Mindreading Animals

Animals live in a world of other minds, human and nonhuman, and their well-being andsurvival often depends on what is going on in the minds of these other creatures. But do animalsknow that other creatures have minds? And how would we know if they do? In Mindreading Animals,Robert Lurz offers a fresh approach to the hotly debated question of mental-state attribution innonhuman animals. Some empirical researchers and philosophers claim that some animals are capable ofanticipating other creatures' behaviors by interpreting observable cues as signs of underlyingmental states; others claim that animals are merely clever behavior-readers, capable of using suchcues to anticipate others' behaviors without interpreting them as evidence of underlying mentalstates. Lurz argues that neither position is compelling, and proposes a way to move the debate, andthe field, forward. Lurz presents a new approach to understanding what mindreading in animals mightbe, offering a bottom-up model of mental-state attribution that is built upon cognitive abilitiesthat animals are known to possess rather than on a preconceived view of the mind applicable tomindreading abilities in humans. Lurz goes on to describe an innovative series of new experimentalprotocols for animal mindreading research that overcome a persistent methodological problem in thefield, known as the "logical problem" or "Povinelli's challenge." Theseprotocols show in detail how various types of animals--from apes to monkeys to ravens to dogs--canbe tested for perceptual state and belief attribution.

Robert W. Lurz is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He is the author of The Philosophy of Animal Minds.