Toward a science of other minds: escaping the argument by analogy

Abstract

Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of other species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connection between specific mental states and specific behaviors. Second, it was assumed that in those cases in which other species exhibited behaviors similar to our own, similar psychological causes were at work. In this paper. we show how this argument by analogy is flawed with respect to the case of second-order mental states. As a test case, we focus on the question of how other species conceive of visual attention, and in particular whether chimpanzees interpret seeing as a mentalistic event involving internal states of perception, attention, and belief. We conclude that chimpanzees do not reason about seeing in this manner, and indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that they do not harbor representations of mental states in general. We propose a reinterpretation model in which the majority of the rich social behaviors that humans and other primates share in common emerged long before the human lineage evolved the psychological means of interpreting those behaviors in mentalistic terms. Although humans, chimpanzees, and most other species may be said to possess mental states, humans alone may have evolved a cognitive specialization for reasoning about such states.

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) conceal visual and auditory information from others.

“…In addition, both pieces of food were in the open so that subjects could not rely on any kind of preference for food around barriers (Povinelli, Bering, & Giambrone, 2000). By choosing the opaque tunnel, subjects were able to conceal just the initial reaching for the food, but this was enough to impede the experimenter from reacting in time.…”

Neural correlates of feeling sympathy

“…More specifically, several recent studies performed by our group have demonstrated the important role played by the right inferior parietal cortex when the self takes the perspective of others [11,21,22,29,75] even at the conceptual level [76]. It is interesting to recall that according to several theorists, empathizing not only necessitates a sharing of affects, but a minimal distinction between the self and the other is also mandatory [23,[55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74]. Results of the present study, therefore, lead us to speculate that when subjects covertly simulate the narrative content of a sad story with the intention of rating their affinity for the communicator (i.e.…”

Cooperative breeding and human cognitive evolution

“…While earlier accounts have often stressed the key role of theory of mind, [18][19][20] more recent results suggest that apes do have simple elements of that theory, such as an emerging understanding of what others are attending to and intending, although these capacities are primarily expressed in competitive contexts 11 (but see Penn and Povinelli 21 ). Such findings shift the focus onto the apparently central role played by shared intentionality, 22,23 which has now been identified as the fundamental source for the majority, if not all, of our unique cognitive achievements.…”