What Frege asked Alex the parrot: inferentialism, number concepts, and animal cognition

Abstract

While there has been significant philosophical debate on whether nonlinguistic animals can possess conceptual capabilities, less time has been devoted to considering 'talking' animals, such as parrots. When they are discussed, their capabilities are often downplayed as mere mimicry. The most explicit philosophical example of this can be seen in Brandom's frequent comparisons of parrots and thermostats. Brandom argues that because parrots (like thermostats) cannot grasp the implicit inferential connections between concepts, their vocal articulations do not actually have any conceptual content. In contrast, I argue that Pepperberg's work with Alex (and other African grey parrots) provides evidence that the vocal articulations of at least some parrots have conceptual content. Using Frege's insight that numbers assert something about a concept, I argue that Alex's ability to answer the question "How many?" depended upon a prior grasp of conceptual content. Developing this claim, I argue that Alex's arithmetical abilities show that he was capable of using numbers as both concepts and objects. Frege's theoretical insight and Pepperberg's empirical work provide reason to reconsider the capabilities of parrots, as well as what sorts of tasks provide evidence for conceptual content.

¿Normatividad primitiva en primates no humanos?

“…De modo general, entre quienes suelen defender que el pensamiento de los animales es de naturaleza no conceptual cabe mencionar a (Evans, 1982;Peacocke, 2001;Bermúdez, 2003). Entre quienes, en cambio, se inclinan por atribuir algunas habilidades conceptuales básicas a (al menos algunas) especies de animales se encuentran (Allen y Hauser, 1991;Allen, 1999;Glock, 2000;Newen y Bartels, 2007;Camp, 2009;Carruthers, 2009;Duhau, 2011;Danón, 2013;Nelson, 2020;Monsó, 2022). Un trabajo ulterior radicaría en evaluar cuál de estas alternativas es la más adecuada en el caso de las evaluaciones normativas que aquí nos ocupan.…”

Considerations for an Integrated Undergraduate Comparative and Clinical Psychology Course

“…Integrating comparative psychology with clinical psychology can answer important questions regarding what is meant by "communication" (Nelson, 2020). This solution is one example of how developing a course covering human and nonhuman animal behaviors will allow for a more complex way of addressing issues that will be important in many clinical areas.…”

Are They Really Trying to Save Their Buddy? The Anthropomorphism of Animal Epimeletic Behaviours

“…In light of recent discoveries about cognitive complexity in animals (mainly in primates but see also findings in dolphins [52][53][54] or in parrots [48,55,56]), reflective anthropomorphism provided a better scientific hypothesis than Morgan's canon: according to de Waal [29] and Griffin [32], this anthropomorphism was a more parsimonious theory than one that considered animals as unanimated objects or machines. However, anthropomorphism might also be an obstacle to the good understanding of animal behaviour and may lead to incorrect hypotheses and incorrect results in science, from both fundamental (do animals think?)…”