Deconstructing the Raven's Theory of Mind: An Analysis of Bugnyar et al. (2016)

Kuznar, Shannon L.; Pavlic, Mateja; Glorioso, Gabrielle C.; Povinelli, Daniel J.

doi:10.26451/abc.07.04.10.2020

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…First, dogs might be able to reason about first-order (directly accessible) perceptual representations of objects, agents, barriers and the geometrical relations among them (e.g. [28,35,37]) but they might be unable to reason about others' mental states (as suggested by [58], about ravens). Indeed, in our first experiment, dogs followed an experimenter's gaze to a target above chance levels, irrespective of whether the experimenter could actually see the target or not.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dogs do not use their own experience with novel barriers to infer others’ visual access

Lonardo,

Putnik,

Szewczak

et al. 2024

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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Despite extensive research into the Theory of Mind abilities in non-human animals, it remains controversial whether they can attribute mental states to other individuals or whether they merely predict future behaviour based on previous behavioural cues. In the present study, we tested pet dogs (in total, N = 92) on adaptations of the ‘goggles test’ previously used with human infants and great apes. In both a cooperative and a competitive task, dogs were given direct experience with the properties of novel screens (one opaque, the other transparent) inserted into identical, but differently coloured, tunnels. Dogs learned and remembered the properties of the screens even when, later on, these were no longer directly visible to them. Nevertheless, they were not more likely to follow the experimenter’s gaze to a target object when the experimenter could see it through the transparent screen. Further, they did not prefer to steal a forbidden treat first in a location obstructed from the experimenter’s view by the opaque screen. Therefore, dogs did not show perspective-taking abilities in this study in which the only available cue to infer others’ visual access consisted of the subjects’ own previous experience with novel visual barriers. We conclude that the behaviour of our dogs, unlike that of infants and apes in previous studies, does not show evidence of experience-projection abilities.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dogs do not use their own experience with novel barriers to infer others’ visual access

Lonardo,

Putnik,

Szewczak

et al. 2024

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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“…. This is not to say that all the skeptics have been convinced; seeLurz (2017) andKuznar, Pavlic, Glorioso, and Povinelli (2020).…”

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confidence: 99%

A Forward-Looking Theory of Content

Buckner

2022

Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy

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In this essay, I provide a forward-looking naturalized theory of mental content designed to accommodate predictive processing approaches to the mind, which are growing in popularity in philosophy and cognitive science. The view is introduced by relating it to one of the most popular backward-looking teleosemantic theories of mental content, Fred Dretske’s informational teleosemantics. It is argued that such backward-looking views (which locate the grounds of mental content in the agent’s evolutionary or learning history) face a persistent tension between ascribing determinate contents and allowing for the possibility of misrepresentation. A way to address this tension is proposed by grounding content attributions in the agent’s own ability to detect when it has represented the world incorrectly through the assessment of prediction errors—which in turn allows the organism to more successfully represent those contents in the future. This opens up space for misrepresentation, but that space is constrained by the forward-directed epistemic capacities that the agent uses to evaluate and shape its own representational strategies. The payoff of the theory is illustrated by showing how it can be applied to interpretive disagreements over content ascriptions amongst scientists in comparative psychology and ethology. This theory thus provides a framework in which to make content attributions to representations posited by an exciting new family of predictive approaches to cognition, and in so doing addresses persistent tensions with the previous generation of naturalized theories of content.

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Deconstructing the Raven's Theory of Mind: An Analysis of Bugnyar et al. (2016)

Cited by 2 publications

References 11 publications

Dogs do not use their own experience with novel barriers to infer others’ visual access

Dogs do not use their own experience with novel barriers to infer others’ visual access

A Forward-Looking Theory of Content

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