Premium
The Semantic Problem(s) with Research on Animal Mind‐Reading
Author(s) -
Buckner Cameron
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
mind and language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.905
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1468-0017
pISSN - 0268-1064
DOI - 10.1111/mila.12066
Subject(s) - reading (process) , mental representation , representation (politics) , psychology , cognitive science , cognitive psychology , cognition , epistemology , theory of mind , linguistics , philosophy , neuroscience , politics , political science , law
Abstract Philosophers and cognitive scientists have worried that research on animal mind‐reading faces a ‘logical problem’: the difficulty of experimentally determining whether animals represent mental states (e.g. seeing ) or merely the observable evidence (e.g. line‐of‐gaze ) for those mental states. The most impressive attempt to confront this problem has been mounted recently by Robert Lurz. However, Lurz' approach faces its own logical problem, revealing this challenge to be a special case of the more general problem of distal content. Moreover, participants in this debate do not agree on criteria for representation. As such, future debate should either abandon the representational idiom or confront underlying semantic disagreements.