Suspending Belief: Epoché in Animal Behavior Science

ABSTRACT In an anthropology that has turned, in recent years, toward the study of human–animal relations, scientific skepticism about nonhuman animal minds has more often been featured as a focus of conceptual critique than of ethnographic exegesis. Decried as the sign of a problematic detachment from nonhumans, such skepticism is often simultaneously presented as an ideological stance by which no one who actually works and lives with nonhuman animals could truly live. In contrast, in this article, I examine attempts to live by such skepticism through an ethnography of two very different British‐led research projects in which scientists study animal behavior and cognition respectively. I describe researchers’ commitment to engaging in intersubjective relations with the nonhuman animals they study while simultaneously detaching from propositional beliefs about the latter's inner lives. This simultaneously engaged and detached attitude, which I describe as “epoché,” challenges descriptions of a settled “naturalist” ontology at play in animal behavior science and offers the potential for a comparative anthropology of doubt and operational skepticism.