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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
Truly Minimal Criteria For Animal Sentience, Mark Solms
Truly Minimal Criteria For Animal Sentience, Mark Solms
Animal Sentience
The criteria for determining animal sentience proposed in the target article are sensible but they lack an explicit functional justification for the focus on pain. This commentary provides an abbreviated account of the most basic functional principles that underpin animal sentience and articulates some minimal criteria for determining its presence.
Fish Sentience: A Hypothesis Worth Pursuing, José E. Burgos
Fish Sentience: A Hypothesis Worth Pursuing, José E. Burgos
Animal Sentience
Woodruff’s case for fish sentience is intriguing. Though far from ready for final acceptance, it is worth pursuing. The case is philosophically uncontroversial under functionalism and reductive materialism. It is also highly heuristic, as it raises interesting issues for further investigation, such as the neural causation of behavior, the role of Mauthner cells in conditioned avoidance, and whether operant conditioning is constitutive of fish sentience.
Decentering Anthropocentrisms: A Functional Approach To Animal Minds, Matthew C. Altman
Decentering Anthropocentrisms: A Functional Approach To Animal Minds, Matthew C. Altman
Between the Species
Anthropocentric biases manifest themselves in two different ways in research on animal cognition. Some researchers claim that only humans have the capacity for reasoning, beliefs, and interests; and others attribute mental concepts to nonhuman animals on the basis of behavioral evidence, and they conceive of animal cognition in more or less human terms. Both approaches overlook the fact that language-use deeply informs mental states, such that comparing human mental states to the mental states of nonlinguistic animals is misguided. In order to avoid both pitfalls -- assuming that animals have mental lives just like we do, or assuming that they …
Trends. Functional Versus Ideological Environmentalism: Implications For Physical And Psychological Security, Ibpp Editor
Trends. Functional Versus Ideological Environmentalism: Implications For Physical And Psychological Security, Ibpp Editor
International Bulletin of Political Psychology
The author discusses how ideological environmentalists embrace the notion that nature is pristine and benign. All must be, continue to be, and modified to be as it would be without human intervention. Supporting belief systems are problematic.