…at Walter Veit's Podcast. This seems to be a lively area of interest among philosophers these days, curious to hear from well-informed readers about issues raised in the podcast.
All about class.
One response to “Philosopher Kristin Andrews talks about animal minds and culture…”
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Very wide-ranging interview, so it is difficult to address the issues it raises in any breadth. Having read most of Andrews' published articles, I'd say the discussions most pertinent to her current work (and that of her collaborators) are questions of how to create new conceptual and methodological tools for investigating cognition and cognition-mediated behaviours (especially wrt social and normative cognition+behaviour). This touches on fairly old concerns about the loss of social/cultural/life-world context when studying captive animals (including captive humans), but also pushes deeper into displacing human cognition etc as paradigmatic of "highly developed" cognition, sociality and normativity. If we presume (consciously or not) that the natural development of cognition etc is a path towards humanity, we look at evolutionarily proximate species to humans, and look for capacities and behavioural categories observable in more developed forms in humans. If we don't frame our models of cognition etc using a human paradigm, it opens up questions of whether cognition etc emerges idependently across evolutionary history in ways that are not analogous to anything familiar in the human example, and very open questions of what we should be looking for.
It is at once very dry and very heady stuff, trying to sketch out a definition of cognition without relying on generalization from introspection or from observation of intelligible others, and trying to sketch out criteria for assessing signs of cognition etc without reference to human analogues. I think this sort of practical, iterative, empirically-directed work invites attacks of being not philosophical from people with a very narrow view of philosophy's domain. I myself have heard the question "how is this philosophy?" verbatim in reference to Andrews' work, from a philosopher whose work on animal dignity amounted to a reconstruction of the Christian doctrine of souls. I am confident that such projects will never amount to anything philosophically interesting, but Andrews' (and her fellow travellers') work promises to assist in making empirical discoveries with great import for philosophy of mind and the geneaology of normativity and sociality.
I also think that the interviewer did quite a good job, and look forward to listening to more of his interviews.
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