Los primeros años en la formación del Estado Administrativo en Estados Unidos 45

The awakenings of the 1960s led most psychologists to a search for rel-evance and to commerce with such concepts as cognition, volition, and consciousness. For many of them, positivism and operationism became dirty words because of the gossip that, back home in philosophy, they were in trouble. This development did psychology great harm.

—Gregory Kimble (1994, p. 257)

There can be no historical doubt that behaviorism has advanced ethol-ogy as a science, whereas the methods advocated by cognitivists have yet to prove their worth. Until mental concepts are clarified and their need justified by convincing data, cognitive ethology is no advance over the anecdotalism and anthropomorphism which characterized interest in animal behavior a century ago, and thus should be eschewed.

—Patrick Colgan (1989, p. 67)

Cooperation merely depends upon the behavior of one animal serving as a stimulus that elicits a certain response from the other.

—John Pearce (1987, p. 261)

Must cognitive ethologists rely forever on anecdotal cognitivism and face the ensuing charge of anthropomorphism? Is it possible to investigate men-tal phenomena in nonhuman animals under natural conditions? Some crit-ics believe that any attempt to investigate the minds of animals must fail to be scientific. Others object specifically to the methods of cognitive ethol-ogists, especially the limitations inherent in fieldwork. Griffin's books have failed to reassure critics that the problems facing cognitive ethology can be solved. Although he provides many examples of behaviors that are

50 Chapter 4

suggestive of mental processing, Griffin does not present an adequate the-oretical framework for the attribution of mental states.

Here we consider a number of objections to the aims of studying animal cognition and mind that have been raised from within psychology. It is our view that some of these objections are based on differences in vocabulary, but where there are substantive disagreements we hope to make them clear.

Later in this chapter we shall outline a framework for the attribution of mental states.

Cognitive Awakenings

Kimble (1994, quoted above) reports as gossip the idea that in the 1960s positivism and operationism were in trouble back home in philosophy. But it was not mere gossip. Quine (1953) had already argued that the logical positivists' theory of meaning relied on principles that were not justifiable from within the positivist framework, and that empirical science and the-oretical philosophy are strongly intertwined. Quine revived the following thesis, which he attributed to Pierre Duhem: No scientific hypothesis is ever tested independent of an ensemble of mathematical, logical, theoret-ical, and empirical beliefs; consequently, the results of any experiment can never be taken as logically refuting any specific hypothesis, only as logically refuting the ensemble as a whole.

These troubles for positivism resulted in a broader conception of the relation between theory and evidence than is allowed by strict opera-tionism. According to strict operationism, any theoretical term must be directly defined in terms of observable phenomena. But if no hypothesis is ever tested in isolation, the failure of an experimental prediction can always be attributed to any of the numerous assumptions that were used to generate the prediction. Any particular theory may be implicated in a large number of predictions, and the rejectability of the theory does not depend on its involvement in the failure of any single prediction. In view of the logical structure of this situation, as elaborated by the Quine-Duhem thesis, there is no objective reason for denying scientific status to theoret-ical terms that are not directly operationalized.

This view of the relationship between theory and evidence suggests that there are not likely to be any behavioral litmus tests for the attribution of

But Is It Science? 51

mental states to animals, and that such attributions can be evaluated only in the context of a broad set of observations. Such a view is fully compat-ible with a thoroughly naturalistic account of mental phenomena that com-pletely rejects dualist ideas about immaterial souls and other supernatural substances. Nonetheless, the idea that there is any room for such notions in science continues to provoke a vigorous negative response from a broad range of psychologists.

It is easy for philosophers of mind to label these responses "behavior-ist" and to dismiss them all as results of a conditioned association of men-talistic terms with dualism. Unfortunately, the label "behaviorist" obscures some important distinctions among psychologists. In many cases, howev-er, it does seem that scientists who resist the use of mentalistic terms are reacting against a perceived return to mysterious immaterial causes rather than responding to the careful suggestions that naturalistically inclined philosophers are making. This represents an unfortunate miscommunica-tion about what is really at stake in this dispute.

Such miscommunication is apparent in Howard Rachlin's (1991) dis-cussion of cognitive ethology in his textbook of behavioristic psychology.

Rachlin specifically discusses Dennett's (1983) methodological sugges-tions for cognitive ethologists. Dennett suggests that ethologists frame hypotheses within a hierarchy of intentional attributions. Zero-order explanations of behavior involve only stimulus-response mechanisms.

First-order explanations invoke representations of non-intentional facts about the world to explain behavior; for instance, a monkey's ascent into a tree might be explained by the first-order belief that a leopard is pre-sent. Second-order explanations involves representations of first-order intentional facts, such as the belief that a leopard wants to eat me. Third-order intentionality involves representation of second-Third-order facts. And so on. Rachlin reports this proposal as a suggestion about levels of con-sciousness, thus obscuring the distinction between intentionality and consciousness that is so important to much contemporary philosophy of mind (including Dennett's). Rachlin proceeds to reject Dennett's propos-al on the ground that the ordinary notion of consciousness is of no scien-tific value. But Dennett (1991) would agree that the ordinary Cartesian notion of consciousness is of no scientific value, so this critique misses its target by a wide margin.

52 Chapter 4

Cognitive ethologists need not be particularly embarrassed if they are unsure how to pursue questions about animal consciousness. The strate-gy of condemning cognitive etholostrate-gy because it has trouble with con-sciousness is about as creditable as the strategy of so-called creation scientists who seek to undermine astronomy by pointing out that astronomers can't explain what caused the Big Bang. There is much more to astronomy than that, and there is much more to cognitive ethology than questions about animal consciousness.

It is all too easy for participants on both sides of this debate to lapse into name calling, and drawing analogies with religious arguments seems to be a favored strategy. Indeed, the charge of anthropomorphism (Humphrey 1977; Colgan 1989; Kennedy 1992) often leveled against those who would attribute mental states to animals hearkens back to the-ological disputes about attributing human characteristics to divine beings (Mitchell 1996). Blumberg and Wasserman (1995) also play the religion card against Griffin. They claim that his argument from the complexity of animal behavior for animal mind is analogous to the argument from design for the existence of a creator. But the analogy fails: creators are outside nature (almost by definition), but neither Griffin nor other cognitive ethol-ogists are opposed to naturalistic accounts of mental phenomena. Thus, there is less prima facie reason to be suspicious of inferences from appar-ently intelligent behavior to the intelligence of the actors.

We shall do our best to avoid these religious wars and instead examine the arguments offered by critics of attempts to study animal mind to see whether they really do support the conclusions that are claimed.

Mental Privacy

Many scientists who are sympathetic to the idea that nonhuman animals possess mental states are nonetheless skeptical of cognitive ethology.

Underlying this view is the worry that we can never know about the men-tal states of others. In its most general form, this worry is the same as that traditionally known to philosophers as the problem of other minds.

Psychologists concerned with human behavior effectively shelve skepticism about other minds in just the same way that physicists shelve skepticism about the mind-independent existence of physical objects. But many

But Is It Science? 53

behavioral scientists believe that knowledge of nonhuman minds poses special problems. While they admit that knowledge of other human minds is possible, they regard the mental states of other animals as closed to us forever. To distinguish this from the general problem of other minds, we will refer to this as the other-species-of-mind problem.

The other-species-of-mind problem underlies the frequent complaint that attributing mental states to nonhumans is unjustifiable anthropo-morphism—defined as an interpretation of what is not human in terms of human characteristics (see Fisher 1996 for a sophisticated analysis of this complaint). The charge of anthropomorphism clearly invokes the other-species-of-mind problem rather than the generic problem of other minds, since attributing mental states to other humans cannot, by definition, be considered anthropomorphic.

A very general argument against scientific knowledge of other minds can be reconstructed as follows (see Williams 1992 and Kimble 1994 for examples that follow this pattern):

Mental phenomena are private phenomena.

Private phenomena cannot be studied scientifically.

Thus, mental phenomena cannot be studied scientifically.

The first thing to note about this argument is that its premises depend on a particular conception of mental phenomena, namely that they are "pri-vate," and one might ask what this amounts to. Clearly, none of us is capa-ble of directly seeing, touching, hearing, tasting, or smelling the mental states of others. But neither can any of us directly sense quarks. Thus, if all that "private" means is "not directly sensible," quarks are private phe-nomena too. Scientific understanding of quarks is based on what philoso-phers call inference to the best explanation: the selection of the most plausible hypothesis among competing alternatives for the explanation of observable phenomena. In the absence of further reasons against taking a similar approach to mental phenomena, the argument from privacy is not convincing. If "private" means "directly sensible only by the individual having the experiences," then inference to the best explanation would still seem to be a viable strategy. Indeed, it would fail to be a viable strategy only if the privacy of a mental state meant that it had no effects whatso-ever beyond the individual subject possessing the state. Even if there is no conceptual reason why mental states must have effects (as Strawson (1994)

54 Chapter 4

has argued), it does not follow that there are no effects. And if they do have effects, it should be possible to discover the characteristics of mental states by an inference to the best explanation of those effects.

The first premise of the argument is probably untrue if "private" means

"having no effects whatsoever," yet the second premise is true only if "pri-vate" is given that meaning. Thus, either the first premise is false or the second one is, and either way the argument is unsound. Because this ver-sion of the argument says nothing specifically about nonhuman animals, it would also rule out attempts to study human mental states—a view that is strongly at odds with contemporary cognitive science. A more restrict-ed version of the argument must be considerrestrict-ed for application to nonhu-man subjects, viz.:

Mental phenomena are private phenomena.

Private phenomena cannot be studied scientifically in nonhuman animals.

Thus, mental phenomena cannot be studied scientifically in nonhuman animals.

In this version, the second premise makes special appeal to the fact that our subjects are nonhuman animals. Perhaps, a proponent of it might argue, one can infer the presence of mental states in humans, but one can-not do so for nonhuman animals. A commonly stated basis for this view is that, in the absence of language use by nonhumans, their behavior is not discriminating enough to allow the attribution of mental states. (For examples of this claim see p. 115 of Frey 1980 and p. 40 of Rosenberg 1990.)

We do not intend to get embroiled in the dispute about what constitutes a language and whether nonhuman animals meet the criteria for language possession. In fact we shall have very little to say about attempts to teach artificial languages to nonhuman animals (although in later chapters we shall discuss natural systems of animal communication and the role of human language in specifying mental content). Our aim here is simply to point out that in view of our diagnosis of the state of the discussion, it is up to cognitive ethologists to explain the grounds on which a mentalistic explanation might be considered the best explanation of some aspect of animal behavior. Griffin, relying on little more than the methods of anec-dotal cognitivism, has not been entirely successful in doing this (Bekoff and Allen 1996). Progress will be made by identifying various aspects of

But Is It Science? 55

mentality and showing how each of these aspects might be made amenable to scientific investigation. This, however, is the project of later chapters.

Here we shall continue to examine the arguments of critics.

The Behaviorist Challenge

Often philosophers to whom we talk about cognitive ethology are sur-prised to learn that behaviorism is alive and well in studies of animal behavior. Yet it is. For example, Blumberg and Wasserman (1995, p. 142) chide Allen and Hauser (1991) for having "prematurely announced the demise of behaviorism." McFarland and Bosser (1993, p. 289) write that

"the problem for the ethologist is that for every cognitive account of an animal's behavior there is always an equally valid behaviorist account."

Coupled with the presumption that considerations of simplicity and par-simony favor behavioristic accounts, prospects for mentalistic explana-tions can be made to appear quite bleak. There are many of our readers, including philosophers and scientists, who will not have much sympathy with behaviorism. But despite the impression of many that behaviorism collapsed under its own weight, many of its methodological presupposi-tions continue to exert an influence on the thinking of many scientists about issues of animal mind. We will take some time to clarify these issues.

There is a tendency by philosophers of mind and others outside of psy-chology to lump all the variants of behaviorism together. Within psychol-ogy, however, the differences among followers of Pavlov, Watson, Skinner, Hull, and Tolman are very important. Arguments endorsed by one group would not necessarily be endorsed by the members of another group (Smith 1986; Kamil 1987). We will attempt to tread carefully by discussing the arguments of individual authors on their own merits.

In the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Kimble (1994) self-consciously portrays the second coming of J. B. Watson. We have already mentioned that the demise of positivism in the philosophy of sci-ence cannot seriously be dismissed as "gossip." Yet Kimble's main argu-ment for why psychology must be behavioristic (1994, p. 258) is based on just this dismissal:

If psychology takes the scientific road to truth, it will discover that the only observables available are stimuli and responses. That reality means

56 Chapter 4

that, at bottom, psychology must be behavioristic. After that, it can be as biological, cognitive, or even humanistic as it wants to be. But disci-plines that study something else—like brain, mind, or human potential—

without connections to stimuli and responses may occasionally be science—even elegant science—but they are not psychology. Psychology is the science of behavior.

The transition from what is observable to what may be theorized is not justified. Although cognitive or biological approaches to mind may employ theoretical notions that are not operationally connected to observable stimuli and responses, this is not the same as saying that they have no con-nection to observables. To suggest otherwise is to attack a straw man, for few present-day theorists deny that there are connections. At issue is the nature of the connections between theoretical terms and observable phe-nomena. Positivist theories of the nature of science and meaning were beautiful theories; they were, however, ultimately indefensible (Quine 1953), and no amount of lamenting that fact can change it. Once it is real-ized that few theoretical notions can be strictly operationalreal-ized, the infer-ence from what is observable to what is acceptable as a theoretical posit must be seen in terms more sophisticated than Kimble's. What applies to psychology in this regard applies also to cognitive ethology.

We have already stated our view that mental-state attributions, when justified, are justified by inference to the best explanation. To understand any such inference, it is necessary to understand what is being explained and what the alternative explanations are. In human psychology, it is some-times possible to take the existence of mentality for granted and to make the mental states themselves targets for explanation (Shapiro 1994).

However, ethologists are not in a position to take mental states of animals for granted. Furthermore, because ethology is traditionally the compara-tive study of behavioral phenotypes, it is not surprising that cognicompara-tive ethologists regard behavior as their main target for explanation.

Animals face a variety of environmental conditions that change over a range of time scales. Conceivably it could be advantageous for a given piece of behavior to be "stimulus bound" in the sense that it occurs invariably (or almost invariably) in response to some stimulus. However, in many cases stimulus-bound behavior will not be to an organism's best advan-tage. For example, it does a sated animal no good to continue to eat when

But Is It Science? 57

its visual and olfactory systems are being stimulated in a way that nor-mally corresponds to the presence of food. Thus, organisms have internal states that modulate their responses to such stimuli. Indeed, laboratory researchers must often take account of this in the design of their experi-ments. Many laboratory protocols involve lowering the body weight of animals in order to produce the proper state of "motivation" to work for a food reward.

In admitting the notion of "motivation," one agrees that explanations of behaviors must take into account factors that are internal to the organ-isms in question. Grounds for disagreement lie in the questions of how complex these internal factors may be and how they are best described. In chapter 2 we touched on the controversy between Hull and Tolman about the status of intervening variables in the explanation of animal behavior.

Those who are sympathetic to the Hullian line tend to regard internal fac-tors either as further "internal stimuli" or as simple threshold mechanisms that are relatively isolated from one another. However, in some organisms at least, these internal factors seem to be very complicated indeed. For example, an organism's response to a given stimulus may change as a result

Those who are sympathetic to the Hullian line tend to regard internal fac-tors either as further "internal stimuli" or as simple threshold mechanisms that are relatively isolated from one another. However, in some organisms at least, these internal factors seem to be very complicated indeed. For example, an organism's response to a given stimulus may change as a result