, 1990);
17. Martin Davies, "Concepts, Connectionism, and the Language of Thought," in W. Ramsey, S. Stich, and D. Rumelhart (eds.). Philosophy and Connectionist Theory (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991);
18. and Keith Frankish, Mind and Supermind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Chapter 6.
19. I borrow this term from Robert Kirk, Raw Feels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 109-113, although I put it here to a somewhat different use.
20. Note, however, that there is nothing in the requirement of compositionality to mandate that thoughts should be realized in sentence-like structures. On the contrary, mental maps and mental models, too, can have compositional structure. This point will prove to be of some importance when we come to discuss the thoughts of honey bees and other navigating invertebrates in Section 3.
21. Randy Gallistel, The Organization of Leaning (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000), Chapters 3 and 4.
22. T. Collett and M. Collett, "Memory Use in Insect Visual Navigation," Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 3 (2002), pp. 542-552.
23. The maps have to be crude because of the poor resolution of bee eyesight. But they may still contain the relative locations of salient landmarks, such as a large free-standing tree, a forest edge, or a lake shore.
24. James Gould, "The Locale Map of Bees: Do Insects have Cognitive Maps?" Science 232 (1986), pp. 861-863.
25. R. Menzel, R. Brandt, A. Gumbert, B. Komischke, and J. Kunze, "Two Spatial Memories for Honeybee Navigation," Proceedings of the Royal Society: London B, 267 (2000), pp. 961-966.
26. R. Menzel, U. Greggers, A. Smith, S. Berger, R. Brandt, S. Brunke, G. Bundrock, S. Hülse, T. Plümpe, S. Schaupp, E. Schüttler, S. Stach, J. Stindt, N. Stollhoff, and S. Watzl, "Honey Bees Navigate According to a Map-like Spatial Memory," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102 (2005), pp. 3040-3045.
27. James Gould and Carol Gould, The Honey Bee (New York: American Scientific Library, 1988), Chapter 4.
28. Thomas Seeley, The Wisdom of the Hive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), Chapter 5.
29. Gould and Gould, The Honey Bee, pp. 65-67.
30. Gould and Gould, The Honey Bee, pp. 221-225.
31. J. Tautz, S. Zhang, J. Spaethe, A. Brockmann, A. Si, and M. Srinivasan, "Honeybee Odometry: Performance in Varying Natural Terrain," Public Library of Science: Biology 2 (2004), pp. 915-923.
32. Robert Brooks, "A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot," IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation, RA-2 (1986), pp. 14-23.
33. L. Aiello and P. Wheeler, "The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis," Current Anthropology 36 (1995), pp. 199-221.
34. Note that I have characterized the contents of the bee's beliefs in terms of our familiar human concepts. But of course I am not committed to the view that bees have the concept meter, let alone 200 m. Rather, what will figure in the bee's beliefs will be a representation that is approximately extensionally equivalent to our concept 200 m, deriving from measures of visual flow (Tautz, et al., "Honeybee Odometry"). And something similar then goes for concepts like sun, hive, and so forth.
35. Seeley, The Wisdom of the Hive, pp. 123-124.
36. Note that representations of direction of this sort need to be adjusted for the time of day. In fact, bees must continually update their representations of direction throughout the day. If they first learn that a nectar source is 30° west of the sun at midday, then an hour later they will need to update this to represent the nectar as 40° west of the sun, say; and so on.
37. For further evidence that bees can represent time, see Gallistel, The Organization of Leaning, pp. 243-259,
38. together with the discussion in Carruthers, The Architecture of the Mind, Chapter 2.
39. José Bermúdez, Thinking without Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 145-147.
40. John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), Chapter 7.
41. R. Wilcox and R. Jackson, "Cognitive Abilities of Araneophagic Jumping Spiders," in I. Pepperberg, A. Kamil, and R. Balda (eds.), Animal Cognition in Nature (New York: Academic Press, 1998).
42. M. Tarsitano and R. Jackson, "Jumping Spiders make Predatory Detours Requiring Movement away from Prey," Behavior 131 (1994), pp. 65-73.
43. D. Harland and R. Jackson, "Portia Perceptions: The Umwelt of an Araneophagic Jumping Spider,'" in F. Prete (ed.), Complex Worlds from Simpler Nervous Systems (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), pp. 5-40.
44. M. Tarsitano and R. Jackson, "Araneophagic Jumping Spiders Discriminate Between Routes that Do and Do Not Lead to Prey," Animal Behavior 53 (1997), pp. 257-266.
45. M. Tarsitano and R. Andrew, "Scanning and Route Selection in the Jumping Spider Portia Labiata," Animal Behavior 58 (1999), pp. 255-265.
46. I would disagree. I would see nothing admirable here.
47. For an argument that all duties towards animals are really of this character-evincing sort, see Peter Carruthers, The Animals Issue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Chapter 7.
48. See Carruthers, Consciousness, Chapters 9 and 10.
49. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harward University Press, 1971);
50. and Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
51. Carruthers, The Animals Issue, Chapter 5.
52. Carruthers, The Animals Issue, Chapter 7.
53. I am grateful to Robert Francescotti for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper.