The New Anthropomorphism Debate and Researching Non-Human Animal Emotions: A Kantian Approach

Maja Białek

doi:10.18290/rf23713.10

Published : 2023-09-27

Vol. 71 No. 3 (2023)

The New Anthropomorphism Debate and Researching Non-Human Animal Emotions: A Kantian Approach

Maja Białek

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6491-6689

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rf23713.10

Abstract

Researchers of non-human animal emotions tend to defend some forms of anthropomorphism and seek ways to make it more critical, self-aware, and useful for scientific purposes. I propose that to achieve this goal, we need first to conduct a Kantian investigation into the deeper structure of anthropomorphism. I argue that we can distinguish at least three levels of anthropomorphising: a narrative level, a cognitive level and an in-between, metatheoretical level which is the deeper structure determining how we anthropomorphise. Because the current debate tends to focus either on the narrative level or on the cognitive level, this paper concentrates on the metatheoretical level, discusses its role in emotion research, the possible errors it may cause, and how we can work on it, drawing on predictive processing-based theories of emotions and an evolutionary approach. The key to being critical in anthropomorphism is to be aware of the complexity of this whole structure, as well as to be able to challenge and put into question all and any of its elements.

Keywords:

anthropomorphism, animal emotion, non-human animals, emotion research, predictive processing

Details

References

Statistics

Authors

Download files

pdf

Altmetric indicators

Cited by / Share

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

References

Arbilly, Michal, and Arnon Lotem. 2017. “Constructive Anthropomorphism: A Functional Evolutionary Approach to the Study of Human-Like Cognitive Mechanisms in Animals.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 284 (1865): 20171616. https:// doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.1616.

Barrett, Justin L., Rebekah A. Richert, and Amanda Driesenga. 2001. “God’s Beliefs versus Mother’s: The Development of Nonhuman Agent Concepts.” Child Development 72 (1): 50–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00265.

Barrett, Lisa F. 2016. “The Theory of Constructed Emotion: An Active Inference Account of Interoception and Categorization.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 12 (1): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsw154.

Bekoff, Marc. 2000. “Animal Emotions: Exploring Passionate Natures.” BioScience 50 (10): 861. https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2000)050[0861:AEEPN]2.0.CO;2

Bliss-Moreau, Eliza. 2017. “Constructing nonhuman animal emotion.” Current Opinion in Psychology 17 (October): 184–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.07.011

Bruni, Domenica, Pietro Perconti, and Alessio Plebe. 2018. Anti-Anthropomorphism and Its Limits. Frontiers in Psychology 9, 2205. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02205.

Buckner, Cameron. 2013. “Morgan’s Canon, Meet Hume’s Dictum: Avoiding Anthropofabulation in Cross-Species Comparisons.” Biology & Philosophy 28 (5): 853–871. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s10539-013-9376-0.

Burghardt, Gordon. 1991. “Cognitive Ethology and Critical Anthropomorphism: A Snake with Two Heads and Hognose Snakes That Play Dead.” In Cognitive Ethology: The Minds of Other Animals: Essays in Honor of Donald R. Griffin, edited by Carolyn A. Ristau, 53–90. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Burghardt, Gordon. 1997. “Amending Tinbergen: A Fifth Aim for Ethology. In Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals, edited by Robert W. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson, and H. Lynn Miles, 254–76. SUNY Press.

Burghardt, Gordon. 2006. Critical Anthropomorphism, Uncritical Anthropocentrism, and Naïve Nominalism. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews 2. https://doi.org/10.3819/ccbr. 2008.20009.

Burghardt, Gordon. 2016. “Mediating Claims through Critical Anthropomorphism.” Animal Sentience 3 (17). https://doi.org/10.51291/2377-7478.1063.

Cartmill, Matt. 2000. “Animal Consciousness: Some Philosophical, Methodological, and Evolutionary Problems.” American Zoologist 40 (6): 835–46. https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/40.6.835.

Cowles, Kathleen V., and Beth L. Rodgers. 1991. “The Concept of Grief: A Foundation for Nursing Research and Practice.” Research in Nursing & Health 14 (2): 119–27. https://doi.org/ 10.1002/nur.4770140206.

Crist, Eileen. 1996. “Darwin’s Anthropomorphism: An Argument for Animal-Human Continuity.” Advances in Human Ecology 5:33–83.

De Cruz, Helen D., and Johan De Smedt. 2015. A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion. MIT Press.

de Vere, Amber J., and Stan A. Kuczaj. 2016. “Where Are We in the Study of Animal Emotions?” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 7 (5): 354–62. https://doi.org/10. 1002/wcs.1399.

de Waal, F. 1999. “Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial: Consistency in Our Thinking about Humans and Other Animals.” Philosophical Topics 27 (1): 255–80.

de Waal, F. 2019. Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves. W. W. Norton & Company.

Fernández-Fueyo, Elisa, Yukimaru Sugiyama, Takeshi Matsui, and Alecia J. Carter. 2021. “Why Do Some Primate Mothers Carry Their Infant’s Corpse? A Cross-Species Comparative Study.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 288 (1959): 20210590. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.0590.

Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2019. “The Evolution of Consciousness in Phylogenetic Context.” In The Routledge Handbook of Animal Minds, edited by Kristin Andrews and Jacob Beck, 216–26. London: Routledge.

Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2020. Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Jékely, Gáspár, Peter Godfrey-Smith, and Fred Keijzer. 2021. “Reafference and the Origin of the Self in Early Nervous System Evolution.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 376 (1821): 20190764. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0764.

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Keeley, Brian L. 2004. “Anthropomorphism, Primatomorphism, Mammalomorphism: Understanding Cross-Species Comparisons.” Biology & Philosophy 19 (4): 521–40. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/sBIPH-004-0540-4.

Kremer, L., S. E. J., Klein Holkenborg, I. Reimert, J. E. Bolhuis, and L. E. Webb. 2020. “The Nuts and Bolts of Animal Emotion.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 113:273–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.01.028.

Lonsdorf, Elisabeth V., Michael L. Wilson, Emily Boehm, Josephine Delaney-Soesman, Tessa Grebey, Carson Murray, Kaitlin Wellens, and Anne E. Pusey. 2020. “Why Chimpanzees Carry Dead Infants: An Empirical Assessment of Existing Hypotheses.” Royal Society Open Science 7 (7): 200931. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.200931.

Marchesini, Roberto. 2016. Philosophical Ethology and Animal Subjectivity. Angelaki 21 (1): 237–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2016.1163859.

Milton, Kay. 2005. “Anthropomorphism or Egomorphism? The Perception of Non-human Persons by Human Ones.” In Animals in Person. Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Intimacy. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003135883.

Morgan, C. Lloyd. 1894. An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. London: The Walter Scott Publishing Co.

Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914.

Nemati, Farshad. 2022. “Anthropomorphism in the Context of Scientific Discovery: Implications for Comparative Cognition. Foundations of Science.” https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-021-09821-1.

Paul, Elisabeth S., Shlomi Sher, Marco Tamietto, Piotr Winkielman, and Piotr Mendl. 2020. “Towards a Comparative Science of Emotion: Affect and Consciousness in Humans and Animals.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 108:749–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.neubiorev.2019.11.014.

Penn, Derek C., and Daniel J. Povinelli. 2007. “On the Lack of Evidence That Non-Human Animals Possess Anything Remotely Resembling a ‘theory of mind’.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362 (1480): 731–44. https://doi.org/ 10.1098/rstb.2006.2023.

Shermer, Michael. 2008. “Patternicity.” Scientific American 299 (6): 48–48. https://doi.org/ 10.1038/scientificamerican1208-48.

Timberlake, W. 1997. “An Animal-Centered, Causal-System Approach to the Understanding and Control of Behavior.” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 53 (1–2): 107–29. https:// doi.org/10.1016/S0168-1591(96)01154-9.

Timberlake, W. 2006. “Anthropomorphism Revisited.” Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews 2. https://doi.org/10.3819/ccbr.2008.20010.

Varella, Marco A. C. 2018. “The Biology and Evolution of the Three Psychological Tendencies to Anthropomorphize Biology and Evolution.” Frontiers in Psychology 9, 1839. https://doi.org/ 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01839.

Wilkinson, Sam, George Deane, Kathryn Nave, and Andy Clark. 2019. “Getting Warmer: Predictive Processing and the Nature of Emotion.” In The Value of Emotions for Knowledge, edited by Laura Candiotto, 101–19. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-3-030-15667-1_5.

Williams, Lisa A., Sarah F. Brosnan, and Zanna Clay. 2020. “Anthropomorphism in Comparative Affective Science: Advocating a Mindful Approach.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 115:299–307. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.05.014.

Wynne, Clive D. L. 2004. “The Perils of Anthropomorphism.” Nature 428 (6983): 606. https:// doi.org/10.1038/428606a.

Wynne, Clive D. L. 2007. “What Are Animals? Why Anthropomorphism Is Still Not a Scientific Approach to Behavior.” Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews 2 (1): 125–35.