Getting It Together: Psychological Unity and Deflationary Accounts of Animal Metacognition

Abstract

Experimenters claim some nonhuman mammals have metacognition. If correct, the results indicate some animal minds are more complex than ordinarily presumed. However, some philosophers argue for a deflationary reading of metacognition experiments, suggesting that the results can be explained in first-order terms. We agree with the deflationary interpretation of the data but we argue that the metacognition research forces the need to recognize a heretofore underappreciated feature in the theory of animal minds, which we call Unity. The disparate mental states of an animal must be unified if deflationary accounts of metacognition are to hold and untoward implications avoided. Furthermore, once Unity is acknowledged, the deflationary interpretation of the experiments reveals an elevated moral standing for the nonhumans in question.

What do we need to know to know that animals are conscious of what they know?

“…She is tied up, as it were, not by her second-order judgment that she does not know which key to press. She is tied up by the fact that she has two conflicting perceptions and a psychology that requires unifying them (Comstock & Bauer, 2018).…”

“…This would be the earliest point in time at which metacognition could possibly begin. Metacognition cannot occur until the gatekeeper mechanism has either completed its work or broken down (Comstock & Bauer, 2018).…”