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Full-Text Articles in Comparative Psychology
Animal Minds, Cognitive Ethology, And Ethics, Colin Allen, Marc Bekoff
Animal Minds, Cognitive Ethology, And Ethics, Colin Allen, Marc Bekoff
Sentience Collection
Our goal in this paper is to provide enough of an account of the origins of cognitive ethology and the controversy surrounding it to help ethicists to gauge for themselves how to balance skepticism and credulity about animal minds when communicating with scientists. We believe that ethicists’ arguments would benefit from better understanding of the historical roots of ongoing controversies. It is not appropriate to treat some widely reported results in animal cognition as if their interpretations are a matter of scientific consensus. It is especially important to understand why loose references to ‘‘cognitive ethology’’ by philosophers can signal ignorance …
The Question Of Animal Selves: Implications For Sociological Knowledge And Practice, Leslie Irvine
The Question Of Animal Selves: Implications For Sociological Knowledge And Practice, Leslie Irvine
Anthropomorphism and Anthropocentrism Collection
The question of whether sociologists should investigate the subjective experience of non-human others arises regularly in discussions of research on animals. Recent criticism of this research agenda as speculative and therefore unproductive is examined and found wanting. Ample evidence indicates that animals have the capacity to see themselves as objects, which meets sociological criteria for selfhood. Resistance to this possibility highlights the discipline’s entrenched anthropocentrism rather than lack of evidence. Sociological study of the moral status of animals, based on the presence of the self, is warranted because our treatment of animals is connected with numerous “mainstream” sociological issues. As …