Mindreading Chimpanzees?

Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill

Humans are probably not the only great apes which can track others’ beliefs (Krachun, Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2009; Krupenye, Kano, Hirata, Call, & Tomasello, 2016; Kano, Krupenye, Hirata, Tomonaga, & Call, 2019).

Slides

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Notes

‘we should be focused not on the yes–no question (do chimpanzees have a theory of mind?), but rather on a whole panoply of more nuanced questions concerning precisely what chimpanzees do and do not know about the psychological functioning of others’ (Hare, Call, & Tomasello, 2001, p. 149)

Glossary

tracking an attribute : For a process to track an attribute is for the presence or absence of the attribute to make a difference to how the process unfolds, where this is not an accident. (And for a system or device to track an attribute is for some process in that system or device to track it.)
Tracking an attribute is contrasted with computing it. Unlike tracking, computing typically requires that the attribute be represented.

References

Halina, M. (2015). There Is No Special Problem of Mindreading in Nonhuman Animals. Philosophy of Science, 82(3), 473–490. https://doi.org/10.1086/681627

Hare, B., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2001). Do chimpanzees know what conspecifics know? Animal Behaviour, 61(1), 139–151.

Kano, F., Krupenye, C., Hirata, S., Tomonaga, M., & Call, J. (2019). Great apes use self-experience to anticipate an agent’s action in a false-belief test. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(42), 20904–20909. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910095116

Krachun, C., Carpenter, M., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2009). A competitive nonverbal false belief task for children and apes. Developmental Science, 12(4), 521–535. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00793.x

Krupenye, C., Kano, F., Hirata, S., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2016). Great apes anticipate that other individuals will act according to false beliefs. Science, 354(6308), 110–114. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaf8110