The Anthropocentric Bias in Animal Cognition
Abstract In the classical philosophical tradition, animals had the special function of serving as “objects of comparison” concerning humans. In that sense, philosophy adopted a peculiar comparative perspective focused on the categoric difference that separates humans from other creatures: an exceptionalist perspective. The Humanities developed an anthropocentric canon for the study of animals and privileged the search for differences over similarities of these with humans. On the other hand, the great boost that animal studies received under the influence of Darwin's work promoted a different comparative perspective in the natural sciences. However, especially in comparative psychology, ingent efforts were devoted to avoid the errors that anthropomorphism would entail: attributing human properties to other creatures and privileging similarities over differences. It assumed that anthropomorphic bias entails a more fundamental type of error than anthropocentric bias. Now, this asymmetric diagnosis has beenunmasked with different arguments. In the context of both disciplinary traditions, it is timely to reexamine the most persistent and negative manifestations of anthropocentric bias as a comparative bias for the study of animal cognition. In this work I will identify the following: the homogenization of animals into a single general category; psychological speciesism and the “de-mentalization” of animals; the survival of a hierarchical conception of cognitive abilities; the selective application - only to animals - of Morgan's Canon or anthropodenial and its complement, the assumption of idealized mental capacities in the human case or anthropofabulation; asymmetrical or distorsive methodological strategies for the study of animals versus humans which affects the comparative interpretations; and different manifestations of semantic anthropocentrism.
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Boesch, C. (2007). What Makes us Human (Homo sapiens)? The Challenge of Cognitive Cross-Species Comparison. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 121, 227-240.
Borchert, R., Dewey, A. R. (2023). In praise of animals. Biol. Philos., 38, 24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-023-09912-2
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Buckner, C. (2023). Black Boxes or Unflattering Mirrors? Comparative Bias in the Science of Machine Behavior. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 74(3), 681-712.
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Dennett, D. (2013). Kinds of things - Towards a Bestiary of the Manifest Image. In D. Ross, J. Ladyman, & H. Kincaid (Eds.), Scientific Metaphysics (96-107). Oxford: OUP.
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de Waal, F. B. (1999). Anthropomorphism and anthropodenial: consistency in our thinking about humans and other animals. Philosophical Topics, 27, 255-280.
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de Waal, F. B. (2009). Darwin´s last lough. Nature, 460, 175. https://doi.org/10.1038/460175a
de Waal, F. B. (2016). Are we smart enough to know how smart Animals are? New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
de Waal, F. B., Ferrari, P. F. (2010). Towards a bottom-up perspective on animal and human cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(5), 201-207.
Döring, T. F., Chittka, L. (2011). How Human are Insects, and does it matter? Formosan Entomol, 31, 85-99.
Figdor, C. (2017). On the proper domain of psychological predicates. Synthese, 194(11), 4289-4310.
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Figdor, C. (2021). The psychological speciecism of humanism. Philosophical Studies, 178, 1545-1569.
Fitzpatrick, S. (2008). Doing away with Morgan’s Canon. Mind & Language, 23, 224-246.
Fitzpatrick, S. (2018). Against Morgan’s Canon. In K. Andrews and J. Beck (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds, (pp. 437-447). New York: Routledge.
Flack, J. C., de Waal, F. B. (2000). ‘Any animal whatever’: Darwinian Building Blocks of Morality in Monkeys and Apes. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7(1-2), 1-29.
Glock, H. J. (2012). The anthropological difference: What can philosophers do to identify the differences between human and non-human animals? Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 70, 105-131.
Heil, J. (1982). Speechless Brutes. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 42, 400-406.
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Horta, O., Albersmeier F. (2020). Defining speciesism. Philos Compass, 15(11), 1-9.
Hume, D. (1739/2000). A Treatise on Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., Tversky, A. (1982). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Lovejoy, A. O. (1936). The great chain of being: a study of the history of an idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Malcolm, N. (1972-73). Thoughtless Brutes. Proceedings and Addresses of The American Philosophical Association, 46, 5-20.
Mayr, E. (1988). Toward a new philosophy of biology: Observations of an evolutionist. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
McDowell, J. (1996). Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McDowell, J. (2009). Having the World in View. Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Midgley, M. (1978). Beast and Man. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
Midgley, M. (2001). Being objective. Nature, 410(6830), 753.
Morgan, C. (1903). An introduction to comparative psychology. London: Walter Scott Pub. Co.
Morgan, C. (1930). Autobiography of C. Lloyd Morgan. In Murchison C (Ed.) History of psychology in autobiography (Vol. 2, pp. 237-264). Worcester: Clark University Press.
Noske, B. (1993). Great Apes as Anthropological Subjects -Deconstructing Anthropocentrism. In Cavallieri, P. and Singer, P. (Eds.) The Great Ape Project .Equality beyond Humanity (pp. 258-268). New York: St. Martin Press.
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Povinelli, D. J. (2004). Behind the ape’s appearance: escaping anthropocentrism in the study of other minds. Daedalus, 133(1), 29-41
Preece, R. (2005). Brute souls, happy beasts, and evolution: the historical status of animals. Vancouver, Canada: UBC Press.
Rigato, E., Minelli, A. (2013). The great chain of being is still here. Evolution: Education and Outreach, 6, 18.
Ritvo, H. (2007). On the Animal Turn. Daedalus, 136, 118-122.
Romanes, G. (1882). Animal Intelligence. London: Kegan Paul.
Shettleworth, S. J. (2010). Clever animals and killjoy explanations in comparative psychology. Trends in Cognitive Science, 14, 477-48.
Shettleworth, S. J. (2012). Fundamentals of Comparative Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Singer, P. (2009[1975]). Animal liberation. New York: Harper Collins.
Sober, E. (2005). Comparative psychology meets evolutionary biology. In L. Daston & G. Mitman (Eds.), Thinking with animals: new perspectives on anthropomorphism (pp. 85-99). New York: Columbia University Press.
Suárez-Ruiz, J. E. (2021). El antropocentrismo como norma filosófica implícita: una revisión a la luz de las condiciones de posibilidad de la Covid-19. Anacronismo e Irrupción, 12(22), 78-96.
Ullrich, R., Mittelbach, M., Liebal, K. (2017). Scala naturae: The impact of historical values on current ‘evolution of language’ discourse. Journal of Language Evolution, 3(1), 1-12.
Vasilieva, O. (2019). Beyond “uniqueness”: Habitual traits in the context of cognitive-communicative continuity. Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, 16, 129-150.
Vitale, A. & Branchi, I. (2023). ‘Are my animals smarter than yours?’: Concerns in comparing animal intelligence. Acta Philosophica, 1(32), 75-94.
Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Wynne, C. (2004). The Perils of Anthropomorphism. Nature, 428, 606.
Andrews, K. (2009). Politics or metaphysics? On attributing psychological properties to animals. Biology and Philosophy, 24, 51-63.
Andrews, K. (2020a). The Animal Mind. An Introduction of Animal Cognition. London & New York: Routledge.
Andrews, K. (2020b). How to Study Animal Minds, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108616522
Andrews K., Huss B. (2014). Anthropomorphism, anthropectomy, and the null hypothesis. Biol. Philos., 29(5), 711-729.
Andrews, K., Susana, M. (2021). Animal Cognition. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edward N. Zalta (Ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/cognition-animal/
Bastian, B., Loughnan, S., Haslam, N., Radke, H. R. M. (2012). Don´t Mind Meat? The Denial of Mind Used to Human Consumption. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(2), 247-256.
Bates, L. A., Byrne, R. W. (2007). Creative or Created: Using Anecdotes to Investigate Animal Cognition. Methods, 42, 12-21.
Boesch, C. (2007). What Makes us Human (Homo sapiens)? The Challenge of Cognitive Cross-Species Comparison. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 121, 227-240.
Borchert, R., Dewey, A. R. (2023). In praise of animals. Biol. Philos., 38, 24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-023-09912-2
Brandom, R. (2000). Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bräuer, J., Hanus, D., Pika, S., Gray, R., Uomini, N. (2020). Old and New Approaches to Animal Cognition: There Is Not ‘One Cognition’. Journal of Intelligence, 8(3), 28.
Buckner C. (2013). Morgan’s Canon, meet Hume’s Dictum: avoiding anthropofabulation in cross-species comparisons. Biol Philos, 28(5), 853-871.
Buckner, C. (2017). Understanding Associative and Cognitive Explanations in Comparative Psychology. In K. Andrews and J. Beck (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds (pp. 409-418). London: Routledge.
Buckner, C. (2023). Black Boxes or Unflattering Mirrors? Comparative Bias in the Science of Machine Behavior. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 74(3), 681-712.
Chittka, L, Rossiter, S. J., Skorupski, P., Fernando, Ch. (2015). What is comparable in comparative cognition? Phil. Trans. of the Royal Society B, 36, 2677-2685.
Coetzee, J. M. (1999). The Lives of Animals. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species. London: John Murray.
Darwin, C. (1854/1989). “Letter to Joseph Hooker”, Jun 27, 1854 (1573). The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 5 1851-1855. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Darwin Correspondence Project.
Darwin, C. 1982 [1871]. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Davidson, D. (1985). Rational Animals. In E. LePore and B. McLaughlin (Eds.), Actions and Events. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dennett, D. (1998). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Dennett, D. (2013). Kinds of things - Towards a Bestiary of the Manifest Image. In D. Ross, J. Ladyman, & H. Kincaid (Eds.), Scientific Metaphysics (96-107). Oxford: OUP.
Descartes, R. (1991). The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume III, The Correspondence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
de Waal, F. B. (1999). Anthropomorphism and anthropodenial: consistency in our thinking about humans and other animals. Philosophical Topics, 27, 255-280.
de Waal, F. B. (2003). Silent Invasion: Imanishi´s Primatology and cultural biases in science. Anim. Cogn., 6, 293-299. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-003-0197-4
de Waal, F. B. (2006). Primates and Philosophers. Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press.
de Waal, F. B. (2009). Darwin´s last lough. Nature, 460, 175. https://doi.org/10.1038/460175a
de Waal, F. B. (2016). Are we smart enough to know how smart Animals are? New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
de Waal, F. B., Ferrari, P. F. (2010). Towards a bottom-up perspective on animal and human cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(5), 201-207.
Döring, T. F., Chittka, L. (2011). How Human are Insects, and does it matter? Formosan Entomol, 31, 85-99.
Figdor, C. (2017). On the proper domain of psychological predicates. Synthese, 194(11), 4289-4310.
Figdor, C. (2018). Pieces of mind: The proper domain of psychological predicates. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Figdor, C. (2021). The psychological speciecism of humanism. Philosophical Studies, 178, 1545-1569.
Fitzpatrick, S. (2008). Doing away with Morgan’s Canon. Mind & Language, 23, 224-246.
Fitzpatrick, S. (2018). Against Morgan’s Canon. In K. Andrews and J. Beck (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds, (pp. 437-447). New York: Routledge.
Flack, J. C., de Waal, F. B. (2000). ‘Any animal whatever’: Darwinian Building Blocks of Morality in Monkeys and Apes. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7(1-2), 1-29.
Glock, H. J. (2012). The anthropological difference: What can philosophers do to identify the differences between human and non-human animals? Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 70, 105-131.
Heil, J. (1982). Speechless Brutes. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 42, 400-406.
Holroyd, J., Sweetman, J. (2016). The heterogeneity of Implicit Bias. In Michael Brownstein & Jennifer Saul (Eds.), Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volume 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology (pp. 80-103). New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
Horta, O., Albersmeier F. (2020). Defining speciesism. Philos Compass, 15(11), 1-9.
Hume, D. (1739/2000). A Treatise on Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., Tversky, A. (1982). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Lovejoy, A. O. (1936). The great chain of being: a study of the history of an idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Malcolm, N. (1972-73). Thoughtless Brutes. Proceedings and Addresses of The American Philosophical Association, 46, 5-20.
Mayr, E. (1988). Toward a new philosophy of biology: Observations of an evolutionist. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
McDowell, J. (1996). Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McDowell, J. (2009). Having the World in View. Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Midgley, M. (1978). Beast and Man. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
Midgley, M. (2001). Being objective. Nature, 410(6830), 753.
Morgan, C. (1903). An introduction to comparative psychology. London: Walter Scott Pub. Co.
Morgan, C. (1930). Autobiography of C. Lloyd Morgan. In Murchison C (Ed.) History of psychology in autobiography (Vol. 2, pp. 237-264). Worcester: Clark University Press.
Noske, B. (1993). Great Apes as Anthropological Subjects -Deconstructing Anthropocentrism. In Cavallieri, P. and Singer, P. (Eds.) The Great Ape Project .Equality beyond Humanity (pp. 258-268). New York: St. Martin Press.
Osborne, C. (2007). Dumb Beasts and Dead Philosophers. Humanity and the Human in Ancient Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Povinelli, D. J. (2004). Behind the ape’s appearance: escaping anthropocentrism in the study of other minds. Daedalus, 133(1), 29-41
Preece, R. (2005). Brute souls, happy beasts, and evolution: the historical status of animals. Vancouver, Canada: UBC Press.
Rigato, E., Minelli, A. (2013). The great chain of being is still here. Evolution: Education and Outreach, 6, 18.
Ritvo, H. (2007). On the Animal Turn. Daedalus, 136, 118-122.
Romanes, G. (1882). Animal Intelligence. London: Kegan Paul.
Shettleworth, S. J. (2010). Clever animals and killjoy explanations in comparative psychology. Trends in Cognitive Science, 14, 477-48.
Shettleworth, S. J. (2012). Fundamentals of Comparative Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Singer, P. (2009[1975]). Animal liberation. New York: Harper Collins.
Sober, E. (2005). Comparative psychology meets evolutionary biology. In L. Daston & G. Mitman (Eds.), Thinking with animals: new perspectives on anthropomorphism (pp. 85-99). New York: Columbia University Press.
Suárez-Ruiz, J. E. (2021). El antropocentrismo como norma filosófica implícita: una revisión a la luz de las condiciones de posibilidad de la Covid-19. Anacronismo e Irrupción, 12(22), 78-96.
Ullrich, R., Mittelbach, M., Liebal, K. (2017). Scala naturae: The impact of historical values on current ‘evolution of language’ discourse. Journal of Language Evolution, 3(1), 1-12.
Vasilieva, O. (2019). Beyond “uniqueness”: Habitual traits in the context of cognitive-communicative continuity. Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, 16, 129-150.
Vitale, A. & Branchi, I. (2023). ‘Are my animals smarter than yours?’: Concerns in comparing animal intelligence. Acta Philosophica, 1(32), 75-94.
Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Wynne, C. (2004). The Perils of Anthropomorphism. Nature, 428, 606.
Scotto, C. (2024). The Anthropocentric Bias in Animal Cognition. ArtefaCToS. Revista De Estudios Sobre La Ciencia Y La tecnología, 13(1), 85–116. https://doi.org/10.14201/art2024.31800
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