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Animal Minds

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Griffin, one of the founding fathers of cognitive ethology, summarizes the best scientific evidence that animals have a rich mental life that involves thought, intentionality, and consciousness. He focuses on three phenomena: the versatility and adaptiveness of animal behavior, nervous system physiology, and animal communication. To his credit, Griffin is not dogmatic; he admits that much scientific work remains before any of the evidence can be considered significant, and he is willing to consider interpretations of the data that reject his own views on animal minds.

In the end, unfortunately, Griffin's impassioned claims about behavior that "indicates" complex thought don't go far enough. The book consists of relatively undetailed reports of animal studies. He provides little detail about scientific methodology and does not develop an adequate theoretical framework for a deep understanding animal mentality. He has no clear methodology for interpreting the strength of the data he summarizes, and consistently conflates important distinctions between perception, consciousness, and self-consciousness. Although Griffin champions an interdisciplinary approach to solving problems of mind, he pays little heed to the many philospohical problems with understanding crucial mental concepts.

Committed defenders of animal minds will enjoy this general retrospective by one of their intellectual heroes. Readers who want a deeper exploration must turn elsewhere -- Collen Allen and Marc Bekoff's *Species of Mind* would be an excellent starting point.

I recently read this book for a class, and found it very readable. Granted, it doesn't go as far into interpretations of what all of this means, and more leaves that up to the reader. Try the book Animal Consciousness by Daise and Michael Radner if you want to go more into the philosophical, and not a run through of animal behavior. It will also help you, in addition to this book, come to your own informed conclusions about the reality of animal consciousness and thought.

Donald Redfield Griffin (1915-2003) was an American professor of zoology at various universities who did seminal research in animal behavior, animal navigation, acoustic orientation and sensory biophysics.

In the Preface to this 1992 book, Griffin states, "This book will review evidence of versatile thinking by animals, and of equal significance will be a representative sampling of the wide range of scientific and scholarly opinion about animal minds. This spectrum of strongly advocated views demonstrates the basic importance attached to the nature of animal mentality by both scientists and philosophers." In the first chapter, he elaborates, "The aim of this book is to reopen the basic question of what life is like, subjectively, to nonhuman animals, and to outline how we can begin to answer this challenging question by analyzing the versatility of animal behavior, especially the communicative signals by which animals sometimes appear to express their thoughts and feelings."

He points out that "Adaptiveness is a completely separate matter from the possibility of conscious thinking. Because mantis shrimp are crustaceans a few centimeters in length, it is assumed a priori that they cannot possibly be conscious." (pg. 200) After reviewing the various "Ape Language" experiments, he says, "On balance, it now seems clear that apes have learned to communicate simple thoughts."

He concludes on the note, "I am confident that with patience and critical investigation we can begin to discern what life is like, subjectively, to particular animals under specific conditions.... Because mentality is one of the most important capabilities that distinguishes living animals from the rest of the known universe, seeming to understand animal minds is even more exciting and significant than elaborating our picture of inclusive fitness or discovering new molecular mechanisms."

This isn't a book geared toward the general population. The material is well-documented, but not written in a way that captures the readers' attention. It is very dry.